Jamie’s Weblog

IBM have moved 30 of their open-source project to Sourceforge. That’s not interesting. What is interesting it that one of them is a Bluetooth simulator, BlueHoc. I feel a little bit negligent for not realising the existence of this project. The simulator is based on ns2, which doesn’t fill me with great joy since setting [...]

A very interesting article about John Gilmore, his life and his fight against the secret U.S. laws that require him to show photo ID before boarding internal flights. It makes the “land of the free” sound like a wannabe Nazi Germany or Cold War Soviet Union. The sad fact is that the UK isn’t much [...]

Visa is to incorporate RFID chips in their credit cards

Firefox 1.0.1 is out. Go get it. Now, explain to me why Firefox has an auto-update feature and yet it doesn’t autoupdate?

There are plenty of ways to construct a user interface in Java. Personally, I stick to Swing (rather than SWT) and, since I’m a NetBeans user, I have a perfectly good GUI editor built into my IDE. But I don’t use it. Swing’s GridBagLayout etc. has never seemed particularly intuitive for me. So, last year [...]

Here’s some light reading I did yesterday: The Guardian, specifically, The Beauty of Bendable Batteries and I’m a scientist, get me out of here! The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven W. Smith. This is an easy-to-read guide to DSP and that is quite a compliment for someone as mathematically-challenged as [...]

Wired are covering the story that all “e-passports” (new passports issued with RFID-style chips) must store your data in an un-encrypted form. This is disturbing because the data can be read wirelessly by special readers (from a few centimeters officially but there’s nothing to stop is happening over 10-30m). So, instead of using a contact [...]

The Irish Times has an article about a secret report which details level of disarray within Media Lab Europe [sorry, sub required]. I won’t go into the details, mostly because there aren’t many given, but there was an interesting quote in the article from… …a secret report prepared by the management of MediaLab Europe in [...]

There was a good article in the Guardian last week about the crush at the latest Ikea store when it opened in London. Of particular note were the comments by Alan Penn, an architect from UCL, on the spatial layout of Ikea (and how it is designed to confuse you). I met Alan at the [...]

I heard on the radio that the World Health Organisation is using increasing severe language regarding a possible bird flu pandemic. This sounds pretty serious. Serious enough that I would expect governments would be trying to prevent it, chickens would be slaughtered, etc etc. But, from the layman’s perspective in the UK, it appears that [...]