I bought The Economist during the week (it’s the Technology Quarterly issue) and I finally got around to reading it. There’s a feature article on Skype, VoIP and the current telecoms operators: Skype announced that it had agreed to be taken over by eBay…[for] $2.6billion in cash and shares. That’s quite an achievement for a [...]

The substance look-and-feel for Java, I particularly like the watermarking effect Sun Microsystems’ rejected adverts for their new servers. Someone over there has a sense of humour! Gallery 2: much better looking albums, install process and website. This is a huge improvement over version 1.x. I’ve been running a test install for a while now [...]

Does anyone else want to work on this PhD? I’m getting kinda sick of it now. Warning: you will need to be smarter than me, so applications from all thick planks of wood should be in with a good chance.

Bruce Sterling links to a good round-up, provided by the BBC, of the New Orleans flooding. They’re hardly sympathetic statements are they? For my own part, I am a little more sympathetic to the residents of New Orleans now that the full scale of the disaster, and incompetance, has become apparent. The martial law that’s [...]

Dreamhost have just doubled the disk space on all their plans. I’ve now got almost 6GB for $7.95/mth! Oh, and that allocation grows by 40MB/week. Perhaps it’s time to reorganise the photo collection and put up full-res versions.

“What’s the bandwidth of a kilo[gram]‘s worth of CDs?” he asks. “Pretty good, but kind of bursty.” — from Unfilled Promise The above article is a good overview of how technology was used (or not) to aid the tsunami relief effort (and other humanitarian project, such as post-war Iraq). BoingBoing has a couple of posts [...]

In his article for Wired, “U2′s City of Blinding Lights“, William Gibson writes: Someone I met in a Dublin pub opined that if U2 hadn’t become the biggest rock act in the world, Adam Clayton might have become a policeman, Larry Mullen would have been the bohemian sort Clayton was perpetually chasing around town, Edge [...]