James Galvin

When it comes to incompetence relating to computers and the internet. None of the emails I sent off to hotels in Timisoara, Romania last week were answered - with one bounceback. So I’m sure that Comreg (aka Telecoms Watch-Poodle) will be delighted to hear that Ireland isn’t the only country where you need to make a phone call in order to get anything done. After getting pummeled in the media this week, they’ll be looking for another reason to pat each other on the back to complement themselves on a job well done.

Rymus has some familiar scenes of UCC like you’ve never seen them before. Reminds me that I need to get myself a camera. Syxpak mentioned the Canon PowerShot A540, so I’ll probably get one of them unless somebody tells me its a bad idea. Can anyone recommend a good book or something that will tell me what I need to know about digital photography?

For the gamers - theres life in Quake 4 yet, as the E-Sports World Championships are underway in Paris. There were no surprises in the group stages, and it looks like it will be the usual suspects contesting for the title, with some notable absences. Disappointing that the Americans are only represented by one player due to sponsorship issues.

Finally, via Sean McGrath - an entertaining list of autoantonyms, words that are the opposite of themselves.

Ireland’s most experienced gaming clan, Clan FH, are now playing Warsow. The clan has been going since August 2000 and has played hundreds of official matches. When Quake 4 turned out to be such a disappointment, I thought that FH’s days were over but we’ll give Warsow a crack and see if its worth playing. I moved the website into Wordpress and got most of the news / match results archives imported.

It’s funny to see that after 6 years, the lack of broadband is still the major issue for me. FH had 21 dedicated Irish gamers in its teamlist. Looking through the news archives, it wasn’t until 2003 that any of us were able to get broadband. On 6th Jan, 2003, quozl was the first of us to have more than 128k bandwidth. He was living in Dublin 4, actively involved in Irish WAN, an engineering graduate with broadband a major priority. But like the rest of us in Cork City, Carrigaline, Bray, Malahide, Galway City, Dundalk, Ennis, Limerick, Portlaoise, and er.. *cough* Ballymore Eustace, it was simply impossible to get any kind of broadband (bar satellite) until this time.

Some FHers still weren’t able to get DSL until just a couple of months ago - Spacey went to extreme lengths including bribes and intimidation in order to get his line to pass and it finally paid off. Out of the blue, Eircom upgraded Vincent’s local exchange. Anyone else who still couldn’t get broadband had long since resigned themselves to the Xbox I think, so that now in the middle of 2006, I’m the last remaining ISDNer. I think I’ll write a song about it.

A guy linked to this on IRC - a FFXI Games Master’s blog. Having wasted €50 on Final Fantasy Online when it first came out, I have no remorse for these losers who continue to play it, and I must commend [GM]Dave on his good work.

[GM]Dave>> You said he was a gilseller
[GM]Dave>> Just because he was there for 5 days.
Player>> Yeah.
[GM]Dave>> And then you said you were there for 5 days.
Player>> Yeah.
[GM]Dave>> And 2 plus 2 equals…
Player>> 4?

*makes a note in player account*

Attention: Player is apparently mildly retarded.

[GM]Dave>> Logic and math skills.
[GM]Dave>> You must beat the girls off with a stick.
Player>> Yeah. A stick +1. lol

*makes a note in player account*

Attention: Player is apparently mildly functionally retarded.

Dvorak writes about another podcasting lecturer, this one from Bradford University in England:

Students will ask questions about lectures via text message, which will be answered in Dr Ashraf’s blog.

The lecturer has also been putting his appointment times online so students can check if he is available or book a meeting without coming into the university.

I’m delighted to see this kind of progress being made. James Bowen’s lecture podcasts in UCC were discussed Damien Mulley’s blog last month, and some people such as Adrian Weckler believed that it would lead to a reduced attendance at lectures, and thus more people failing in exams. Having experienced first-hand the benefits of Bowen’s podcasts and well-organised and readily available notes, I have to disagree fully with Adrian’s view. There are two types of students - those who attend lectures, and those who don’t. Those dilligent individuals who attend their Friday morning web programming classes will surely not change their colours simply because there is a file they can download online.

Unfortunately for me, I was born into the latter category and in my four years at UCC I’d say I could count the total number of lectures I attended on my fingers and toes. I know that the university should not have to cater for this degree of laziness, but when the goal is to educate, nobody can deny that we are better served by an organised collection of notes readily available online. Ironically, it was my interest in computers that ultimately doomed my education in computer science.

I wonder how much stress it would cause if the university declared that all lecturers must put their notes online. Some of my lecturers didn’t even have a website. Taking it a step futher, how difficult would it be to have all lectures recorded? All it takes, essentially, is a few clicks of buttons, and all of the valuable information that our tired, sieve-like brains don’t capture is gathered by a safety net that can be accessed at any time in the future, in a 13meg file. Accompanied by the notes so that you can read along, I can think of no better way to educate. So what if a couple of people decide not to show up due to the redundancy of the occasion - the underlying aim is to educate, and impeccable attendance is not a requirement.

Whats more, I’m sick of making excuses about how “I’m sorry I was lazy for four years, I’m sorry I didn’t go in” - if I had my day over again, I wouldn’t even bother wasting those ten hours that I did spend dozing off in the Boole basement listening to some guy read out his notes. Why not just give me the notes, and I’ll read them myself? I have better things to be doing - like working. Do you realise how expensive it is to go to university? With or without a grant - it is crippling if you don’t have Daddy paying your way for you. Money aside - the experience that I gained working IT-related jobs while I should have been attending lectures will prove far more useful than the VRML that I missed out on. In my ideal University 2.0, there would be no reason why I couldn’t have the best of both worlds - come home to find todays lecture accompanied by the notes up on the web. Text the prof with a question here or there, book a meeting with him for next week sometime.

You might say “bullshit, James, if you didn’t bother to get up in the morning then you won’t be wasting your time downloading large mp3s on your sucky 64k” and you could be right - but I would bring my USB stick into college some evening and I would download everything, and then when the frantic cramming sets in around May, I would reap the benefits of this accessible education. I don’t want to sound like a whiner, but I can honestly say that the only thing that has separated me from the 1.1ers is the fact that they always had the notes, and I didn’t. True, I have only myself to blame, photocopiers are easy to come by, but this is 2006 and I really don’t want to be scurrying around like a 1997er. I shouldn’t even have to know what a photocopier looks like - they became obsolete along with Whigfield and Scatman John.

My sickle is sharpened, and my hammer weighs heavily, urging me to take this declaration a step further - once we have our podcasts and our lecture notes uploaded, why not put them all into a big huge directory and make them publicly accessible? I realise this probably sounds very naive, so please, do me a favour and explain it to me. Why is it that these not-for-profit institutes of learning horde their material behind closed doors? Its easy enough to unearth some PDF’s or PPT’s from some guy in MIT if you google hard enough, but I want RSS feeds - I want Wikis, I want Education 2.0 Social Education. I’m interested in Artificial Intelligence - I want my feed reeder to beep everytime some MIT professor updates his podcast, or uploads his notes to his website. I don’t want to suffer anymore because my own lecturer is useless. And I want to find out once and for all if those Arts students are really talking shit or not - I want to see their notes; I want to read their course material. I want all this stuff to be accessible to the common man, for the good of education. Patent pending, Tom.

I hate e-sports. Computer games should be games, and nothing more. There have always been super competitive teenagers who alias and quit servers and make excuses and whine, but since the rise of e-sports, this has become the norm. All the same, I hate to see Ireland left behind, and this is exactly what has been happening for the past three years, as Ireland has lacked any semi-professional online gaming organisation since the downfall of clan dNC. I hated clan dNC, I hate Four Kings, and kick-esports, and all these queer organisations with “e-sports” or “gaming” tacked onto the end. Basically I want any clan that has a CEO to cop on and get a life.

Unfortunately, gone are the days when we could play our weekly league match against against a group of lads who play the game for fun. The entire European clan scene has sold their souls in return for a branded mousemat, and a fancy IRC bouncer. These days, a clan is more about a corporate identity, getting their name in the media, and sucking up to their sponsors.. As much as I hate all the lameness and lack of sportsmanship and 14-year old egos that this new competitive streak has brought to online gaming, I have to acknowledge that it is not going to go away, and its time that Ireland starts catching up.

Traditionally, Ireland has a good pedigree in internet gaming. Famously, we won the QuakeWorld four nations in Scotland at Rapture ‘99, beating England in the final. Since then, as a nation we have severely lagged behind the rest of the world in terms of our internet infrastructure, namely the shameful lack of availability of broadband, and our prowess as a gaming nation continually declined. We had some success in Counter Strike in the early days, with some great clans, most notably dNC winning major competitions at home and abroad, but this somehow fizzled out to the extent that we now have about one decent clan left. I was captain of the Irish Quake 3 team for several years, and despite our absolutely dire connections, we managed to hold our own against the second tier nations of Europe. We claimed many scalps, against the UK, Netherlands, Estonia, Portugal, Slovenia, Norway, among others, but we were still living off the talent that was produced in the early Quake days days, as we very rarely came across promising new faces.

In the early days of this century, we had clans in the ClanBase Eurocup in Counter Strike, Quake, and Unreal Tournament, which were the biggest arenas at the time. But by the time the wave of e-sports arrived, and the new generation of games - RTCW, Enemy Territory, Battlefield, Call of Duty, the number of clans and skilled players was at rock bottom, and we had very few national teams competing.

In the past four years since Ireland’s last participation in the Cyberathletes Professional League, we have had no representation at any of the major international events - the E-Sports World Cups, or the World Cyber Games. We have never participated in these tournaments - consider that the following countries, among others, are named as participants: Egypt, Iran, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (South), Malaysia, Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Cyprus, Qatar, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand.

So why is it that the flags of Qatar and Moldova are proudly present, but our beloved tricolour is not? The answer is: because no organisation has stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility for the qualifiers. Now, the E-Sports Association of Ireland has been announced. In its current state, its a poorly designed PHP Nuke website, with no community and no resources, recycling the news from eSreality and ClanBase. But its the best attempt yet at bringing Irish internet gaming into the 21st century. My worry is that it could easily fall by the wayside. It has been very poorly promoted, there seems to be one guy behind it and he seems to be out of his depth. This will not be a problem, assuming the ball gets rolling.

Several months ago, as I pieced together a disaster of an Irish national Quake 4 team (disaster because we ended up with a total of 5 players, one of whom was on ISDN) in the hope that we would not concede another entire game to the void of Irish apathy, I considered organising an e-sports association like this myself. I looked at the success of e-Sports.lt, the Lithuanian E-sports community, and thought of how badly we needed a bridge between the different Irish gaming communities, to get all our shit together on one site that would open the door to sponsorship, and facilitate and encourage new players in all of the different games. But then I thought - why bother? I would be better off channeling my efforts into something more worthwhile - how about chess? How is it that half of the young people of Ireland don’t even know how to play chess? Or why not yodelling, or curling.

Nonetheless, I’m glad that somebody has assembled the fragments that I was never going to piece together. I hope to see this growing in stature - hosting leagues, organising WCG/ESWC qualifiers, maybe some LAN events. For now there is a long way to go, and this starts with a website and a community. The community is the hardest part.

I’ll add my voice to the mounting frustration among Irish internet users resulting from Amazon UK’s decision to stop delivering certain items to Ireland.

Amazon: if its costing you too much to ship to Ireland, then maybe… raise the shipping charges? I see no good reason why they would pull the plug on their Irish customers like this, and judging by the reaction on Michele’s blog, Amazon have not been forthcoming with an explanation. Its insulting, and while they continue to ship certain items (such as DVDs), this is a very clear statement that they don’t value our business. Viva play.com.

I got the Sunday Tribune today, and was pleased to be greeted by the broadband coverage map made by Damien Mulley and John Handelaar. There it is in big bold font: “Gaping holes in Irish internet”: Mulley 1 - 0 Eircom.

Noel Dempsey’s spokesman admirably exhibits the art of saying nothing but saying everything, in the generic please-everyone response:

“Broadband is a top priority for the minister because it is an essential building-block for the knowledge economy. While the minister is not satisfied with the current situation, significant progress has been made over the past two years”.

I’m happy with that response from the government, because the score remains at 1-0. But the fatcats never lose. Enter Eir“SUCKERS OF SATAN’S COCK”com. David McRedmond took a break from projectile vomiting to respond: “Your mother’s in here, Damien. Would you like to leave a message?” before going on to say that the map is “grossly misleading”. I wish I had been interviewing David McRedmond when he said that, because my next question would have been “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU MORON”. Where exactly is it misleading, let alone grossly misleading?? Is that not a map of Ireland? Are those yellow blobs not marking every enabled exchange? Does this map not actually make Eircom’s coverage look far better than it really is?

Mr. McRedmond, I will give you an example of something that is misleading:

“we are making broadband available as much as it is anywhere in Europe, and this is a fantastic achievement”

I could never be a reporter, or a politician, because when someone comes out with a statement like this, I just can’t let it rest. To me it is an assault on humanity, because somebody might believe it. It brings me back once again to the Islamic cyber-terrorists threatening our safety with their Battlefield 2 mod - as long as you have stupid reporters who don’t research anything and ignorant politicians who dont know anything then we will never have progress.

Adolf Hitler asserted that the masses will more easily fall victim to a huge lie than to a small one. Forget about your “uhh its not as bad as it seems” approach - reach for the stars: “its fantastic”. This is an old trick, and by far the most effective way to cover up for a complete disaster. It used to happen at Intel - somebody fucks up and theres a crisis in the department, all hands on deck trying to restore productivity, and next thing they’re all queueing up at the award ceremony, patting each other on the back. Eircom’s “fantastic achievement” in enabling all these exchanges in the past year has been made possible by their ABSOLUTE INCOMPETENCE in the preceding years. Do you want me to praise you for being YEARS behind schedule?

Thank you Ireland Offline for having the patience to stand up to this, because when it comes to technology, our politicians are rabbits in headlights, with myxomatosis. Just look at the Health Service Executive and their cutbacks last year - then count up how much they pissed away on everything IT related. And I’m not just talking about their payroll system. As long as you can keep the “fantastic achievements” coming in your monthly reports, then you’ll never have to worry.

I’m not even going to start on the electronic voting saga. Before they’re allowed stand for election, every prospective TD should complete a mandatory two weeks “WAKE THE FUCK UP” course in technology.

Last night I spent some time laughing at the Yahoo article exposing the latest wave of terrorist activities: converting popular computer games as a tool for propaganda and training of recruits. As bad as it was, it gets worse.

Dvorak got the story this morning, where julieb pointed out that the source which was the basis of the terrible article, supposedly a Battlefield 2 mod made by al Qaeda to train young terrorists, was actually a video made by one of the lads over on the Planet Battlefield forums, using Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police voiceover. Here’s what julieb says:

The video the retarded writer is referring to is not made by terrorists. It was made by a member of the Planetbattlefield forums. The voice of in the video is not a terrorist - it is Trey Parker from the movie Team America World Police. The article also claims it is a mod created by terrorist. It is not a mod. It is the Special Forces Expansion pack that anyone can buy.

I knew there was something very familiar about the quote which was cited in the news article - “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters”. Here is the full quote from Team America:

Gary Johnston: I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in their Blackhawk helicopters. The infidels fired at the oil fields and they lit up like the eyes of Allah. Burning oil rained down from the sky and cooked everything it touched. I could only hide myself and cry as my goats were consumed by the fiery black liquid death. In the midst of the chaos, I could swear that I heard my goats screaming for help. As quickly as they had come, the infidels were gone. It was on that day I put a jihad on them. And if you don’t believe it, then you’d better kill me now, because I’ll put a jihad on you, too.

Terrorist: I like you. You have balls. I like balls.

It is good to see such a well-researched story making it onto the pages of Yahoo, Washington Post, zdnet, and of course, the one and only Fox News. I have to agree with julieb that David Morgan is a horrible writer and should not be working for Reuters. In the wise words of Kim Jong Il: “Why is everyone so fucking stupid?”

Announcing the Google Cheatsheet - they should teach this in schools! From Googlebot’s IP addresses, to all of Google’s domains, to Google Caculator examples - this is Google in a nutshell.
[via]

I just paid £30 to renew a .com domain for one year. Thats €43.26 - about eight times what I usually pay with eNom. Had to renew it before they would transfer the ownership because it was already expired. And I thought it was funny when I was quoted $10 per user per month for standard pop3 email accounts. I thought these kind of prices went out in 2001.