Jamie’s Weblog

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. Ideally, I’d [...]

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 devices [...]

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 [...]

If you use System.out.println-style statements and the default java.util.logging.Logger class, you’ll often find that the printed statements don’t align with the logged output. For example, Logger.info(“Start something…”);System.out.println(“Finished it”); can produce, Finished itStart something… which is obvously wrong. This is because the Logger is using System.err and your print statements are using System.out, and hence they’re [...]

The launch of Royal Mail’s printable stamps caused some uproar because they won’t have the Queens head on them (they’re just machine-readable 2D barcodes). This reminded me of a presentation from the MIRW workshop at MobileHCI. Basically, Enrico started by talking about how much was lost in the move from pictorial stamps to 2D barcodes [...]