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Monthly Archives: March 2006

NCT Blues

I originally failed because my two front seatbelts weren’t springing back properly. The mechanic at the NCT centre (in Blarney) told me this was a safety issue. Slightly irritating, as I knew that this isn’t a safety issue because the belts work fine, its just that when you get into the car you have [...]

Algorithmic Composition of Music

I posted a few days ago about some of the projects that I found interesting at the UCC Open Day for Computer Science fourth year projects. The one which I expected to see more of in the future was Mark O’Brien’s project on the algorithmic composition of music. He has sent on some [...]

Oblivion

Like so many important events, a new Elder Scrolls chapter only comes along once every four years. When I bought Daggerfall in 1998, I spent every moment thinking of it. I was lucky that my brother kicked me off every two hours so he could have his turn, otherwise I would not have [...]

TransAtlantic Showdown

I believe Quake 4’s swan song was sung in New York this weekend, at the ClanBase/GGL TransAtlantic Showdown where a $100,000 purse was on offer. For those of you who don’t follow e-Sports (I use the term lightly), I’ll give a small bit of background. There has always been a high degree of professionalism [...]

UCC Open Day

Despite having just two hours sleep last night, today was very enjoyable thanks to the fourth year projects on display at the UCC Computer Science Open Day.
My own project was an Ad-hoc Network Management System, designing and implementing a protocol for wireless ad-hoc networks, independent of IP, with a service-oriented naming scheme. As wireless-enabled [...]

The Streets are Safe Again

Quake.ie’s resident Belgian has sent word of police raid on a LAN party in the small town of Bazel that has left 18 computer gamers in a lot of trouble. This article claims that it has become increasingly common for Belgian justice system to target LAN parties, in order to diminish the use of [...]

Learn from Lei Fang

I am still waiting for the day when the Chinese suddenly appear on the scene en masse and tear the competitive gaming world apart like a soggy spring roll. Apparently, ‘electronic heroin’ is frowned upon in China, so Sweden can continue to bask in their glory as the world’s premier gaming nation, for another while [...]

Age of Empires III

A Microsoft game, and yet it does not support Microsoft Windows 2000. Attempting to run it off the CD, it informs me that it can only be run on Windows XP. Not so easily defeated, I installed via the command prompt, et voila. The game runs fine on Windows 2000, so why would Microsoft allow [...]

Breezy Critical Security Threat

With Breezy running on three of my systems here, I was a bit surprised to find this post on the Ubuntu security forum; root password in plain text in a file that is readable by all users, on a standard installation. I am amazed that nobody has spotted this before – surely there has been [...]

jamesgalvin.com

In 1997 I started messing about making websites on free hosts. To have my own domain was out of the question. I was earning about 1 euro per month, and domains and hosting were expensive at the time. It broke my heart when I realised that the domain I had my unimaginative eye on got [...]