James Galvin

I got this powerpoint presentation by email - a series of photographs depicting some treacherous mountain roads in Bolivia.

With their new album, Wincing the Night Away due to be launched at the end of January, The Shins have released a track, Phantom Limb, on mp3 for free download. You can get it here via the Subpop website.

According to last month’s Second Life census, over 1 million people have immersed themselves into the virtual online world. No cannibal bloodelves, no diseased scorpids, no dancing gnomes going “choo-choo”, and no backstabbing undead shamans as they exit Booty Bay tunnel - Second Lifers get their thrills from enacting mundane everyday activities on their computer screen. According to this article, they’ll soom have the option of watching live TV from the comfort of their virtual living room:

Rivers Run Red is aiming to have more than 100 specialist channels streaming video every hour of the day, with user content likely to feature too.

Yes, its a little bit freaky, but even I can see the possibilities here. With Channel 4 and the er… Sci-Fi channel available from the start, how long until your Second Life neighbour can get the premium boxing matches or live football? It would certainly be strange to have friends gathering online to watch the latest Sopranos and the like, and I would rather not think of the long-term social implications if this did catch on, but the potential here is huge. I’ll have to take a look at this game one of these days…

I’m happy with my new Eircom Broadband connection, but it’s not the reliable service that it used to be. Tonight I was knocked offline for a few minutes, as my router lost its connection for no apparent reason. I don’t have a particularly weak signal to noise ratio, and I’m not far from the exchange, but this is not the first time I have been randomly disconnected. I’ve had a couple of search referrals to this site from users who are clearly experiencing similar issues, e.g. “why is my eircom broadband connection always failing”. I know Paddy is having a terrible time in the past two weeks, being disconnected most evenings and sometimes unable to connect for hours. Eircom send out engineers and replace routers, but nothing gets fixed.

This thread on boards.ie blames the new batch of Netopia routers that Eircom provide - the silver ones with two aerials and ‘eircom’ written on top. I’ll track down my trusty old Solwise SAR110 router and see if that makes an improvement, but I’m wondering if Eircom’s network is sick at the moment. Is anyone else having problems?

With the midterm elections in the US in full swing, all eyes (well… some eyes) are once again on the shambles of e-voting as it buckles and crashes - as expected. RTE mentions “problems with electronic voting machines in a number of states, including Ohio, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida”. I expect we’ll be hearing more about that, since the recent US elections have been plagued by discrepencies in the e-voting system. Start with Ohio 2004, and work your way back to the Volusia County fiasco in 2000 - the Florida constituency with such strong support for Bush that Al Gore actually ended up with fewer than -16,000 votes. These were the high profile cases, the issues that came to light - but always remember the words of a wise hotel cook from Torquay: “what the eye can’t see, the chef gets away with”.
Update via Slashdot: The candidate who allegedly got 0 votes.

On this side of the Atlantic, we have a different system. The Irish government put €40million into the Nedap-Powervote, which, as any computing student would have told you, is not secure. This was confirmed in a demonstration (linked to by ICTE last month) by some hackers who reverse-engineered the Dutch electronic voting system, which is almost identical to our own (except ours has a thick layer of dust on top).

As we become accustomed to the security failures and general inconsistencies in the electronic voting systems in other countries, there is a danger that the Irish public will forgive the faults in our own. Consider the informative website that the government has given us to ease our concerns - electronicvoting.ie. It does its best to reassure us ignorant members of the public, urging us to disregard those ridiculous experts and nonsensical independent audits:

The Nedap-Powervote system has already been proven in the Netherlands over the past 15 years and in a number of cities in Germany and France.

I would have worded that slightly differently. Maybe more along the lines of “The Nedap-Powervote system has already been proven to be insecure in the Netherlands”. The fact that they are still using it is completely beside the point - there’s no need for us to turn a blind eye just because our neighbours are.

But we can overlook those minor details such as accuracy, as long as its nice from a usability perspective -

It has been adapted, improved, tested and successfully piloted at two polls in Ireland. To date, over 400,000 Irish people have used the system in real polls, and their response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Daniel from Kildare reported that it was overwhelmingly nice to push a button instead of ticking a box. Margaret from Leitrim was also overwhelmed by her button-pushing experience. With results like this, who needs the accuracy? Its just a shame we spent so much on the Nedap-Powervote - I hear Fisher Price have a system that lights up.

I actually don’t have a major problem with e-voting, because to be honest I don’t really care who gets elected. However, I don’t like being force-fed blatant lies at the same time. This website is provided by the government and thus should give us a fair and accurate overview of electronic voting, rather than peddling half-truths in a marketing brochure. It should have been taken down the day the Commission on Electronic Voting pointed out that the system is no good, and that we’d hold off for another few years. But the government decided to leave the website there, because whats the harm in a few inconsistencies? It sounds to me like they’re setting a precedent.

There is a very heavy hand marketing Borat, and I expect the jokes will get old very soon as a result. Hopefully Sascha Baron Cohen is planning something different, or has a couple of new characters in the works, because I would hate to see the impact of his humour lessened by over-exposure. But before the Borat phenomenon reaches saturation point (I’d give it two weeks) - here is a scene that didn’t make it into the movie:

If you’ve seen the film and are wondering about the parts that weren’t staged - here are some comments from the victims who came out worst, explaining how they got duped. Namely - the rodeo man, the car salesman, and the frat boy.

No offence to my Irish Broadband 1meg which has done the web browsing job nicely, but I’m delighted to say that I have got my Eircom DSL installed - and it was relatively painless. Slightly disappointed that I’m only getting 128k upload on the 2meg/256k package, which means that I can’t use cl_maxpackets 125. Vincent, from Ballymore Eustace, just upgraded to this package specifically to avail of the greater upload speeds, but he is also stuck on 128k up. I’m sure they’ll blame the line atten, but I have a feeling that this is part of a sinister conspiracy by Eircom.

Still, this is the first time I’ve used DSL in Ireland since they reduced the interleaving on the residential packages. Latency is slightly higher than other people I checked with in Dublin - I’m getting 19ms to Irish servers, while others will be around the 11ms mark, but the main thing is that its consistent. I will never leave the house again.

I was looking for the famous South Park episode, when I came across this Dragostea din Tei rendition:

Ingenious.