Jamie’s Weblog

podcasting, verb. The act of turning a well thought-out, considered and edited blog post, full of style and wit, into a rambling stream of errmmms, ums and ahs in a bad accent. Seriously, I know podcasts are supposed to be the Next Big Thing™ and Odeo have just got a ton of money to make [...]

The Island: Good enough to watch.Crash: Very good film. You’ll find something to like and something to hate about every character. Reminded me a lot of Magnolia, but without the frogs. Includes the quote: They might want to eat the burger but that doesn’t mean they want to meet the cow! Before Sunrise/Before Sunset: Lots [...]

Bruce Schneier points to the Devil’s Infosec Dictionary, which contains these gems: Business case: A creative writing project, the quality of which is directly proportional to your security budgetLaptop: A computer designed to allow employees to easily store vast amounts of customer data in the backseat of a taxicab Although the comment on his post [...]

robots.txt is a file format used on websites to inform autonomous crawlers about areas that they shouldn’t index. The convention is to put a file called robots.txt into the root directory, and specify simple commands along the line of User-agent: *Disallow: /cgi-bin/ This convention is almost as old as HTML pages themselves. I can certainly [...]

I don’t drive; why should I care about oil prices? The BBC has a good article about how the rise in oil prices will affect all of us, and highlights how dependant we are on that raw material. One cup of crude oil for a single disposable nappy?! WTF!

Mauro seems to be reading a lot about Self Organising Maps (SOM’s) recently and I came across them, briefly, in one of my books. Then it occurred to me that SOM’s could be made to learn about repeated collocations between people (the crux of my PhD). SOM’s (a.k.a. Kohonen Maps) are an example of an [...]

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while: A M*A*S*H-style series set in the future, all “filmed” using the XBox game, Halo [via slashdot]

Bruce Schneier writes about how a program designed to make security more convenient at airports, by providing a sort-of “trusted traveller” program, can be subverted by those it intends to defend against. By successfully subscribing to this program, a terrorist can actually use this system to be notified when the authorities are onto them! Your [...]

Someone has scanned in many of the pages from one of the books in the “Bunny Suicides” series. I’ve often had a good laugh at these books in Waterstones but they’re just too expensive to buy. Perhaps if they were £3-4 each I’d buy the whole lot. Still, have a look at the scans.

Among web developers (of which I’m not one) AJAX is the latest buzzword. It’s what makes Gmail such a pleasant user experience but this post on Slashdot really annoyed me: They are not your father’s HTML pages anymore. AJAX interfaces are getting more complex and versatile, relieving the user of the necessity to reload the [...]