Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

The time has finally come to resurrect my old office from Mountain View. I put my desk together Monday evening and then set about unpacking my computers and turning them back on after nigh on six months of disuse. My file server happily whirred into action, using the new power cord I purchased from Media Markt on Saturday.

My workstation, however, was a different story. The dreaded click of death familiar to anyone who has ever lost a hard drive in active duty defiled my ears with its filthy rattle. My heart sank. I knew immediately what this meant.

That's what can happen when a hard drive kept in constant use for months on end is suddenly spun down, packed into a box, shipped across the Atlantic in God knows what kind of temperatures, kept in storage for months in God knows what kind of temperatures, then plucked from a box months later, connected to the mains and optimistically called back from its slumber as if nothing had ever happened. Some drives can't take that kind of abuse and give up the ghost. Mine was one of them. Most of the stuff on there had been backed up, anyway. My home directory was networked from jiskefet, which was, itself, backed up before leaving the US.

In short, this isn't a disaster, but it is a major irritation, because now I have to install Linux again from scratch on my workstation. That means compiling a bunch of local programs, too.

So, I had to go out Tuesday morning to buy a new hard drive. I picked up a 400 Gb Maxtor from MyCom on the Ceintuurbaan. I also bought a USB 2.0 and Firewire card to put in jiskefet, the file-server. That machine is also used for making back-ups to the external hard drive that I purchased a few days before our departure from the US. I had noticed back then that making these back-ups was painfully slow and it turned out that its USB ports were only USB 1.1 devices. I should have bought a USB 2.0 PCI card and fitted it there and then, but there were so many things to do in those last few days that it never happened. Anyway, jiskefet now has such a card fitted. I'll connect the external hard drive to it tomorrow.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've fitted my workstation with the new 400 Gb drive and started to reinstall the operating system, but it's a slow process, choosing all those packages and the like. I'm putting Fedora Core 4 back on it, even though 5 will be out in a few days. Friends are currently raving about Ubuntu, but I don't have time to look into a new distro at this point in time.

Another thing happening on Tuesday was that the electricians came back to complete the Ethernet work they had begun for me. I can now happily report that the house is currently wired with CAT5 in most rooms. Wireless 802.11 is all well and good, but sometimes one wants the stability and security of a wired connection. Besides, more and more household appliances can be connected to a network these days, so it's good to have ports in most rooms.

I also had to buy a new mouse, because the old cordless one I was using had a power adapter that couldn't handle 220V. Anticipating this kind of thing, I had bought a voltage converter at Fry's before leaving California, but the shape of the adapter plug meant I couldn't plug it into the voltage converter. Doh!

To fix the problem, I bought myself a Logitech G7 mouse. This doesn't plug into the mains at all. Instead, its base station charges battery packs that then slide into the mouse. The base station is powered by one of the PC's USB ports. It's a great mouse, but there was nothing wrong with the old one. It would have been sufficient to purchase a Logitech 220V adapter, but, of course, no-one sells those separately.

I hope to find the time to finish installing my workstation tomorrow, at which point I can begin configuring the system again. With a little luck, I'll be able to stop the day's other chores from getting in the way.

We made our first on-line order of Dutch groceries a short while ago, from Albert and I must say that the experience was very good. The delivery was made on time, the man brought everything into the kitchen and fridge and freezer items were packed separately for immediate storage; he even took our Coke bottles away and deducted the deposit from the price

The experience stirred some fond memories of ordering from Webvan to my Linuxcare expense account, back in 2000 when I was living in my corporate apartment, down on 3rd and Folsom in San Francisco. Webvan was pure bliss, but Albert is right up there, too, even if the name isn't quite as snappy sounding.

Last Tuesday saw me bike over to the Elandsgracht for the formal return of the house to the property management agency, which went without a hitch. I put the last few bags of rubbish on the doorstep, read the meters, handed back the keys and off I went again.

Elandsgracht 33 served its purpose; not well, but its purpose it served. Uncomfortable furniture, unwieldy lay-out, dodgy boiler, a rather pathetic shower, bed linen straight from a whore's boudoir, a water bed with all the support of a punctured rubber dinghy... it had it all. Still, it was home for the first few months of our return to The Netherlands and, as such, still manages to acquire a fondness in our memory. The location, if nothing else, was fantastic, with everything right there on our doorstep. Oh, how I miss the Thai take-away next door.

Last Sunday, we drove over to Delft, a pleasant little town about a forty minute drive from here. Now life is starting to calm down somewhat, we'll be making more of these little trips across country, as Sarah has still seen very little of it.

Earlier this week, we had an electrician make the ventilators in our three toilets separately switchable from the lights. That way, I don't run the risk of waking Sarah and Eloïse when I come up to bed in the middle of the night. Old habits die hard, especially the bad ones. I also had them replace one of the ventilators, as it made a lot of noise and sounded like it was at the end of its useful life.

Next week, we'll be seeing a lighting specialist in order to figure out how we can make our new home look a little more atmospheric. Right now, we have a lot of halogen spotlights, which are a little too modern and businesslike for my taste. Some light fittings have been reduced to loose wires hanging from the ceiling, where chandeliers have been removed. Lighting's very important in a home, so we're hoping to make some progress on that front. The man in question has already been to our home to take a gander and form an opinion, so hopefully he'll have lots of nice things to show us next Tuesday.

After years of promising myself a decent coffee machine, I no longer have to deny myself one. Now that we're in our own home in a city and country we have no plans to leave, we can furnish and equip our domicile with the character and atmosphere that has always been lacking from our homes in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and, yes, even our last rental on the Elandsgracht, here in Amsterdam.

And so to my latest gadget, the Jura Impressa Z5. Words are hardly an appropriate medium for describing the taste of something, so I won't rave about this machine. Suffice it to say that, in the two days one of these Swiss beauties has been gracing our kitchen counter top, I've enjoyed several grand cups of espresso and even a capuccino.

For the purists amongst you who sneer at the use of an automatic machine, I should tell you that this machine allows one to vary the grind of the beans and adjust just about every other variable that comes into play in the pursuit of the holy grail of that perfect cuppa. And then there's the bonus of not requiring a separate grinder, a milk frother, etc. There's also less mess, which keeps Sarah (who can get very territorial in the kitchen) happy.

I'm now looking forward to months of experimentation with various types of coffee bean -- there's a great shop on the Van Baerlestraat -- and sitting at my dining-room table, reading the paper whilst sipping a truly great cup of coffee. I've been dreaming of this simple, yet voluptuous pleasure for years; and that's no exaggeration.

It's so nice to realise a long-term goal every now and again, to finally be back in the place one wishes to be, to be able to take my daughter for daily walks in the Vondelpark, to be beholden to no-one... simple, yet meaningful pleasures that lead to lasting contentment. Add to that the new ability to drink excellent coffee in the privacy of one's own home: bliss! Life is good.

The last six months, I've been enjoying (well, mostly) an extended break away from pretty much anything to do with computers. I've read my e-mail and done plenty of on-line reading, but all geek activities were halted and any resemblance I may once have borne to a coder or a sysadmin was no longer in evidence.

Happily, my workstation is now reinstalled and awaiting further instructions. Next week, I hope to embark on the arduous process of integrating all of the patches I've received over the last six months for bash completion, Ruby/LDAP, Ruby/Google and some of my other projects. New releases should follow within the foreseeable future.

Ruby/Amazon is another project of mine that has been generating a lot of e-mail lately. A fair number of people would like to see me update the code to use version 4 of the Amazon API (it currently supports version 3), but it's a major overhaul that I just haven't had the time or inclination to take on in the last six months. After all, I did become a father, re-emigrate across the world and buy a house.

Anyway, I've still not been convinced to sink the necessary time into Ruby/Amazon, but I'm closer to being convinced now than I was three months ago. One person even offered to pay me on a contract basis to do the work, which was very flattering, but it's not an issue of the money. It's simply that it's quite an undertaking to do it properly and that's time I wouldn't be able to spend on other things.

We'll just have to see how that one pans out. No promises, but if life settles down a little and I manage to produce new releases of my less involved projects in the next few weeks, I might reconsider my position on Ruby/Amazon.

I should also start work on that MythTV box I keep talking about. So many things to do and only 86400 seconds in a day.

I promised I'd return to coding and here's the first fruit of my labours, a new version of Ruby/Google.

Version 0.6.0 adds a new method, Search#utf8(src). If src is not nil, query strings used by the Search#search and Search#spell methods will be converted from encoding src (e.g. ISO-8859-15) to UTF-8 prior to being sent to Google.

Additionally, something broke Ruby/Google in recent months, possibly a low-level change Google made to their Web API. I had a patch available fairly quickly to fix the issue, but I'm happy to say that it's now been integrated into 0.6.0.

My thanks go to Klaus Stein for alerting me to the UTF-8 issue that led to this release.

It does feel good to be coding again, I must confess. I'm looking forward to updating some of my other projects in the coming days and weeks.

Wiesje (a.k.a. Poe-Poe, a.k.a. Eloïse ) paid a visit to the consultatiebureau this morning. She now weighs 8.87 kg, is 70.5 cm long and has a cranial circumference of 46.5 cm. What this means is that she's growing well and hovering around the national average. The doctor was very pleased with her progress.

She's getting heavy now. The days of comfortably carrying her around in one arm are long gone. In fact, two arms are now prone to ache after a few minutes of lugging her lovely, chubby little body around.

We'll put up some new pictures soon. Whereas whe was a carbon copy of me for the first few months, she's now looking more and more like Sarah with each passing day. Looking at photos of Sarah as a baby, it's hard to tell them apart. They're like two drops of water.

I keep forgetting to mention that Eloïse now has a couple of bottom teeth. I don't get to see them very often, but they're definitely there. I can feel them while I'm attempting to brush them.

She's growing up and it's all going so fast. One minute, she's being born; the next, she's smiling; soon after that, she's rolling over; then, she's sitting upright; before you know it, she has teeth! At this rate, she'll be having her own children some time in 2007!

Even though I'm at home with her every day and essentially miss nothing, the speed at which the days, weeks and months go by is discomforting. Perhaps that's because so much has happened in the last twelve months; I don't know. We have plenty to do this year, too, what with furnishing the house and finding our niche in the new life we've created for ourselves, but I nevertheless trust that the pace will be less frenetic. After all, we have no plans to have another baby, move across the world or buy another house this year.

Yes, by the end of 2006, I do hope that it will feel as if it has slunk by more slowly than the year before it.

René from Forma called yesterday to give us the good news that our long-awaited couch and dining-room table have arrived in the shop. We've scheduled their delivery for Friday afternoon. It's going to be wonderful to have a comfortable new couch to sit on. I can't wait.

We still haven't found any dining-room chairs that we both like, so the search for those goes on.

I bought an Artemide Tolomeo Terra floor lamp yesterday for my home office. After unpacking it today, I discovered that it's not supplied with a light bulb. I don't know why I thought it might be. I'll have to get one tomorrow.

The new house is slowly coming together. All of my books, DVDs and CDs are now unpacked and stored. I still have a lot of junk in my office, which I'm going to have to either throw out or move down to the cellar over the next week. The danger with moving stuff down there is that we'll never look at it again, so that's something we'll have to guard against.

Sarah went out this morning to her first La Leche League meeting (you should blog about that, Sarah), so I seized the opportunity to upgrade Gallery from version 1.5.2-pl2 to 2.1rc1. The new version has lots of nice new features, including vastly improved security when it comes to keeping one's photo repository outside of the Web server root.

On the other hand, it required the configuration of a MySQL database and, for some odd reason, this version has lost the ability to auto-rotate portrait photos on import, based on a bit in the EXIF tag. Why wasn't this feature carried over from version 1?

Anyway, all of this was in preparation for uploading the long-overdue photos detailing months eight and nine in the life of the world's most beautiful baby.

In addition to these two new albums, the Tall Timbers album contains a lot of new photos from our recent trip to see Fenella, Tim, Cameron and Willow, out in rural Maryland, USA. Some of those are really lovely, so if you're the kind of person who coos over cute children, you won't want to miss that one.

Phew! That should keep my mother-in-law quiet for another month.

Yesterday, we took receipt of our new couch and dining-room table . In fact, if I had been alone in the house at the time of the delivery, I would have accepted the wrong couch, as they brought a much bigger one than the one we ordered, and it was in a different colour. Of course, I didn't remember any of the details, so it was Sarah who piped up and announced, "Er, that's not our couch." After an extra trip back to the shop, they were back with the right article.

In the process, the ground floor of the house has been transformed. Our old couch, bought for about $50 from our landlord in Palo Alto back in 2002, has now moved to the front of the house, in what we have chosen to designate the sitting-room. So, not only do we now have a comfortable place to sit in the living-room, but the front of the house no longer looks so bare. Nevertheless, there's still a lot of work to be done before the sitting-room looks anything like finished. We want to get a Persian carpet for that room, plus another couch and one or two comfortable armchairs. That means spending a lot of time in shops, testing couchs and looking at carpet designs.

We had an interior designer come over in the morning, too, so hopefully we'll soon get some new ideas from her. We especially need help with the lighting, as we still have a number of bare light fittings around the house. A hindrance here is that Sarah and I have quite different taste when it comes to illuminating our living environment.

The other major news yesterday was that the car dealer called to let us know that our new Audi A6 Avant has arrived from the German factory. They'll be taking care of the registration paperwork early next week, so I've made an appointment to pick up the car up next Thursday afternoon, by which time it will be registered in my name, polished and ready to go. Exciting!

I have just released Ruby/LDAP 0.9.3.

This is mostly a bug-fix release. The changes from 0.9.2 are listed below:

• LDAP::Schema#names and LDAP::Schema#attr will now allow names with hyphens and/or underscores.

• A warning about @sasl_quiet when run in debug mode has been silenced.

• Uninitialised data structures in LDAP::SSLConn#bind and LDAP::SSLConn#simple_bind have been fixed.

• Ruby/LDAP now builds properly with OpenLDAP 2.3.

• Build-time options --with-ldap-incdir and --with-ldap-libdir have been replaced by --with-ldap-include and --with-ldap-lib. This is a consequence of making extconf.rb more standard.

• The Windows build has been improved, so that it should now at least build without error. Whether it will work is another matter.

It's good to get a new release of this out the door, even if the changes are very minor. I did all the major work I wanted to do on this library in previous versions, mostly for the 0.9.0 release. In particular, adding the ability to manipulate LDIF data was very important to me at the time. Now that I'm not working and actively using LDAP, I'll have to find my motivation to work on the code from some other source.

In the future, it would be nice to improve the quality of the Windows build. Various people report varying degrees of success in getting the software to work under Windows, but since I have no Windows build system, I can't really work on the code. Progress is pretty much restricted to integrating any patches I get sent.

As a longer term project, it would be nice to be rewrite Ruby/LDAP in pure Ruby, rather than wrapping the C libraries, as is currently the case. Ruby/LDAP will always have better performance than a pure Ruby solution, however, so that's probably best started as a separate project.

We reached an important milestone yesterday, namely finding a general practitioner with whom we're happy.

Our choice was complicated by the fact that neither Sarah nor I feel much affinity for allopathic medicine, instead prefering the homeopathic approach, which is much more holistic in nature. There are plenty of homeopaths in The Netherlands, but very few of them are GPs.

Happily, we managed to find someone close by, who studied and is qualified in western medicine, whilst also being a qualified homeopath. At an acquaintance-making appointment, he explained to us that he uses a mix of both approaches, first attempting a homeopathic solution to a complaint, then resorting to things like antibiotics only if strictly necessary.

The three of us have now signed up with him, which was an important item to tick off the list. We hadn't been registered with a doctor since returning to The Netherlands last August.

The upgrade from Gallery 1.x to 2.x was quite involved. As has happened before (and to my great chagrin), albums and photos whose titles, summaries and descriptions contained foreign letters like 'ð', 'þ' and 'œ', as well as accented letters like 'é' and 'ö' suffered GBH in the transition.

Fixing this meant writing a pile of Ruby DBI code and testing it very well before letting it lose on the MySQL database in which everything is now stored by Gallery 2.x. The end result, happily, is that things should now be more or less back to normal.

There may still be a few sporadic instances of spurious characters appearing, which seems to have been caused by some titles, summaries and descriptions accidentally undergoing double-encoding to UTF-8, so that the previously encoded multibyte UTF-8 form of a few foreign and accented characters was re-encoded, producing strings of gibberish. If you find any of these, please let me know which photos are affected and I'll correct them by hand.

You'll find all of our photos in our gallery. If some albums seem slow, that's because thumbnail generation is delayed until the first viewer enters that album. Once an album has been viewed by someone, the thumbnails are stored for future use, so subsequent page renderings will be much quicker.

After much dithering, I have finally ordered nearly all of the hardware needed to build our MythTV box, an open source equivalent of the TiVo, with which we had so much fun in the US.

I'd been enamoured with the idea of building my own intelligent DVR ever since Peter, my office mate back in Mountain View, unpacked his MythTV hardware in front of me and explained that he was going to build one. That was last July or so, right after having a baby and right before leaving the country. Needless to say, I had no time back then to be building new computers.

I did wonder if I should purchase the hardware for such a box before leaving the US, given the cheaper prices over there, but I decided not to. After all, I might never get around to actually building the box at all, which would be rather a waste. And, even if I did get around to it, better hardware would likely have hit the market in the interim.

So, within a few days, I should have the hardware in house and can start assembling the system. I hate building computers, so I'm looking forward to having that part done and then getting onto the software configuration part, which is much more my thing. I'll detail the hardware once I have it all assembled, as I'll then be able to report on any oddities that I experienced while putting the system together.

DVR DIY is much more expensive than simply purchasing a TiVo, but then again, that isn't an option in The Netherlands. TiVo doesn't sell their system over here. One or two people offer a Windows Media Center Edition computer in the form of a household appliance, and that can do more or less the same thing, but those are expensive for what they are and, whilst it would be easy to set up, I can't quite bring myself to run Windows on a box that will be central to our TV viewing. Within a very short span of time, I would inevitably run into annoyances or shortcomings in the software and I'd be stuck. With MythTV, since it's open source, I can just fix the problems.

Besides which, I can make the MythTV box do so much more. Since it's just a Linux box at its core, it can do anything Linux can. For example, how about a webcam on top of the box, so that we can call up the family in the US and watch them on TV while we chat to them? How about streaming music to the TV from our file server in the cellar? Anything is possible, really.

One problem that will be a little tricky to solve is getting the MythTV box to change the channel of the UPC Mediabox, the set-top box that decodes the encrypted digital TV signal. I'm going to need some form of IR blaster for that part. I have one in mind, but it will mean having it shipped from the US.

Anyway, this should be a lot of fun to set up (as well as a black hole for my time), but by the end, we should have a box that will do pretty much anything we want, when it comes to finding programmes to watch and record. It'll be very cool to have essentially assembled the system from scratch, having picked out the hardware by hand and then installed the software over the top.

Watch this space.

My Jura Impressa Z5 is working out very well.

It's amazing how something as simple as high quality coffee can improve one's experience of life. The several cups per day of great coffee that this machine has been churning out have increased my level of happiness considerably. If you don't love good coffee, such a statement probably seems ridiculous to you.

I've been working my way through 100 g of each of the types of bean that my local shop, Brandmeester's sells. So far, I've tried the beans from Cuba, Guatemala & Antigua, Ethiopia and Sumatra. I topped up on bags of Papua New Guinea and Kenya today, which I should get to in the next few days.

So far, I probably like the Cuban coffee the most. It's not too strong, so it's a great one to have around for guests. I like all that I've tried so far. however; there hasn't been a dud amongst them. I have many left to go before I've tried them all, though, Ordering 100 g at a time is just the right amount to allow the bean to make an impression on you before moving onto the next.

Yes, it's only coffee, but it's the little things that count. There's nothing quite like sitting at your dining table, sipping a cup of your favourite coffee whilst reading the paper. Hmm; I've said that before, haven't I? Well, it's true.

Incidentally, there are no branches of Starbucks in Amsterdam. I do hope that doesn't change.

What a fiasco.

I drove down to the Audi dealer today to pick up our brand spanking new A6 Avant.

At first, all appeared well. The car was gleaming away in the showroom with just 29 km on the clock. The colour and the upholstery looked great. A quick glance around the cabin seemed to indicate that all of the obvious features I had ordered had been built in. In summary, everything looked ship-shape and Bristol fashion.

Then we took it outside, the dealer and I, and got inside to run through some of the less obvious features. And then it started.

First of all, I found I couldn't adjust the left wing mirror properly. It didn't seem to be seated properly and manually tampering with it didn't seem to help, either. The salesman offered to let the annexed garage have a look at it.

Picking another feature at random, I thought I'd adjust the steering column for my driving position. I pushed the switch towards me and out slid the steering column. Then I pushed the switch downwards to lower the column and... nothing happened. Was it already lowered all the way? I pushed the switch up to raise the column. Still nothing. Bollocks!

Who knows whether the car has other problems, because at this point, the salesman took the car around to the garage to have them look at it. With 2 out of 2 features demonstrating faults and it already being the middle of the afternoon, there was no time to waste.

The mirror issue was corrected very quickly. It just needed some manual adjustment. The uncooperative steering column, however, pissed on everyone's fireworks.

After hooking the car up to the computer diagnostic apparatus, the car was given the once-over. Nothing obvious leapt out and even the switch that controls the steering column passed its individual test, so the thought now is that the motor that moves the column through the vertical plane is buggered.

It being late in the day, all hopes of driving the car away today were dashed. The car will be more heavily investigated tomorrow. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a very minor fault and they will be able to correct it on the spot.

Electronic problems like this are the main reason I went for an Audi over a Mercedes or a BMW. Humph. This is not an auspicious start.

Meanwhile, the registration paperwork is now in my name and the car is insured. That means I'll get a road tax bill before very long, so the sooner the car actually gets on the road, the better.

Hopefully, this will just take a day or two to sort out and then I'll be the proud owner of a brand new car for the first time ever. What a disappointment. Even with something this expensive, quality still isn't guaranteed.

They just don't make things like they used to.

After nearly seven months without a printer, I'm happy to say that we are once again able to print documents from our computers.

I took receipt of an Epson Stylus Photo R800 on Saturday, but had to wait until today to purchase a USB A-B cable. Printers aren't supplied with cables any more, it seems. I ordered the printer on-line and it arrived just in time on Saturday for the shops to be closing. It can also be connected over Firewire, but I decided to hook it up over USB instead.

I looked at a bunch of printers before deciding on this one. I considered the Epson R245 and the R320, which were attractive because of their support for memory cards. Using those, you can stick your Compact Flash card straight into the printer, view your photos on a small LCD screen and print from there. It's a gimmick, albeit a nice one.

Higher-end printers don't have such features, because the thought is that serious photographers would never print straight from the card, anyway. Most serious photographers (of which I am not one) take their photos in RAW format (which is not actually a standard and means something different on every make of camera), post-process them in something like PhotoShop, and only then send them to the printer.

Of course, I don't need to spend €1000 on a printer, but I did want something a little bit better than can be had for €100. Photo print quality was important, but equally important was support for Linux. For this reason, I had to rule out the Canon IP5000 that Fenella suggested. Canons are very poorly supported in Linux.

I also looked at an HP Photosmart 8250, but read too much conflicting information about the quality of its prints. I also didn't want to have to fart around with yet another system of printer drivers. Berkeley LPR, LPRng, System V printing, CUPS, Omni, Foomatic... I've had enough of making UNIX systems print properly over the years. Printing isn't exciting; it isn't sexy; it isn't even interesting. It just needs to work.

And so it ended up being the R800, a decently priced printer with high quality photo prints. Eight separate UltraChrome ink cartridges take care of that, although one of those is actually a gloss optimiser cartridge that avoids bronzing on glossy paper.

Its top resolution is 5760x1440 dpi with a 1.5 picolitre droplet size, but I shudder to think how long it takes to churn out a photo at that resolution. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, though. So far, all I've printed out was a test page.

I researched the Linux support for this printer extensively before deciding to purchase it. Although the printer's been around since 2004, Linux support for it is quite new. Epson apparently has some sort of driver for it, but I wanted to use CUPS, which is as close to a decent printing system as UNIX has ever had. Actually, it is decent, if a little difficult to recall the details.

gimp-print 4.2.7, which is on my Fedora Core 4 system, doesn't support this printer, so I had to download and compile gutenprint 5.0.0-rc2. gutenprint is actually gimp-print, with its name changed to remove the understandable confusion that some people had in thinking that one could only use this package to print from The Gimp.

Anyway, once this bleeding-edge copy of gutenprint had been installed, with all of its PPD files, I was able to configure a printer queue for the R800, using CUPS' rather nice Web interface. A test page rolled out shortly afterwards.

And, just to show that Linux does -- after a little bit of work -- support this printer well, here's an example of how the escputil utility (part of gutenprint) can be used to read the ink levels of the cartridges:

# escputil -i -r /dev/usb/lp0
Escputil version 5.0.0-rc2, Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Robert Krawitz
Escputil comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'escputil -l'
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type 'escputil -l' for details.

         Ink color       Percent remaining
            Yellow                     100
           Magenta                     100
              Cyan                     100
       Matte Black                     100
       Photo Black                     100
               Red                     100
              Blue                     100
   Gloss Optimizer                     100

Handy, eh?

Anyway, no longer will I have to bike over to Jo's house when I want to print an important document. Thanks for that, Jo. You're free of me now!

Sarah and I are in the midst of gearing up for our 2005 taxes. Submitting tax returns in one country just wasn't enough fun, so this year we'll be filing taxes in both The Netherlands and the USA. I'm happy to say that this will be the last time I'll have to file taxes in the US, but poor Sarah, as an American citizen, is obliged to file an annual tax return with the IRS for the rest of her days. The freedom tax, I call it.

We met with a Dutch tax advisor today. What a barrel of laughs that was; lots of paperwork to collate and return to him, so that he can file the return on our behalf. Sarah's busy trying to get end-of-year statements for her many on-line accounts, many of which don't have up-to-date address information for her, and many of which mysteriously no longer allow her to log on. Then you find out that old 401k plans have moved to other companies, etc., etc. It's monotonous and very frustrating work.

To top it all, the Dutch immigration authorities are giving us a hard time, concerning Sarah's application for a residence permit. I sent them a new letter today, so we'll soon see what their next move is.

The car is still poorly. After having had its regelapparaat (which, after a little bit of googling, is apparently an ECU or electronic control unit in English) replaced, the Audi people were apparently still concerned enough about a failure somewhere down the road (no joke intended) that they've decided to replace the entire steering-column.

So now the question is how soon a steering column can be sent from Germany and put into the car. No family road trips in the new car for us just yet, I'm afraid.

Most of Sunday was spent assembling our new MythTV box. When I switched it on that evening, an LED on the motherboard lit up and the VFD display at the front of the case displayed a couple of messages, but that was as far as it went. No fans spun up, no sounds emanated from the motherboard; zip, nada, diddly.

I've replaced the RAM, but that didn't help. I tried short-circuiting the start-up pins on the motherboard, but that didn't cause a boot, either. I've double-checked all the connections and everything is fine. I tried reseating the CPU. All to no avail.

The TV tuner card was also broken, so I've sent that back to be exchanged.

My fingertips are still sore from all of the messing around, but at some point I need to try to rule out the power supply as the dodgy factor. If that passes muster, I'll have to suspect the motherboard.

How tedious.

I had hoped to be well into the software installation at this point, but I don't even have the hardware working. I find it really tedious to build computers and this is one of the main reasons why. When things don't work, it's boredom at best and misery at worst, trying to figure out what the problem is.

Dealing with hardware is definitely one of the least enjoyable parts of system administration; as far as I'm concerned, at least; some people love it, of course.