Author Archives: Donncha

Speed up your hard drive under Linux:
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -c1 -m16 -u1 /dev/hdX
Read the man page for hdparm first though as the above can cause filesystem corruption if you’re not careful.
The last setting I tried was “-u” which sets the “interrupt-unmask” flag on the drive. The man page warns that corruption is possible with certain IDE interfaces so be careful with this one. I will say that enabling this makes my machine run noticably better. All the above help in fact.

Nagios is the new name for Netsaint.

Lots of docs here on GNU and Unix development tools. I found this site while searching for docs on make.

Vim Cookbook

This Iptables firewall script looks promising. I haven’t had time to get my head around Iptables yet so this script may get me started!

Zimran picks up on Joel’s article <a href="http://www.winterspeak.com/2002_06_01_archive.html#
85178566″>over at winterspeak and expands upon it.

Another search engine claims to index more pages than Google. I tried it, it hasn’t indexed this site yet, Google has (can’t remember if I submitted it to Google though!) and it does seem to have a wide range of pages indexed.

Daniel pointed me at this Joel article on Open Source. Slashdot has picked up on it and you can read the comments there. Whatever about the comments, the article makes good reading!

Just downloaded a few MP3s off RKO and here’s three that I’ll recommend: (these are only extracts, visit the site to download the full tunes!)

1. Firelord – Symphonic
2. Great Giana Sisters, tune 3 (Acoustic Style)
3. Treasure Island Dizzy

Irma discovered another 9/11 conspiracy.

Our local supermarket, Super Valu, went up in flames this morning. I passed it in the car half an hour ago, smoke was blowing over the road and all I could see was black burnt material inside the shop! Guards and fire brigade were at the scene and I heard it mentioned on the national news a few minutes later at home.

There’s going to be one hell of a party when the Irish Team return tomorrow night!