donal's blog

as sinéad puts it "i got tickets, up yours!"... haha The last time REM played in Ireland was back in 1999 iirc - in Landsdowne Road. I fell out with a guy I went to school with over that gig - we were meant to go and get tickets together and he went off and bought the tickets without talking to me. I never went to the concert... so now that they've announced 5 nights in the Olympia, I'm delighted. It will be a preview of new material which is being recorded this spring. I love the intimacy of the Olympia so this will be a real treat... We've got tickets for sunday and thursday night. see you there...

heard this on phantomFM tonight while driving home from the cinema... genius...

c/o www.timesonline.co.uk I happened to notice this article in the sunday times when i was getting off the train today. I had expected it to be easy to find online but it took about 10mins of searching... The reaction on the times website seems to be "so what!". so what? do folk realise just how much society relies on the internet these days? The article is scarce of real facts but I would be surprised if the location they mention would have been the only target. Anyone with any knowledge of networks would realise that there are easier targets than one of the world's main internet hubs. More and more telecommunication companies are pushing data and voice over the same physical medium so both voice and data could be affected by such an attack. This worries me a little... A simultaneous attack on key network infrastructure in a handful of countries could result in killing communications for a larger percentage of the world. This has a knock-on effect for national security

Incandescent light bulbs are to be phased out over the next 2 years as part of an EU initiative to reduce CO 2 emissions. This is abosultely brilliant and should result in cheaper prices and availability for CFL light bulbs. We replaced all the bulbs in our house last year at a cost of about €90 - that's not cheap and will drop considerably with competition. Kevin Barry has an interesting article in today's Irish Examiner. He recently visited the northwest and comments about how the current economic situation in ireland is having an effect on areas outside the Pale. he writes "the shimmering prosperity of the capital verges fades very quickly" and "once you get to longford and beyond, it can seem like you're back in 1987". This is a worrying sign if you take into account that house prices are falling in certain areas of dublin, a number of multi-nationals have reduced their footstep in ireland and that interest rates and inflation are set to increase

I've been itching to try it out for a while and report on the current status of mobile computing possibilities in Ireland. Back in October of last year I went to New Zealand for 3 weeks and had hoped to create entries on my blog using my mobile phone or blackberry (i had both with me). Unfortunately my plans were dashed on arrival when I found both my phones could use very few of the data services available. There was also a bug in the blackberry Google Mail client I was testing at the time which meant i could read email but not send any. fast-forward to March 2007... I'm on a fast train to Cork and this seems like a perfect time to test out tethering my blackberry to my laptop. I had attempted to get it working a few weeks back with no joy but this time I had strong signal and the availability of an EDGE-enabled mast. After hooking up my blackberry to the laptop, starting the blackberry device manager and dialing into the o2 network i'm connected! First time, no messing,

so i've finally managed to get access to blogspot.com subdomains again (thanks to a ssh tunnel to a server on another network)! what follows is speculation based on the various reports on the internet (boards.ie; blogger's help group)... so it appears sometime in the past week (28feb / 01 mar), a change in NTL's routing policy has resulted in packets destined for blogspot IP space to be routed rather strangely (via various networks which are now owned by virgin)... |------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | WinMTR statistics | | Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last | |------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------| | [removed] - 0 | 57 | 57 | 0 | 29 | 110 | 10 | | [removed].ntlworld.ie - 0 |