Jamie’s Weblog

I’ve never understood Halloween and I’ve always hated it.  Surely it’s just legalised blackmail perpetrated by your neighbours’ children?  In my dreams, Halloween goes something like this:

There’s a knock on the door. I open it to find a pack of children wearing a collection of €1 “scary” masks and/or a collection of old sheets with [...]

During a rather heated argument:
I won’t listen to rational reasoning
Of course, I tried irrational reasoning as well but that didn’t work either

Dreamhost have recently made themselves carbon-neutral. I’m not really convinced about the use of carbon credits but they have to be better than doing nothing at all. Dreamhost continue to impress me, not just with their candid honestly about system problems, their pricing and features but also their social responsibility (they’ve long had [...]

I treated myself to a new phone last weekend: A Nokia N73.
My old Sony-Ericsson had finally annoyed me enough so I took the plunge and bought myself a decent phone. Many of the reviews said that the N73 was buggy, very buggy and slow. It isn’t. Well, at least the latest firmware [...]

It’s quite staggering the gulf between a good recruitment agent and a bad one. The bad ones are just after your CV, and your name in their database, so that they can encourage employers. Unfortunately, they’re usually short of both candidates and positions… mostly because they’re a) lazy, b) rude or c) incompetent [...]

Here’s one of the best spam messages I’ve seen in a while — it’s actually quite honest about what it is

Well, since Hilary has broken the news, I guess it’s safe to talk about our move. For a good few months now we’ve known that our rental contract on the flat would end in January, as would my PhD funding. Either we could find a new place to live in Southampton and [...]

I’ve been stressing my poor little laptop pretty hard these days. I’ve written some python scripts that produce over 36,400 different datasets (72,800 files) but altogether they take about 15-20mins to produce. And, it’s going to take much longer to run the algorithm over each dataset, produce the results and collate them together. [...]

Based on a report by the Information Commissioner, Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 spent a good portion of his show talking about the surveillance society that the UK has become. Fair enough, there’s probably something to that. However, he also kept going on about your sat-nav’s tracking you.
For once and for all, GPS [...]

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 to move [...]