Jamie’s Weblog

The Register has a brief article about Ireland trying to fix it’s e-voting problems but it was this quote that had me laughing into my desk: Ireland will be embarrassed without computerised balloting, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern claimed during a Dáil session last week. “We have to correct the software, which will cost €500,000 and try [...]

Google released a search engine for source code a few weeks ago. I wasn’t terribly interested at the time, but it’s interesting to see how often programmers swear and refer to idiots and morons. Perhaps most surprising was the number of Idiot classes and a method called demoronise(). Oh, if only that was a global [...]

I just can’t accept that a PhD is not about solving a problem. My thought process is: I have a problem, I need to find a the solution. But I’ve been repeatedly advised that solving the problem is not a PhD topic… how I go about solving it is what will get me a PhD. [...]

I like Sun Microsystems. Sure, I’ve never bought anything from them but then I’m not really in their target market — if I was, I’d have desks and rooms full of their kit. I like the innovation; the blogging CEO, the eco-awareness (as in ecological==economical), and the shear technical smarts they have.Sun’s latest innovation: a [...]

Dropkick Murphys are what Green Day might sound like if you gave them bagpipes, a bodhran, accordian and a dash of Irish heritage. Their track “Shipping up to Boston” featured in (the brilliant film) The Departed (or on the trailer — if that’s all you can find). Dropkick Murphys describe their goal as to blend [...]

Well, it seems that $1.65billion will buy a popular, but unprofitable, video site. I think I’d heard that YouTubewere spending ~$800,000 a month in bandwidth/server costs. That’s an awful lot of advertising Google will have to sell even if they have the servers to cope. Sure, between YouTube and Google Video they capture 9/10 video [...]