James Galvin

Here (via bch).

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…

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.

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.

At last I have escaped from the chaos of Dublin’s south inner city. No more will I be lulled to sleep by the constant sound of rockets being fired at some guy’s head. I knew the place was a zoo from day one, but, with Halloween approaching, the area really lives up to its local nickname: “Beirut”.

I will miss my Cork Street pals - the insane security guard, the heroin dealer on the corner, and most of all - the toothless old man. The toothless old man walks into the Centra of Death with his bicycle. The insane security guard stops him and says no bicycles are allowed in the shop. The toothless guy replies: “But I have no teeth!”

I have to say though, there are plenty of characters this side of the canal. So far I have encountered an Elvisman, complete with 99 Micra plastered with stickers and slogans of the King. On the same road, I came across a middle-aged man driving along in traffic eating a kinder egg. Next thing he finished the chocolate, and started assembling the toy while booting along at 30mph.

At the moment I’m savouring the tranquility and enjoying my free wireless broadband, Irish Broadband 1meg it seems. Given their reputation, my expectations were very low, but I am pleased to see that not only is this connection working, it is working well. Certainly head and shoulders above Clearwire, who do things the American way - patriotically blocking your bittorrent. I’m not a downloader - I have neither the patience nor the inclination to download movies or anything but the odd mp3, but I have come to rely on bittorrent for legitimate uses; for example - the World of Warcraft updater, installers for programs like cygwin, and access to the occasional legal file which is only distributed via bittorrent.

This isn’t a major issue for me though, and having seen in the past how bittorrent can kill a network, I wouldn’t complain… assuming they made up for it in the other areas. Not the case - you get low bandwidth (1024/256 in theory, much less in practice), Clearwire is expensive (€40 per month), a long minimum contract of 12 months, and a low download cap (10gb). It is handy that it is not dependent on line of sight, but this just leads to high latency and packet loss making the product unsuitable for gaming or VOIP, even with a full signal. I have seen other Clearwire users in different areas with reasonably low and stable ping, but in my own experience, I could only barely manage World of Warcraft, which is playable even on 56k modem or with 800ms lag. I realise that it’s unfair to compare UnClearwire with fixed wireless… the only similar product in Ireland would be Irish Broadband’s disastrous RipoffWave, which I have had the displeasure of using in the past.

This Irish Broadband connection, on the other hand, is cheap and fast with low latency:
PING games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=6.85 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=96.9 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=13.6 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=10.2 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=70.1 ms

A bit of jitter there, but you’ll get that on most wireless connections. I realise that when things go wrong with IBB, they go very wrong, and I have dealt with their lack of support in the past… but for now I’m not complaining. Despite the apparently solid performance, FPS games are still unplayable, so I have ordered a phoneline to get DSL in too. With a bit (lot) of luck, I won’t have to battle with Eircom every inch of the way, and I might even be connected in time for the Quake 3 TDM Nations Cup, where Ireland has been drawn in a group with:

	Poland
	Czech Republic
	Italy
	United Kingdom
	Hungary

Last night somebody robbed my car stereo from the secure underground parking facility. God bless Cork Street. Apparently this is just one of several cars that have been broken into in the past few weeks. Its turning into a playground for the local scumbags, who have their own personal car-stereo farm in which they can work all night in privacy. They took my really nice Alpine headunit which plays just about every format going, along with my CDs (except for Jack L, which they didn’t seem to want), and a couple of other bits and pieces.

I’m not too annoyed because its my own fault for neglecting to detach the front-panel in the car, and it provides a perfect opportunity to start making a car computer (as soon as I move out of this place). I think the only real loser here is poor oul Jack L.

Today I discovered that Sam, at work, is a geocacher. I was amazed that I had never heard of this activity before - the global GPS cache hunt. Its like a secret society of Boo Radleys who hide little treasure boxes throughout the world, and give, on the internet, the GPS co-ordinates for clues that will lead to the cache. There are hundreds of these caches in Ireland alone, and Sam himself has located around 14 caches in Dublin.

The cache itself is usually a box, well hidden under stones or in some secret location, with a log book and some trinkets within. If you discover the cache, you sign the log book and can take souvenir out of the box if you want, although it is recommended that you replace it with an item of your own. The whole concept was fascinating to me, so I asked Sam for a real example. Dublin Castle was the one he gave. Somewhere in the walls of Dublin Castle, unknown to the hundreds of staff and tourists that pass by its hidden location every day, is a secret cache. Occasionally a geocacher will have targetted this particular quest, and following the clues, may or may not find the box and leave his signature.

Each cache is marked with a level of difficulty, and an indication of how difficult the terrain is. Having quickly looked over the website, it seems this is a popular family activity, so there is advance warning given if the cache is going to be located inside a volcano or something. I was slightly concerned about the prospect of saboteurs… people who go around stealing all the caches, or planting explosives or unsavoury material inside of them, but this doesn’t happen at the moment. One of these days, some geo cacher is going to be diagnosed with a terminal illness and inside the cache will be the keys to his Ferrari. It is rare that caches are discovered by the public, but the cache owner returns occasionally to check on it.

Here is a sample of the clues from a random Irish cache:

1. Go to the location above. You will find an unusual piece of art by Doug Ross. It was erected in 19A8. Make a note of this decade as you will need the answer for the final cache. In order to find the coordinates for the next stage you need to obtain the following information: The title of the piece has how many letters? Call this answer a and go to N53º 04.110 W006º 12.a65

2. At this location you will see a sign post. A famous film was made around this area. How many letters are in the title of the film? Call this answer b and input it into the following coordinates in order to be able to move forward to the next stage: N53º 03.(b-5)16 W006º 11.166

…

7. You now find yourself outside a pub in the heart of the village. Either call in for a pint of the black stuff or make a note of the phone number hanging on the sign outside, 01 281?247. Call this answer C. You will need this for the final cache location.

8. Almost there! Go to N53º 03.950 W006º 13.457. You should see a two digit yellow number. Take the second digit and call it D. You can now input the final cache location numbers A,B,C & D collected on your trip around the reservoir to find the final cache and it’s goodies!

What a great hobby. Sounds like an entertaining way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and you get to see lots of places that you never would have visited otherwise. Many of the caches are placed in locations that the instigator would deem to be remarkable… perhaps there is a great view, or an unusually shaped tree.

I’m going to turn my head and never look at geo caching again, because I generally don’t do half-measures when it comes to hobbies. If I got hooked on geocaching, I would be looking for caches all over the world, and planting my own caches in the most ridiculous places. I have been to some inaccessible places in the past - on Fastnet Rock for example, or on a glacier on a remote island in Patagonia - and I would struggle to resist hiding my own caches in these places. I would be climing cliff faces and lodging the little box into a falcon’s empty nest, or securing it inside some submerged wreck. Tip: don’t try it at an airport.