Jamie’s Weblog

I got this email at work today… Note: If a SEMP UI/Common Dopo deployer must consciously choose to use/leverage TOM, then make sure you have both a DEU with SEMP UI/Common Dopo as well as a DEU with TOM. * acronyms changed What?! It’s like a rejected scene from Office Space. Please shoot me if [...]

I’ve been using the beta version of KISSmetrics on Shutter Scouts to track conversion rates. Frankly, this was more of an experiment as the site hasn’t really been promoted and opened up yet but I wanted the get the analytics infrastructure in place first. KISSmetrics allows you to track events in a user-specified conversion funnel [...]

I’m going to swear now so turn away if you disapprove “A sign of the times” “In these difficult times” “The world we live in” “At least you still have a job” I fucking hate these stupid platitudes which are currently being banded around in boardrooms up and down the country (including ours, this morning, [...]

I haven’t a clue how this sexist, offensive rant was ever published in a national newspaper but I do think that the re-energisation of women in the Irish workforce has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the influx of women into the Irish workforce was the main reason for our rapid economic growth. [...]

What the hell is going on in Waterford? I mean, I can understand being upset at losing your job but staging a sit-in? What are they demanding? To be let back to work? I just don’t understand the mentality. The company is losing money hand over fist so I can only assume that these workers [...]

There’s a fantastic thread on the JoS discussion board in which the original poster was considering leaving a career in programming for some other field. This spawned lots of comments (including from Joel himself) that touched on everything that it means to be a programmer (or not), working in corporate IT, and so on. This [...]

I was a little surprised at the unceremoneous death of ‘I Want Sandy’ and ‘Stikkit’ last week. Twitter bought the parent company so that they could get the founder to work for them but this left the actual sites themselves abandoned. Since both were free sites there was no business model, no income, no incentive [...]

No it hasn’t happened yet, and it might not soon, but I think the founding basis for Google’s search technology is becoming less relevant. In the good ol’ days, you could just do a simple search for the page with the best keywords. Then people got wise and we had pages full of irrelevant keywords [...]

This post might be written in a tone that gives you the impression that this is advice about your PhD. It’s not. It’s overly pessimistic and specific to my situation. These are (largely unedited) notes I collected between 2003-2006 when I was working on my PhD in Computer Science. I eventually admitted to myself that [...]

Facebook just isn’t working for me — I think it’s designed for people with friends. If you’re happy to have all your updates, photos, conversations etc on the one site, and share that info with just your “friends” then perhaps it does work. But the fact is that I don’t want to keep all my [...]