Jamie’s Weblog

The flooding in New Orleans seems to be pretty bad, destroying not only lives but family homes, possessions and pets. However, I’ve been feeling guilty because I don’t really care. I hear the reports on the news but I don’t feel any deep sympathy. I think America has spent all the good will I can [...]

I bet no one else spent part of their bank holiday sewing together a Tux! We did. For some unknown reason, I came across an open source pattern for making your own Linux mascot (‘Tux’). Even more bizarrely, myself and Hilary decided to make one: I’m trying to write a mini-thesis at the moment, which [...]

Myself and Hilary went to see The Cave last night. I have a theory that the idea for a “cave with monsters” film was circulating around Hollywood and two seperate scripts were written. The results were the super-scary “The Descent” and the pseudo-scienced, trashy summer action movie, “The Cave”. I’d love to see some film [...]

This is (obviously) another Media Lab invention: The Cellular Squirrel, by Stefan Marti. The squirrel sits on your desk and acts as a personal secretary, mediating between you and your incoming calls. Instead of ringing or vibrating, the squirrel will wake up and try to get your attention by shaking its head or waving at [...]

There’s been a lot of furor over Google’s new chat service, Google Talk. I haven’t actually used their chat client but, through the wonders of a standard IM protocol, I’ve been able to use my current client (Gaim) to connect. Of course, there isn’t much benefit to having Google provide a Jabber server when Dreamhost [...]

I too (BoingBoing, EFF) was a little confused by Sun Microsystems’ announcement of the Open Media Commons project: An open-source solution for locking up content? Bizarre. At first I was quite hopeful; perhaps Sun had finally realised that the value of DRM was not in protecting corporate assets but in protecting the personal information of [...]

I really don’t have much to say. MGB was over at the weekend so there was plenty of eating and drinking, some driving, ponies and a bit of a walk. I’ve put up a selection of the (best!) photos. Now I’m in the library working on thinking about procrastinating over my data mining algorithm. PhDs [...]

Hilary! (well, once we get a car)

What a way to promote Java technology! (as seen on Tuesday morning at http://javalobby.com) 500 Servlet Exception java.lang.OutOfMemoryError at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method) at java.util.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:204) at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:132) at java.util.jar.JarFile.(JarFile.java:70)

Just occasionally I’m reminded of the madness of Ireland, public transport workers in particular: The dispute centres on claims by DART drivers that they are entitled to a pay rise for driving longer trains. That’s right. Train drivers think they should be paid more if they have to drive a few more carriages around. It’s [...]