donal's blog

following on from dublin bus rant, i want to point out that I really really want to be environmentally friendly when i have to travel. If I could rely on dublin bus I'ld use it as a primary or secondary mode of transport. saying that, i've got into a bad habit of driving to work and there's absolutely no need for me to do so... As a result (and due to the weather improving), I'm going to get back on my bicycle and cycle to and from work as much as possible. it's good exercise, it avoids the traffic big time and it's quicker! they've just but a new cycle/bus lane all the way along the long mile road / drimnagh road / crumlin road too. sweet!

I've no idea what part # of my adventures with dublin bus this is but isn't getting to the end. ;) As you may or may not know, I vowed to dublin bus sometime last year that they should improve their service or force another customer into a car (doing the complete opposite of what they should be doing). Anyway - today, forgetting that things in this wonderful country never change, decided to get the bus into barrow street. So i wander over to the 77/77A/50 stop near my house and it's gone... nothing left of it at all. not unusual - this is dublin bus... ;) a few more people turn up and about 15-20mins later a bus finally shows but fails to stop. hmm... again this isn't overly unusual. though the bus was half empty which indicates either a really bad driver or something amiss. anyway - the crew of 4 at the now non-existant bus stop wait patiently for the 2nd bus (cuurently on the other side of the infamous walkinstown roundabout). this bus also passes us all by and the d

I've been meaning to play with linux a lot more than I actually have in the past 2-3 years. One of the main reasons was that I didn't want to have the huge overhead of leaving a noisy machine that sucked lots of energy running somewhere in my house all the time. A colleague of mine is building a new robot based on the Linksys NSLU (a network storage device that can be made to run linux). I got him to buy me one at the same time. Anyway - got the thing on wednesday and only really got to play with it tonight. Was really easy to flash the thing and now i have a 133Mhz linux machine with 32mb ram and a 64mb usb key stuck into the back of it. it's like the early '90s all over again! here's some technical details. root@slug1:/etc/network# uname -a Linux slug1 2.6.12.2 #1 Tue Sep 27 20:21:18 CDT 2005 armv5teb unknown root@slug1:/etc/network# cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 1 (v5b) BogoMIPS : 131.48 Features : swp half thumb fa