Jamie’s Weblog

I’m not much of a *nix geek but cygwin is a wonderful tool to have on a Windows machine. Today’s brief exploration was using rsync to backup this website to my work PC. Dreamhost provides ssh shell accounts and rsync is available, so from within cygwin… rsync -e ssh -av –exclude ‘<remote dirs to exclude>’ [...]

I’ve dabbled a bit with Python, mostly as hacks to MoinMoin to make it work as I want. Yesterday was the first time I’ve tried using it for real work, namely parsing the data files from the Haggle project. Basically, I needed to scan all files in a directory, parse the filenames, load each file, [...]

One of the problems with my PhD has always been my lack of data about the movement in the real-world. I initially tried to tackle this by creating a supa-dupa (it’s a technical term) simulation of the world. The first step was to create a realistic world, particularly the street grids of urbans cities. Now, [...]

Last week my 3.5year-old laptop finally gave up the ghost (with a little unwise driver tampering on my part). After much pressuring from Hilary, budgeting, spec-comparing, and searching, I finally bought a HP dv1265EA from Dabs.com. She’s not the fastest, lightest, cheapest or prettiest laptop but she has elements of all four. I am particularly [...]

Windows XP Home doesn’t have very fine-grained access controls: basically everything is either readable by only you, or by everyone. This is why Microsoft included a “Shared Documents” folder. In this way, you can protect your “My Documents” folder but still share things like music and photos with other users. That’s all fine. The problem [...]

Which came first, the marketing hype surrounding “Harry Potter and the fifth nipple” (or whatever it is) and the actual market demand? Are the hype and demand linked in a positive feedback loop and, if so, will the world end in some perpetual Harry Potter frenzy?

I’ve posted a brief note about a script I wrote to delete all the non-English pages from a MoinMoin installation. Use at your peril!

Javalobby have launched chat rooms that allow people to sit around and discuss Java-related things. They’ve done a few good things here: the chat rooms are XMPP (aka Jabber) so any old Jabber client should work (I’m using Gaim); there’s also a web-based client. I’m not too keen on AJAX (the use of Javascript in [...]

A small script to remove the extra language files from MoinMoin (probably now out-of-date)

I haven’t blogged about the bombings on Thursday in London. Partially, this is because it really didn’t affect me and partially because I’m afraid of contributing to the media-frenzied overreaction. I read about the missing (and presumed dead) in the Sunday Times and those stories were truely heartbreaking. Those four small bombs have devastated the [...]