Jamie’s Weblog

The world would be a better place if only more laptops were as selfless as this little Thinkpad. If only they’d edge themselves, lemming-like, off the desks of researchers around the world to prevent the global spread of pointless, incoherent theses. Don’t worry, my laptop is currently on suicide watch in a soft padded bag [...]

This seems like a simple matter. If you’ve already used the IEEE styles, then how hard could it be to produce a final copy? Well, I spent about a day fixing my paper and I’ll just recall some of the things I found out the hard way, which Google couldn’t tell me: No hyperlinks. Just [...]

In keeping with Media Lab’s tradition of style-over-substance, the sub-$100 laptop looks pretty. Still, that’s no bad thing (considering the retro look and functionality of the Simputer – yuk!) and it’s nice to see the project progressing. The laptops could prove to be a real catalyst for education in deprived countries although I have my [...]

Of course I’m talking about The Da Vinci Code. Just because Peter Jackson managed to take a mediocre book (LOTR) and turn it into series of brilliant films, doesn’t mean Ron Howard could make anything other than a terrible film out an appalling book. Sorry, but it’s a lot worse than Starship Troopers. It’s not [...]

Many of the “Web 2.0″ applications I’ve seen have failed to impress me. However, myself and Hilary needed to collaborate on a sensitive email and found Writeboard (and MSN) to be a quick and easy alterative to pinging emails around. All in all, it was 30 minutes (and 6 versions) from creating the document to [...]

Apparently, the loneliest places on the planet are: Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Does the fact that these are also the top 3 places I want to live, say something profound about me? Probably not. It probably says that Google Trends aren’t terribly good. And it obviously ignores the poor souls in desolate places with [...]

I’ve been writing Java code since 1997 and it has been my primary programming language since then. Sure, in about ’98/99 I wrote C/C++ code for 8 months, maintained some VB code for another 4 months, and I’ve occasionally dipped back into C++ using the Java Native Interface. I generally prefer PHP for anything running [...]

I heard about this over the weekend (on the radio) but I hadn’t actually seen the footage. This is the moment when the BBC interviews a music industry expert about (yet another) Apple court case — except that it’s actually a cabbie, who’d just arrived to pick up the real expert. Check out the poor [...]

Two rather entertaining Irish news stories in the Guardian today: ComReg have discovered the source of static being picked up by aircraft approaching Dublin airport: God — well, the Catholic church to be precise. The priests were broadcasting sermons to local parishiners and didn’t realise that this was illegal. God’s message never actually got through [...]

This is one of the best WTFs in a while: a very null value. I think they might be on to something here. Perhaps we should have very zero’s, extreme nothings, etc.