Ubuntu disk i/o analysis

Very quick rundown of some commands can tell you things about your disk IO. If I feel like it in the future, I'll expand this to a more documented post.

Organizing Windows desktop icons with Fences

 I frequently get annoyed by apps changing the way I've organized my desktop icons. Only recently I found an excellent program to deal with this once and for all. It's called Fences (by Stardock). It let's you create little boxes or 'fences' where you can drag icons into. Once in a fence you can move the fence or resize it, but all the icons will nicely stay in it.

In contrary to their usual software, this one isn't annoying and it's free for personal usage.
Get it at the Stardocks website.

I'll add one of the screenshots so you've got a bit of an idea how it looks:

Youtube faster with Feather ßeta

Youtube is testing a new system called Feather, which would deliver their content much faster. Lower latency and reducing the stream from 391 KB to 52 KB are amongst things to watch for.
Though it doesn't yet work for all video's, you can join here.

This doesn't seem to work with Opera or Firefox at the moment because of interpreting issues of the HTML 5 code using ogg or H264 (youtube using the later). Internet Explorer can't handle it at all, so use Chrome or Safari if you want to test.

Edit: Here's an article of Firefox defending why they only play ogg and no H264

Installing Ubuntu 9.10 as home server

In this article I'm going to be installing Ubuntu Server 9.10 on my home server with some specific requirements. I'm doing the installation on a similar built VM as well to get screencap's.