Jamie’s Weblog

The safe way to land a plane — by blowing one of it’s wings off.
“Attention, passengers. In the event of a need for a crash landing, please return to your seats, fasten your seat beats, and stow your tray tables — before we rip the left wing off and turn this airplane into a shrieking, [...]

Oh, how true this is. Probably the hardest thing I’ve had to come to terms with in the PhD (and at Media Lab Europe), is that it doesn’t matter whether you turn up or not. And, if you’re the sort of person to doubt yourself, this can quickly lead to feelings that “my [...]

A while back I mentioned that I was developing a Windows Media plugin for logging the music you’ve listened to. This was sparked off by an activity in the group around logging various aspects of your life so that when we invent a super new data mining algorithm, we’ll already have a large body [...]

AJAX is a web-development technique popularised by Gmail that provides a subjectively faster response time from websites. That’s why Gmail is so natural to use. However, one of the oft-touted beneficeries of AJAX are low-bandwidth users but this is not true.
I can only assume that those AJAX developers who tout its [...]

18 months ago I bought Hilary a 256MB USB stick and, at the time, it was the smallest one in the world. Now she’s returned the favour by buying me the smallest stick… this time with a 1GB capacity. It’s even smaller than most of the memory cards you get for digital cameras [...]

Here are my 2 cool clips of the day:

A temporary barrier was demolised across the Three Gorges Dam
Diet Coke fountains (made with mints)

Oh, and in the land of the reading, Eric Drexler’s seminal book on nanotechnology is now available online. The book was always more of a manifesto for the field rather a realistic [...]