Category Archives: General

Dave’s off the fags. Good luck, you’ll succeed, one day at a time.
If you want some help, then Allan Carr’s book on smoking, Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking can be recommended. I’m not a smoker, but I know someone who smoked 60 a day. He read that book and stopped smoking. Just like that. I saw him this weekend, 3 weeks later. We went for a drive in his car and the first thing I noticed was that he didn’t light up. He also has a lot more money and spoilt himself shopping! Good going Richard, now I hope Mary reads the book! I know Martina feels the same way.
A friend told Martina that giving up smoking is like giving up your favourite food, but multiplied by 100. I can’t imagine the temptation that must cause!

War on smoking: I have never felt better, I quit smoking because I wanted to, not because I had to.

Poochkiss: Each year [on the net] that passes is like a dog year; multiply by seven. 1995 is really not too long ago.

Just back from the dentist. ‘s funny but when he got out the drill, or when he was giving me the injection, all I could think of was being on top of a 50m crane and diving off into thin air.. *shudder*

Cringley has a new article that I haven’t read yet (I’m on dial-up, I pay by the minute!)

Asteroid just missed Earth and we didn’t even know it until 3 days later! I saw this on the news last night and was shocked that I hadn’t heard/read it on the weblogs earlier. RTE Network 2 News reported that the asteroid missed us by 75,000km, not 120,000km as reported in this article, but the article on rte.ie says 120,000km too.

Slashdot: Native Sorenson Playback Comes to Linux.

The Irish Examiner led with a story yesterday titled WHO proves passive smoking causes cancer. The linked article doesn’t have that title, that’s what appeared on the front of the paper. Unfortunately I haven’t heard anyone make a fuss about this story. The print article had a lot more details too.

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!