Jamie’s Weblog

From Bruce Schneier, the Commission on Electronic Voting (in Ireland) has released a report on their work so far. I briefly flicked through the summary and they aren’t recommending electronic voting, not because they believe it won’t work but because it hasn’t been proven to work.

Now, here’s the “proof”. Not that I put much faith in IQ tests.

Someone mentioned this story in the pub on Friday. We all had a good laugh but I assumed that it was more of an urban myth than fact. Unfortunately, it appears that someone really has walked off with a lump of plastic explosive in their suitcase. “hmmm… how did this plasticene get into my suitcase, [...]

Hilary will have a new crochet project for the New Year: Crocheting the Lorenz manifold. The full crochet pattern is contained in a paper submitted to the Mathematics Intelligencer journal.

Acronis are a great little company that make affordable software utilities that beat the well-established competition. I’ve got a copy of their “OS Selector 8″ (now replaced by Disk Director Suite – I think), which basically does the job of any number of open source bootloaders (i.e., selecting a operating system at boot time) but [...]

For Java developers: Netbeans 4.0 is finally released. There’s a very interesting talk by Bruce Sterling about his vision of Spimes, RFID, privacy, objects and personal product design & production. Absolutely mind boggling. It’s streamed but I’m going to have to try an save a copy for later, further brain mangling

Inspired by Alison: jokes java james bond jamie oliver jamie oliver jamie oliver jamie lee curtis jamie lawrence

On the bus yesterday, I was wondering: What determines our routes. Sure, the distance is a big factor and we’ll often seek out the shortest route — but not always. Other factors might influence us to take a longer route. We might decide to avoid steep hills or stairs (or if we’re looking for some [...]

The lovely Hilary decided to inform me yesterday that this site is a little broken in Internet Explorer. The content on the right hand side appears after everything else. I don’t know why and I’m probably not going to fix it. Do us all a favour and download a Mozilla-based browser, I recommend Firefox. Someday, [...]

Here’s a few interesting things I’ve discovered: Last month’s edition of “3D World” magazine included a full version of Bryce 4. This is a very interesting and complex landscape generator/3D modeller. Why might a researcher be interested in this? Well, you know those boring posters you have to produce for a conference… pictures sure do [...]