Whilst back home in Ireland, I did this. She said yes. For the last few days, I’ve been randomly smiling for no apparent reason

I was back home in Ireland for the last 2 weeks and therefore haven’t been blogging. I’m not dead (sorry!). If you’re really annoyed at me, you can always flood my site or throw some bombs at it.

Ain’t Radio 4 great? This morning (but you can listen to it all week) the Start of the Week show has an interview with Audrey Kurkov, author of Penguin Lost and Death and the Penguin. His new book, A Matter of Death and Life, describes a man who hires a hitman to kill himself but [...]

I really do love the user name ‘hopeless‘. Here’s what the university’s course enrollment system just told me: You have been successfully enrolled in 04-05-FESM Generic Skills Training Programme (research) (FESMGST-04-05) as hopeless. Click ok to continue. Starting off a course as hopeless perhaps isn’t the best start. Eircom’s webmail service used to tell me: [...]

I’m partial to a bit of philosophy and amateur psychology regarding my PhD (or phhhhhhhdddd as it gets called in our house). To date, I’ve talked about caves and umbrellas, and soldiers and software developers. Yesterday, I read about procrastination in students (some random article in the Times Higher Education Supplement) and the point they [...]

Multiplying matrices is one of those subjects that all comp sci students are taught but no one ever explains why it’s useful. And, if you ever figure out why you might want to multiply a matrix, you have to wait several years before you’re presented with an oppurtunity to do so. Last night I needed [...]

PhD students don’t get business cards. To be honest, we don’t really need them. But, if you’re attending a conference or workshop it can be useful to have something to give people. StreetCards provide lovely cards, easily customisable (although you can’t freely design your card) for a fairly respectable £8 for 25 cards. The cards [...]

Myself and Hilary had a good laugh (at my expense) over this cartoon. I was so inspired, I’ve changed the tagline of my notebook to “Jamie’s Aimless Mental Loitering”. I think nicely complements “Procrastination with a purpose“

Oh dear, I need to learn to spell: DefinatelyDefinitely

Mark watson has released KBTextmaster, his Natural Language Processing toolkit, under the GPL licence. This Java library will perform indexing, summarization, part-of-speech tagging (i.e., identifying nouns, verbs, conjunctions etc) and will also extract names of people and places (which is pretty cool). It understand OpenOffice.org, PDF, Text, HTML and Word formats. Input text: President George [...]