Jamie’s Weblog

A quick post of a graph I knocked up showing the distribution of price difference from dualpricing.ie:
It seems that 35% price difference (after VAT and currency are already accounted for) is the sweet spot for most retailers. I wonder if this is based on economic fact or just because Irish consumers are trained to accept [...]

Firstly, I should mention that I wasn’t trying to push dualpricing.ie too hard. It’s just a side project and, frankly, thousands of visitors is probably going to cause me problems that I don’t want to spend money or time fixing. However, I was quietly hoping that the site would be useful and interesting to [...]

About 2 weeks ago I was thinking about the dual pricing issue in Ireland (whereby UK stores/brands markup their prices for the Irish market). There are many reasons given for this dual pricing (tax, wages, rent, transportation and most often, currency). It occurred to me that some of the major price differences can easily be [...]

So, I’ve been out of work for the past 3 months since the accident but recently I haven’t been entirely idle.  I’ve finished off the personal finance site I first talked about almost a year ago and I’ve also written 2 other Ruby-on-Rails websites and got them deployed.  These aren’t fancy sites but they fill [...]

I was implementing the Strategy pattern presented here to avoid the limitations of Single-Type Inheritance but I wanted to implement some conditional validations based on the type:

If it’s a “MonthDay-based” recurring event (e.g. 23rd of every month), then the monthday field must be present
If it’s a “Date-based” recurring event (e.g. 1st August, repeating every year), [...]

I previously used an Excel spreadsheet to budget my quarterly student stipend and ensure that rent was paid, known expenses were accounted for and Visa cards paid off. This worked reasonably well but marriage and moving back to Ireland has made the personal finances a little more complicated: We each get paid at different [...]

Sometime ago I wrote about a little utility called Sigh that monitored processor usage and performed certain tasks when it drops. Well, I’ve expanded on Sigh and released TaskMonifier (yeah, daft name). TaskMonifier will now also monitor disk and network usage, and it now has the ability to send you an email or [...]

h1. PhotoPlanet.py README
Jamie Lawrence, 4th August, 2006
*This is a small script to “locate” your photos in “Google Earth”:http://earth.google.com/. It takes a GPS tracklog and a collection of photos, and generated a KML or KMZ file that allows Google Earth to pin thumbnails of your photos at the location where they were taken*
!http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/notebook/images/35.jpg!

A small script to remove the extra language files from MoinMoin (probably now out-of-date)

Using MoinMoin to keep track of research notes and references as part of my PhD.