This was in the days before Eircom, my informant told me. It was even in the days before Telecom Eireann, all the way back in the dark ages when the telephone system was controlled by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, rural exchanges were still connected manually, the handset came in any colour you wanted …
Monthly Archive: August 2008
Aug 07
What’s My Name?
You can all breathe a little more easily tonight. The internet is safe again. During a presentation at the wonderfully named Black Hat Conference in Las Legas, a gathering of security professionals, Dan Kaminsky outlined the flaw in the design of Domain Name System that could allow the unscrupulous to hijack well known domain names …
Aug 06
Dúchas
There’s very little to do on a wet day in Donegal. Except perhaps, to climb a hill to look at a hillfort. Dooneany fort (Dún an Aonaigh?) is somewhere between 2300 and 3100 years old, a rugged, weather-beaten and isolated spot, that took a battering not just from the elements but from beseigers, by the …
Aug 04
Overheard in Donegal
The night was already dark, even in Donegal, far to the west and north of Greenwich, where official time is set, and the days are shorter. The fiddlers were just getting warmed up in the pub kitchen, while in the bar, the patrons moved in and out as orders were placed. Many simply placed their …
Aug 01
Random Walk
Googling the GRA earlier this week, I found www.gra.cc. So I wondered, ‘what does .cc stand for?’ It’s the two-letter country code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, two atolls and 27 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. In 1609 Captain William Keeling was the first European to see the islands, which remained uninhabited until John …