http://www.users.on.net/johnson/resourcehacker/ is a brilliant tool I found when I came across Mozilla Splash screens. MozillaNews has instructions on how to use Resource Hacker to change the Splash screen. It is really simple. MozillaNews also has a few examples of alternative splash screens that you could use. Being the Soppy Git that I am I have an image of my Girlfriend as my splash screen, at least she knows I think of her at least once a day (that is when I boot up Mozilla).

Condolences to my brother Peter who lost his All Ireland GAA VEC Schools Semi-Final. they lost by two points and It was supposedly a good match. It was in Nenagh so I didn't get a chance to go.

It's been red nose week all week, at RedNoseDay.com. The documentary on “African Hospital” with Billy Connolly was brilliant and if I was working full time I would definitely be donating money to that charity.

ste has given his webiste a complete revamp (www.ste.org )It looks seriously sweet. A plug for myself : ste is using by Blog Script and GUI, which reminds me , I might (if time permits) put my Blog Script up on Aggreg8 as a Side project. ste also has an RSS feed and recently has been posting alot and frequently. A good read.

With so much talk of certificates in Security protocols i decided to get myself one.
Thwate offer them for free here . To view details of your cert go here. It's free for a personal Cert. which is what I have requested, it's in X509 format which is exactly what we are using in college. I'm not too sure how it works but it seems that there is an MS version and also a non-MS version (i.e if you are using a non-Microsoft email program).

Update: I've downloaded and installed both Certificates and they work perfectly (MS and Netscape/Mozilla). I also found on my travels today a very good intro to passwords and how to choose them, well worth a read.

Right then, After all my bitching the other day about ireland and it's backwardness, I have some praise to give to the people of Eircom. I 1901 rang last night to report a fault on our line as the line quality had dropped considerably, both voice and data calls. Eircom ranf me again today at 1:30 and he was at my house at 2pm and replaced the junction box on the side of the house. (I'm still not sure whether the problem is fixed yet) but my point is that they were very efficient. The engineer even said himself that anything that takes longer than a day and a half means a stewards enquiry. Now if only Eircom could do something about their prices then maybe I might add them to my list of companies with foresight.
For those of you who don't know there is an Eircom customer charter. In this it states that a falut that is not repaired within 2 days will result in 1 month free line rental (I used this a while back and we did receive the free rental). I can't find an online version of tha cahrter so if anybody knows of one could the mail me the link.

http://www.wifinder.com/
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,5184,4541,00.html
http://www.hootersair.com
I'll comment on the above later

Check out Deskmod.com, there is some wicked Graphics there. I've been working on Security Protocols all week and I'm headwrecked, I have it basically finished (apart from some niggly bits and error checking). All I have to do now is practically comment on every line of code which with all 12 classes come to well over 1000 lines of code. I did the same for the previous project so some of those comments will still hold. I can' remember If I gave the link to the javadoc of my last project, but here it is JavaDoc Security protocols Part1. (I got full marks for this by the way….all of a whopping 1% overall). It seems Windows NT does not support USB (plug and play anyway)…I kind of knew this already but was hoping it wasn't true…so my memory stick will not be getting the use I had expected it would get, but I predict it will be very usefull while travelling, to store all my documents and CV etc.
There was a good debate or interview today on PatKenny (The Late show) about how Ireland is a country full of rip-off merchants, from dairies to Insurance brokers, this is what I have felt about the "emerald Isle" all along, and it is only through the foresight of companies like Ryanair, Lidl, Aldi, Komplett, TKMaxx etc. that this will change. And untill it all changes I fear Ireland will remain the backward little country full of gullible Paddys. We need to change if we are to be any kind of a nation….(As I hate politics talk, this is not politics talk). Opinions on this topic can be sent to me and I will post them here (provided they are worthwhile).

On Reflection: The above was a bit harsh but the point still stands.

As many of you might already know… I love Lidl (the budget supermarket), today just strengthened my love for this wonderful store. Today I bought the memory stick (description here) pictures on the left and the mouse (description here) pictures on the right for €39.99 and €29.99 respectively. Both of which are brilliant prices, and both products are superb. The memory stick is absolutely tiny. I recently bought a Microsoft Cordless-Optical mouse from PC world for €50 (was priced at €90) which apart from some ergonomic features is the exact same as the Lidl mouse (the maker of both products is Typhoon http://www.typhoonline.com). The Typhoon mouse even has a recharge feature unlike to Microsoft counterpart. I went to Finglas Lidl early today as i wanted to make sure i got a memory stick…I got there about 9:20 and there was none left, people had been queing from early that morning. I asked a member of staff..who just happened to be the manager, if they had any left. He looked at me for a moment then brought me to his office door and gave me the last one that he had been keeping for someone…..SOUND!!.
Check out this mouse (pictured left) which I am defintely getting when i get my laptop (only €35!!) you can buy it here …..the sites in german though.
Other issues for today:
* I found out last week with all of the Jackass movie talk that Wee-Man is not infact dead, I had heard he was and had told a few people that he was….sorry for lying to you folks.
* Google has bought the company Pyra . Pyra are the founders of Blogger.com. Blogger is a super servie and i have used them for a few blogs i had running {Intra updates and 4th Year project ideas}. As I am big in to my Blogs and Google might be setting up in DCU ( a research facility) I might be seeing if there are any opportunities with their newly acquired blogger department….the best thing about this news is that Blogger will not be going anywhere, only getting better.
* Sorry to those who might have been checking my site lately…some images were missing as they were hosted on my local server which of course only i can see which meant when I checked the site here, everything was fine.

Well there you go folks, a brand new layout, and as is all the rage at the moment , all the styling is strinctly CSS based (with some Javascript for rollovers etc). I have tried to adhere to te XHTML rules but I'm sure I've breached a few of them along the way , but it's a start. As you can see there is a Logo missing from the top left corner, my good buddy Garovski Vladimeer is working on a few options at the moment. I have moverd away from the whole mouseover menu feature that I had in my previous menus as there was Browsers in compatibilities there. Instead I have created a new page where there would have been a menu, ie, Friends, Lecturers and the links page has been extended. These three pages still need alot of work as you can see. Anway let me know what you think, I will be changing the colors around a bit as I'm not too sure about the ones now (this is now super simple to do as I create the CSS dynamically using PHP and as mentione dall the styling is done by this CSS).

Peter (My brother that is) and his school team, St. Peters of Dunboyne, are now Leinster school champions and now go on ot the All-Ireland semi-finals. I am very proud of the young lad (he plays corner back). Well done to him then.

The Grange network : Last night I set up my Intranet site at home. I have Foxserv (A bundle with Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, WinMySql and plenty of other add ons.) I got this working fine and had the main website set up. I then installed an online image gallery, just lke my one on Philroche.net (http://gallery.philroche.net ), I needed to install Image Magick for this so that it could resize the images etc.. I then installed and set up PHPNuke 6.0 which is an amazing fully featured Portal system. When I go home in the evenings now I have no reason at all ,at all to go to sleep. Next step i reckon is play with Apache by adding some add-ons like Apache::Gallery. Now when I get Braodband (which if I stay in ireland will be in about 20years) I will have a wicked webiste that I can run from my own box. (I am such a fucking nerd it's unbeleivable)…….^..^

Observation made over the last few days driving through BallyMun:

• Caravan: I was driving to DCU on the back roads behind Ballymun when lo-and-behold, what do I see but a caravan sitting in the middle of the f*#^ing road. It sat there for 2 days untill it was burn't down. Then 2 days after that anotehr one appeared. I can't beleive that the travellers beleive that they can get away with disposing of their caravans on the road just outside their halting site.
• Probable Hooker: Same place as the caravan incident above. When I was driving by this morning, there was a young “lady” walking home (9:35am) looking quite dishevelled and very tired and dirty….what had she been up to all night????(My imagination does tend to run wild now and then).

I've just spent a few hours trying out automatic image gallery generator, mainly from freshmeat.net. But the one I settled for was http://www.chezgreg.net/coppermine/ . I will be hosting all of my travel pictures here so check it out when I leave…it's http://gallery.philroche.net/  And it's all PHP which is cool and MySQL which is even cooler . It uses something called ImageMagick to manipulate the image(which was fortunately already installed on the redbrick server). I thought I might mention ste's 4th Year project entitled "webbot" which is damn cool, There's not much there now but there will be soon, you can bank on that….http://webbot.ste.org .

I haven't posted for a while… mainly because I have been working on Aggreg8 and on my Multimedia Technology Project, I've mentioned it before, an implementation of the LZW compression algorithm, I have it working for ascii text documents, I can compress a 10kb file to a 5kb file. It's pretty cool really. Here's the output form the compression.

Compressed file : "ca438ContAssess.txt.lzw" (4631 bytes)
Decompressed file : "ca438ContAssess.txt.lzw.out" (9083 bytes)
Decompression Dictionary file : "ca438ContAssess.txt.lzw.out.dct" (199666 bytes)
Number of entries in Dictionary : 3491
Minimum code size : 7
Maximum code size : 12

Which I am quite proud of. It seems that Mozilla now comes fully equiped with the kitchen sink. see : http://www.mozilla.org/catalog/web-developer/examples/kitchensink.xml . This example is now loaded into the new releases of Mozilla because of comments that Mozilla was a bloated product and might as well include the Kitchen sink(i.e. it comes with to much).