James Galvin

I had been planning on touring Eastern Europe earlier in the year - had it all mapped out, from Croatia to Estonia, but was forced to come to terms with the fact that I just couldn’t afford it. So I’m pleased to get the chance to attend the the 5th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing in Timisoara in July, where I will be presenting my results on “the Greedy Formation Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks”.

Four days of hardcore technical presentations will probably be a bit much, but if I get through it without my head exploding then hopefully the experience will be of some benefit to me. There are some interesting talks, and the city of Timisoara is meant to be a nice place, so I am looking forward to going there.

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.

Five years since I walked in through that big old stone building with the ogham stones and the statue of the ringwraiths. Hopefully I won’t have to be back for any repeats in the autumn, but who cares… I’m going to go to sleep now and when I wake up I WILL BE FREE. Fishing… travelling… oh ya, I’ve got to get a job too I suppose. I’ll leave all that till later.

Its that time of year again when the UCC library heaves with the desperate sighs of students in the strangling grip of pre-exam panic. In May I avoid the library like the plague… an apt metaphor perhaps, considering the pathogens that may be festering in the stagnant, fetid air within - the collective breath of a thousand sickly students. But today I have no choice.

One last taste of oxygen before taking the plunge, I momentarily admire the stunning Boolean architecture before we’re herded through the gates like cattle. The guard in the booth has given up. I think back to brighter, quieter days, when he once refused me admission because i had no ID. He sits there now… defeated, as the swarm of students continues to pass. Once powerful, now a broken man, on the verge of tears perhaps… contemplating what might have been if he had become a lollypop lady like his mamma always wanted. In a moment of sympathy, I consider owning up to the fact that I don’t have my student ID, but the herd ushers me onwards through the putrid atmosphere of the overcrowded foyer - greeted by the warm, nauseating smell of a Mexican launderette.

And on to queue up to search through the books of past exam papers. To queue up again to use the photocopiers and pay €3 for the privilege. Books… photocopiers? These are past exam papers! They were once healthy PDF files basking in the blissful calm of some UCC computer. Why were they relegated to such a state, deprived of their right to pasture on Booleweb? Perhaps it was the difficulties of copy/pasting. Sure isn’t it much easier to send them to the knackers yard… “THE PRINTER”??? Sure haven’t we been doing it that way for decades?

In the past, due to IP restrictions, I have had to SSH Into my college account, download the files onto my space via lynx, and then retrieve them with FTP. Now at last there is passworded external access to Booleweb, but what good is that if there are no papers once you’re logged in? This is what happens when you let your university uses yahoogroups for official mailing lists.

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 midi files that were automatically composed at the touch of a button (and maybe a couple of slider bars) by his program.

The interface also has a “risk” slider which, if set to “low”, would come out with a tune that conforms perfectly to our rules of music, akin to Mary Had a Little Lamb. Increasing the risk will allow the computer to stray more from the predefined rules to create either a unique inspirational work, or an absolute disaster. Take a listen to this Shins-esque one (which I think had risk factor set to “medium”)… I think its class:

If you’re not into the sinister bells genre, there are pianos, guitars and more on the zip file here (3kb). Mark says he’s currently accepting donations

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 devices continue to get smaller and more numerous, IP routing cannot meet the future requirements of ad-hoc networks. My protocol is an alternative to IP. It reduces processing and memory overhead by eliminating the costly updating of routing tables, the large packet headers, the address conflicts, and the unnecessary restrictions that IP routing brings to an ad-hoc network. The service-oriented naming scheme introduces a whole new host of improvements and possibilities for the future, although at the moment I have only its most basic implementation.

The guy in front of me had an interesting project, 17,000 lines of code examining the algorithmic composition of music. When I was greeted by midi music at 9am, I thought I would be in for a long day. Turned out it was quite the opposite - he had really done his research and the results were amazing. The program used random numbers to generate a unique tune within the constraints of an algorithm which conforms to our idea of what good music is. There were loads of different controls to vary the output, but even some of the computer’s own work was really good. One tune in particular which used a slow, bluesy rhythm could easily have been a movie sound track. Even if you’re an AI skeptic who believes that a computer could never generate genuinely good music, there is no doubting that this tool could be a source of inspiration for artists, or a powerful background music generator for games, for example. The author of the project is looking to do a PHD, so it is in safe hands and it is possible that we could be seeing more of it in the future.

Music and Artificial Intelligence were also central to Mood Musik, a Java based music player which recommended songs to the user based not only on musical patterns (as some existing mp3 players can do) but also by analysing lyrical content.

There were several robotics projects. As far as I could tell, one such project involved a wheeled robot navigating his way through a red-brick maze. Maybe I got the idea wrong, but robots are always cool anyway.

Games development was big this year, with most of the guys that were at Intel with me taking this option. One group made a PC game, another made an Xbox game, and a third group who developed a PS2 game (although I did not get to see that one).

The multiplayer PC game looked like Quake and felt like Unreal. Perfectly rendered machinegun with realistic sounds, and great graphics except for the disproportionate enemy models that provided comic effect akin to using the ‘homer simpson’ model in Half-life Deathmatch and Quake 3.

The Xbox game, called ‘Revelation’ had a religious theme. You are are monk who runs around banishing demons, in the true spirit of oldschool classic FPS games. A great theme and atmosphere, with a first rate introduction (the holy tome opening with a freaky otherwordly narration).

These projects were really inspirational - the things you can do in just a couple of months if you put your mind to it. Revelation inspired me to go straight to GAME and buy Oblivion, which was released today. So I braved the Friday evening South Ring traffic to Mahon Point. And by the time I got there, they were sold out. I’ve never seen this happen before… I bought Halflife 2 the day it came out, at 8pm in the evening. I bought World of Warcraft the day it came out… and Doom 3, and Quake 4. None of these came close to selling out on their opening day.
I rang GameStop in Blackpool and asked if they had it in stock.

Norry: “Yeah we have that, no bother.”
Me: “Should I reserve it? Like, is there any danger of it selling out between now and the time I get there?”
Norry: “Nah we have loads of copies.”

So I braved the Friday evening North Ring traffic to Blackpool. They had one copy left when I got there.