Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

From my well-travelled friend, Zain, comes this article about the sad state of geographic knowledge in the US. Not only is global geography desperately poor; the full report demonstrates that the average 18 to 24 year old American doesn't know much about his or her own country, either.

Some choice findings:

"Told they could escape an approaching hurricane by evacuating to the northwest, only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map."

"Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country [Iraq] on a map of the Middle East."

"Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel."

"Half could not find New York State on a map of the United States."

"Nine in ten couldn't find Afghanistan on a map of Asia."

"Fewer than three in ten think it's absolutely necessary to know where countries in the news are located."

"Only 14 percent believe speaking another language fluently is a necessary skill."

And the conclusion:

""It's discouraging that so many young Americans have so little understanding of the world."

And that's an understatement, since the rest of us have to live in that same world that young Americans (who -- make no mistake -- become older Americans) care so little about. Indeed, one has to wonder if the foreign policy makers of the US would fare any better in the survey.

Sarah's folks have been staying here for a few days, visiting us and a few attractions, such as Keukenhof. We also went to Alkmaar one day, walked down a couple of streets, had lunch and came home again. It wasn't much of an experience.

Koninginnedag went off well. In spite of poor weather predictions, it stayed dry, although it was chilly at times when the sun wasn't shining. Sarah's parents were amazed by what they witnessed and appeared to enjoy themselves.

The vrijmarkt in the Vondelpark was really gezellig. Amazingly, that's pretty much the first Koninginnedag that I've done more than glance at what was happening in the park.

It was particularly lovely to start Koninginnedag just a couple of minutes' walk from the park. Since it was a public holiday, people had made full use of the parking exemption, rendering our street chockablock with vehicles. People had even parked on the pavement.

In the park, things were in full swing. Only children are allowed to engage in commercial activities, so there is a great atmosphere in the park, with lots of little girls and boys dancing, manning home-made fairground attractions and selling their old toys. That'll be our little family in years to come.

We made our way through the park, experiencing difficulty as we tried not to lose each other. We passed over the Leidseplein and headed down the Prinsengracht towards the Jordaan, ultimately aiming for the Brouwersgracht, but it was not to be. It was simply too busy and the human traffic eventually ground to a halt, so we turned back via the Jordaan's many side streets.

Refreshments were needed before we could go any further, so we stopped for a drink on the Spuistraat. There, we met up with Bas and Kylie, who had flown over from England the day before and were experiencing their first Koninginnedag in Amsterdam.

We made the mistake of trying to walk down the Leidsestraat to head south and ended up getting wedged between the masses of unmoving people. It certainly wouldn't have done to have a claustrophobic disposition, I can tell you.

Once we had made it past the Leidseplein, it was a pleasant walk back home through the Vondelpark. Bas, Kylie and I went out for dinner at a local Indonesian restaurant that evening.

So, that was Koninginnedag.

What else has been going on?

Well, we've finally ordered our family silver. There's a twelve week delivery time, so I'm just going to forget about what I'm going to have to pay for our 144 piece set when it arrives.

Also on order are a couple of Maxalto armchairs, which will complement the couch we've ordered for the sitting room. We're still searching for a glass coffee table for that room.

On the Amstelveenseweg, just around the corner from us, we found a shop with a lovely wall panel for hanging coats and hats. Since we didn't even have a coat stand in our foyer, we purchased this, which Gerard came around on Monday and hung up for us. Now we finally have somewhere to hang our hat, so to speak.

Sticking with the house, the painter was here yesterday to paint over the window frames of the new burglar-resistant panes of glass we had fitted at the back of the house. It's looking nice out there again now.

We also entertained our lower-numbered neighbours for the first time earlier this week, in spite of the lack of seating until our new stuff arrives. It went off very well, thanks in no small part to Sarah's signature chocolate dessert. Mother and daughter inevitably flapped and clashed about exactly how much preparation is necessitated by such a momentous occasion (lots vs. hardly any), but all was well on the night.

Sarah's folks took the train to Rouen yesterday for a few days in Normandy. They'll be back again Monday evening.

Soon after they depart in mid-May, Geoff and Jason, my old Google friends, will be turning up for SANE 2006. Geoff's the only guy I know who will have been to SANE twice with Google footing the bill. Nice one, Geoff!

As soon as those guys leave, Sarah, Eloïse and I will be leaving for our next foreign trip, which will almost certainly be to Czechia and Slovakia. We really need to do some reading in preparation.

The weather really couldn't be better at the moment. The sun is blazing and it's 23°C outside. The house is heating up and I can tell it's going to be a difficult place to keep cool in summer. The garden is in bloom and the weeping willows in the Vondelpark have regained their foliage in just a few weeks.

Oh, and it looks like we have a mouse problem. We haven't seen one yet, but the tell-tale signs are there. Sigh.

I forgot to mention that Jo and I went to see the Sisters of Mercy at the Melkweg last Sunday. That was the fitrst time either of us had seen them since the late eighties, when we both still lived in England.

It wasn't really the Sisters that we used to worship, though. Oh, Eldritch is still there, but his long hair and hat are gone. In fact, all of his hair was gone; he's shaven-headed these days. The shades were still in place, though. Has anyone ever seen this man's face? He can still suck his way through a pack of cigarettes on stage, too.

Dr. Avalance was still there, too, as invisible and reliable as ever, thumping out the beats. No bass player was present, but there were a couple of good guitarists, apparently Chris May and Ben Christo.

The Sisters haven't released a record since 1992, although they keep threatening to do so. They played quite a bit of new material, so a new record would be nice.

Apart from the new material, the set contained a few surprises. The Sisterhood's Giving Ground was performed, for example, along with a lot of material from Floodland.

The omissions were surprising, too. Nothing at all was played from First And Last And Always. And, if I'm remembering correctly, the only older tracks played were Anaconda and absolutely storming versions of Alice and Temple Of Love, the latter of which was the part of the encore.

For the first few minutes of the gig, I wondered whether I'd be able to say afterwards that I had really seen the Sisters Of Mercy, because it was almost impossible to actually see them. There was so much dry ice pouring off the stage, that visibility was down to a few metres. Occasionally, the shades of Eldritch, contrasted against his gaunt complexion, would slide into focus from within the fog, and then sink as enigmatically back into it.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself, I must admit. I used to worship this band, but had lost touch with what their progress since I moved to Amsterdam in '91. After the Under The Gun single in '92, they pretty much disappeared; or so I had thought.

The sound was very good and Eldritch still has great stage presence. I'll definitely go to see them again the next time they're in town. Let's hope there's a new album before either Eldritch or I pass away.

After a bite of breakfast at the Vondeltuin this morning, we spent most of the day in the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, also known as the Spiegelkwartier, which would mean Mirror Quarter if anyone actually referred to it in English.

This street is home to the city's most exclusive antique dealers. Exclusive is, of course, synonymous with expensive, since it is the price tag that excludes most people from purchasing them and allows the happy few to feel exquisitely privileged.

We were actually looking for a chest of drawers or something similar for our hallway, but ended up being enraptured by a couple of Dutch grandfather clocks we found in two of the shops. I didn't think I would ever want one of these things, but after admiring the intricate engravings, the wood carving, the hand-painting and the overall beauty of the two we saw today, I've undergone a rapid change of mind.

I'm not saying we're going to buy one, mind you. We need to consider where we would even put such a thing; the options are limited, given that our downstairs area is so open. We could put one in the hallway, but it would not get the attention it deserves in that location. It really needs to go in the living room, and the only logical place there is to the left of the fireplace. The sitting room would be an even better place, but the only location it could go in there is where we plan to put a long sideboard, so that wouldn't really work.

We have to consider the price, too. These things are anything but cheap, especially when you're looking at clocks from circa 1750 and in excellent condition. It has to be a total love affair to justify the kind of money they're looking for.

Oh, and our suspicion about mice in the house was an accurate one: I've just seen one of the little buggers. I almost caught him, too, until we jumped through a gap in the panel under the dish-washer and made good his escape.

The lovely weather continues. It's great. As I write this, at eleven o'clock in the evening, it's still 21°C. It's been so beautiful since last Wednesday, around 23 or 24°C each day. T-shirt, shorts and sandals have been the order of the day. It's been like being back in California.

I sat out in the garden this morning and engaged in my favourite practice of reading the paper whilst sipping at a cup of great coffee. The sun was beating down and the temperature was lovely. We need to clear out the old leaves, bent nails and fag-ends, of course, but it's still a real treat to sit outside in one's garden in Amsterdam and just enjoy the day.

In the afternoon, we biked over to Pisa for some of the best ice-cream in town. Bliss.

This evening, we had dinner out in the garden. The tiny tyrant got to eat pineapple for the first time, which she seemed to enjoy. She's been eating blended raspberries in the last few days, too, which she really likes. However, they make her mouth look like she's fallen on her face, which I can't quite get used to. I know it's not blood, but still.

Sarah's folks return from Normandy tomorrow evening, putting an end to our few days of peace and tranquility. Yes, it's going to be nothing but wild parties and late nights for the next week.

Yes: wankers. Wankers! WANKERS! WANKERS! WANKERS!

Who am I talking about? Managed.com, of course, the company to which I give good money each month to host this site.

What happened?

Well, managed.com decided to move its network from California to New Jersey. At least, that's as much as they told us, the paying customers.

In preparation for this, they sent all of their customers an e-mail asking to be supplied with the customer's root password via plain text e-mail. For those of you who aren't in the field of computer system and network administration, let me state that this is a violation of one of the most basic and universally lauded principles of the profession: never, under any circumstances, send passwords in the clear.

And yet, my hosting provider was asking me to do just this. In hindsight, that should have been enough to spur me into action. I should have found another hosting provider, right there and then, and moved my data prior to the migration. But I decided to wait until after the migration to seek a better provider. As always, laziness, compounded by a failure to recognise the urgency of the situation, won out.

Anyway, managed.com were supposed to back-up their customers' data, firstly with a full back-up and then, shortly before the migration, with a further incremental back-up. The migration was supposed to be barely noticeable, with a guaranteed maximum of two hours of downtime.

I was sceptical, but kept my fingers crossed.

Can you believe that managed.com didn't tell its customers in their notification e-mail when this migration would actually take place? We were left to guess. E-mails to them on the subject went unanswered, as did requests for a secure channel through which to supply one's root password.

When I noticed one day that my machine had been rebooted without my permission, I incorrectly assumed the migration had already taken place. If I'd known at that time that things would be moving to New Jersey, not just around the corner in California, I could have run a traceroute and seen that my machine had not actually gone anywhere. At that time, however, I thought they were just moving locally. What else could I think? Managed.com had told me virtually nothing in their e-mail.

caliban.org mysteriously went off the network on 9th May. It remained inaccessible for almost three days. So much for the two hours of guaranteed downtime.

All of my e-mails to managed.com went unanswered in this period. Only when I threatened them with legal action (a trick I picked up in America), did they finally respond by rebooting the machine and getting it back on-line.

Naïvely, I thought that would be an end to my problems. Yes, that was very naïve of me.

You see, managed.com restored my service from a week old back-up. I've no idea what happened to the promised incremental back-up. It was probably never made and, even if it was, it would have had to be of the last week's worth of data, not just the day before the migration. I suspect it was never even made, however.

The net effect? I found I was missing a week's worth of e-mail, multiple DNS changes had been lost, the last week's worth of blog entries had effectively never been written, and sundry other less serious issues now needed to be fixed, such as recent software updates becoming undone.

More e-mails to managed.com went unanswered. Due to an oversight on my part, my own off-site back-ups had not taken place in recent times, so I had no private back-up from which I could recover my data. Typical.

I began work on the system to repair the damage my hosting provider had done to it, but before I could achieve very much, the system went down again. The system was off-line again for more than a day. Once again, e-mail threats were required to get it back on-line.

So what's going on?

Exploration of my system's log messages shows that the new hardware on which my data resides is not the same as the old. For one thing, the system has a different Ethernet card. Now, either that card is flaky or the Linux driver for it is, because the system regularly gives up the ghost and all but crashes: TCP connections to open ports hang without response; processes can no longer be forked; even syslogging stops.

Yet, even if the new hardware had presented no problems, it's inconceivable that a company would move a working Linux (or any other) system to new hardware and just expect it to work. What if I had not had the driver for the new network card compiled for my kernel? My machine would have had absolutely no way of ever getting back onto the network after the migration. It's sheer luck that I can sometimes still log into my machine and that it's not completely dead to the world.

So, the networking on the new hardware is extremely unreliable. rsyncs regularly fail with checksum errors. The more network traffic one pumps over the interface, the more such errors occur. Eventually, the system becomes unstable and eventually unreachable.

It's also possible that the machine has bad RAM or ineffective cooling, either at the CPU or the data centre level. Witness these messages, culled from my log in a rare moment of accessibility.

May 15 06:39:58 ulysses CPU0: Temperature above threshold
May 15 06:39:58 ulysses CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode

The system is now on heavy-duty medication: cold reboots, at first twice daily, but that proved inadequate, so cron now reboots the machine every hour. That's the only way to avoid the machine locking up completely, which then puts me at the mercy of managed.com to reboot it. That's something that now seems to take more than 24 hours to accomplish.

Clearly, this appalling state of affairs can't be allowed to continue, so I'm already on the look-out for alternative hosting providers.

A year ago, when I selected this company to host my services, people seemed happy with it. I, too, was happy with the service until earlier this year. In the last couple of months, however, things have been going downhill, which is never a good portent for the future. Nevertheless, I was not prepared for what has now befallen me. These people are lacking even the most basic system administration skills.

So, what happened? Well, a little research shows that managed.com is not really performing a migration. The hard drives and the data have moved to the other side of the country, yes, but not because managed.com is doing it. No, managed.com has been sold, you see? My data now turns out to be at the mercy of Web Host Plus, so the current disaster is actually largely due to their mismanagement and incompetence.

In fact, it turns out that a great many people are in a similar or even worse state, thanks to this bunch of clowns. Sixty-three pages of utter misery and appalling professional disregard of one's customers come to light.

Anyway, to say that I am in the market for a new hosting provider is an understatement. If you have any recommendations, I'd be glad to hear them. Ideally, they should not be located in the US, due to that country's Draconian legal stance with regard to privacy.

Thanks to Google, I was able to rescue the missing blog entries from the Google cache. I had to add back the article comments by hand, which caused the loss of the original time of entry, but at least the text of the article itself has been recovered.

The week of missing e-mail, on the other hand, is simply gone. Calls to Web Host Plus to make available the missing incremental back-up simply fall on deaf ears.

I'm utterly appalled to experience first-hand how this company has lost my data and now ignores my complaints. I'm left bewildered as to the precise ratio of incompetence to deliberate professional disregard, but I am 100% sure that I have to get my data away from this bunch of wankers as soon as I possibly can.

Until that time, expect the server to be up and down like a yo-yo.

We biked down to the Dienst Persoonsgegevens on the Johan Huizingalaan today to pick up Sarah's verblijfsvergunning (residence permit). After nearly nine months, she can finally hold it in her hand. And, less than two months from now, she'll be receiving the letter about having it renewed and the fun can begin anew.

Amusingly, they gave her a little welcome package, which consisted of a map and a book about living in Amsterdam. It's particularly funny and rather quaint to be receiving a map some nine months after her arrival. She's pretty good about finding her way around these days.

Now the process of inburgering (mandatory integration) begins. Sarah is expected to undergo 600 hours of education on the Dutch language, the people and our society. By the time she gets to the end of that, she'll undoubtedly know more about The Netherlands than the average Dutch person. She has an interview a couple of weeks from now to determine exactly what her needs are, as each person gets an inburgering tailored to his or her specific background and existing knowledge of all things Dutch.

Much of the last 24 hours has been spent seizing those rare moments during which my server -- migrated through no desire of mine to Web Host Plus -- is up and on the network, and using them to perform a migration of my own, namely to the server in my cellar.

I'm knackered, but a lot has been accomplished today. DNS and e-mail have now been fully migrated, including Web mail and mailing lists. The Web site, too -- which you're now reading -- is also up and running on the new (well, actually quite old) server.

The main thing that's not yet back up is our gallery of photos. That's because it's 19 Gb of data, which would be slow to copy from a reliable server on a fast network. Well, I have to copy it from a machine that keeps crashing and is not on a fast network. It could be a couple of weeks before I manage to get all of my data off it... if I'm lucky. I don't want to even contemplate the notion of not being able to recover all of my data.

I thought I'd left this kind of sysadmin drudgery behind me when I stopped working. Indeed, I moved my domain to dedicated hosting to reduce the downtime and maintenance that I had repeatedly endured when I hosted it myself on a domestic DSL line. Little did I know that I would get to enjoy such advantages for barely a year before falling victim to the worst kind of professional incompetence: that with no sense of responsibility for one's customers.

And so caliban.org is back on a domestic DSL line, albeit one that has proved itself more reliable than those I had in the US. The upstream bandwidth is also somewhat better.

Anyway, don't bother looking for new photos -- or old ones -- in the near future. I'll announce when -- if? -- they're once again available.

Eloïse 's birthday went off very well last week. She had a lot of presents, ranging from wooden toys to bedtime story books. Thanks to everyone who sent a gift.

It's hard to believe that, one year ago, she was only just being born. Now, I'm filling in the forms to enrol her at the school she will attend just a few years from now. It's a lot to get your head around.

Happily, Montessori schools abound over here; perhaps because Maria Montessori ultimately settled in The Netherlands and died here. In fact, the headquarters of the Association Montessori Internationale, the organisation she founded, is on the Koninginneweg, just around the corner from where we live. The nearest Montessori school, too, is just a short bike ride from our house.

Sarah's parents flew home Monday afternoon, leaving us alone for a few days' respite. The highlist of their trip (for me, at least), was a visit to Apenheul to see our simian friends. The weather was fantastic that day, as, indeed, it was for about ten consecutive days. It's cooled off since, of course, so I'm back in long trousers again.

We actually only get a few days off from our fellow man, because this weekend, we'll have Geoff, Jason and Vivian staying with us. Ah, yes; it's all go at McKenna-Macdonald acres.

In fact, I met the three of them at the airport on Saturday. From there, Jason and Vivian went straight to Delft, where Jason is attending SANE 2006 this week. Geoff came back with me in the car and hung out for the weekend before heading down to Delft Sunday evening for the conference. He spent Saturday night in a hotel just around the corner from where we live, because the house was full with family guests.

Filming of Keyzer & De Boer Advocaten continues just around the corner from our house.

Occasionally, we're lucky enough to catch a glimpse of an outside scene being filmed. Most of the time, however, huge spotlights stand in the street, aimed through the windows of Emmalaan 21. These are pretty much the only clue that a scene is being filmed inside. Alas, the action is then far removed from the curious eyes of yours truly.

Anyway, yesterday we caught a glimpse of Mara van Vlijmen, standing outside in a long trench coat, apparently waiting for an outside scene to be set up. She plays Simone, the effervescent receptionist of the office.

When am I going to be treated to the sight of Roos Ouwehand and Daphne Bunskoek? I feel like someone collecting give-aways from cornflake boxes.

Bas pointed out to me this morning that those of you who use SPF as an anti-spam measure may be flagging mail you receive from me as spam.

This is due to inconsistencies in the answer that DNS is currently returning as the canonical address of caliban.org. These problems should evaporate by the end of the weekend, at which time all DNS servers that serve name information for caliban.org should be synchronised.

Our photo gallery is back on-line.

I was able to bring it back much more quickly than I had first anticipated, because I used an old Gallery 1.x back-up to seed the albums in the Gallery 2.x installation. That copied hundreds of extra, unnecessary files, but they were easily removed afterwards by rsync.

I did this by getting a list of all the album directories on the remote server:

cd /var/www/g2data/albums
find -type d > /tmp/file_list

I then copied this over to the new server with the Gallery 1.x back-up:

for i in `cat /tmp/file_list`; do
  album=${i##*/}
  src=`find /var/www/html/albums -type d -name $album`
  [ -n "$src" ] && rsync -av $src/ /var/www/g2data/albums/$i
done

In the end, I needed to copy from New Jersey only the photos we had taken since mid-February, which is when I had done a full back-up in preparation for migrating from Gallery 1.x to 2.x.

Somehow, one of the tables in the MySQL database had got corrupted in the move:

060518 18:02:38 [ERROR] Got error 134 when reading table './gallery2/g2_ImageBlockCacheMap'

This was easily corrected:

mysql> repair table g2_ImageBlockCacheMap;
+--------------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| Table                          | Op     | Msg_type | Msg_text                                   |
+--------------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+
| gallery2.g2_ImageBlockCacheMap | repair | warning  | Number of rows changed from 45465 to 45460 |
| gallery2.g2_ImageBlockCacheMap | repair | status   | OK                                         |
+--------------------------------+--------+----------+--------------------------------------------+

And, with that, the rescue and salvage operation to yank caliban.org from the incompetent clutches of the unholy alliance of Managed.com and Web Host Plus is 95% or more complete.

Once the residual DNS propagation issues evaporate, I'll be able to fully exhale once again.

The site seems to be running nicely on the old server in the cellar. I'm sure browsing photos isn't a terribly fast experience any more, but until I can find a reasonably priced hosting provider I can trust, this is the way it has to be. As detailed here, my last dedicated hosting provider turned out to be less than dedicated and not much of a host to his paying guest.

As I've mentioned before, the new hardware that Web Host Plus put me on after managed.com sold my hard drive to them was less than reliable. I suspected a few causes, one of which was bad RAM. This theory now seems to have been borne out by an experiment I did. Before I rsynced our photo gallery across the Atlantic, I rebooted the problem box in New Jersey and reduced its operational RAM from 2 Gb to 512 Mb. In that new configuration, I was able to spend many a joyous hour copying my precious data over the transatlantic pipe without the originating box going AWOL. QED, I'd say.

I'll be cancelling service with managed.com, Web Host Plus or whoever's running the show now as soon as my next invoicing cycle starts. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.

In the meantime, any DNS oddness you may have been seeing should now be a thing of the past. All slaves are in sync and handing out correct data. Incorrect data in the caches of other DNS servers should now also have expired. Normal service has now been resumed.

Nothing is safe in this house any more.

In the last couple of days, Eloïse has started climbing out of her high chair and onto the dining-room table; but that's not all.

She climbed the stairs for the first time a couple of days ago; under supervision, yes, but still. You just can't turn your back on her any more. Before you know it, she's off and running.

She crawls around the house at high speed now and can scramble up onto the couch from the floor. She then stands on the couch, leaning forwards onto its back, and jiggles up and down with enthusiasm. It's only a matter of time before she climbs over the back of the couch and falls freely to the ground.

She used to be content to sit and play with toys, but not any more. She still does that sometimes, of course, but as often as not, she'll pull herself to her feet, lean against the couch and then walk around its perimeter to the side-tables we have, where she proceeds to help herself to anything we've been foolish enough to leave on them.

Yes, the time has come to babyproof the house, although it's rather daunting knowing where to start. I need to find some kind of expert to come in and assess the place.

On the eating front, she's doing well with lots of fruit and vegetables. The consultatiebureau told us to give her bread, because the masticatory action would supposedly expedite the path to speech, but this seems to be nonsense as far as we can tell. There's so little nutritional value in bread and so much potential for allergies of one kind or another, that we're holding off on introducing too many grains at once.

Speaking of speech, she's still babbling like a loon at regular intervals; anything from LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA to BA-BA-BA-BA-BA-BA-BA to PA-PA-PA-PA-PA-PA-PA. It's easy to think Papa is in there somewhere, but that's just egocentrical wishful thinking.

The summer is nearly here, although you wouldn't know it. While Sarah's folks were here, we had ten days or so of shorts and sandals weather. The last week, however, it's been very capricious weather. It's a brave (or naïvely optimistic) man that leaves the house without the security of a brolley at the moment.

Last Friday, Geoff, Jason and Vivian pitched up and spent the weekend here. Jason and Vivian like it raging hot, so they really missed the mark by a few days. They'd spent the week before in Delft, where Jason and Geoff were attending SANE 2006, and pretty much arrived on the day that the mini-heatwave gave way to more restless climes.

That fact meant that we didn't do an awful lot outside the house, so we mostly just chatted and drank coffee. I do hope they weren't too bored.

Geoff took the train to Paris today, but will return on Friday to spend one last weekend with us before returning to the evil empire.

That's pretty much the only reason we're still in town at the moment, actually, because next week, we'll be driving to Czechia (or the Czech Republic, as Sarah still prefers to call it) via Leipzig and probably Dresden.

I'm really looking forward to heading out east. We have no firm plans, other than to go to Prague and eventually head further east into Slovakia, paying a visit to the High Tatras. I daresay we'll turn Budapest on its head on the way back, but other than that, we'll be playing it by ear.

With no jobs to return to, we'll be returning home when we run out of traveller's steam -- and not before! We expect to be back in late June, but who knows? We've been waiting a long time to be unbeholden and at liberty to travel freely; I'm happy to say that moment has now dawned.

So this week is being taken up with belated research and planning. Proper travel is always a lot of work beforehand; otherwise you miss things and fail to appreciate and understand the things you do see. It really enhances the experience to have a good understanding of your destination, its history, culture, people and -- if there's time -- language, too.

With nothing else on the calendar for this summer, we can travel at will. Denmark, Sweden and Italy are all vaguely on the schedule. It's going to be a fun summer, that's for sure.

We're busy tying up the loose ends in preparation for our trip to Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, which starts next week.

That means paying all of our bills, getting an annoying vibration removed from the dashboard of the car, making sure we have a bottle of engine oil and windscreen wiper fluid for the journey, giving spare keys to the neighbours, arranging travel insurance, etc., etc.

Sarah has been busy planning the route, reading masses of information on the places we will visit and sticking coloured markers to the map, so that we can get an overview of the areas we want to cover.

Our Baby Boardrent order turned up today, just one day after placing it. We bought a Marco hanging chair and a swimming nappy.

The hanging chair is so that we can place Eloïse at our table while we eat, even if the restaurant in question has no high chair available.

The swimming nappy is so that Eloïse can enjoy public pools and spa baths. Without such a device, she either wouldn't be allowed in or we wouldn't be able to relax, out of fear that she could drop a load at any moment.

Unfortunately, the hanging chair stinks of cigarette smoke. In fact, as soon as I opened the cardboard box containing our order, I noticed the vile smell coming from within. Obviously, the stock at the shop is kept in a smoky environment, which is very offputting. Still, it'll be OK once it's had time to air.

Other things that were delivered today were our dining chairs. Finally, we have some lovely, comfortable chairs to go with our nice dining-room table.

I wonder if we'll find any nice items for the house in Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary. Next week, we'll start to find out. In preparation for our trip, I've booked our first night's stay in Leipzig and programmed the route into the car's sat-nav system. Just a few more days and we'll be on our way.

Back in July of last year, I wrote about the open-source replacement firmware project called Rockbox. For a year now, I've had it running on my trusty iRiver iHP140 and, in that time, have seen the code grow to maturity.

For a while, though, the iHP140 has been feeling cramped. I really needed a 60 Gb player, but no suitable player existed. Most of my music collection is encoded using the Ogg Vorbis codec, so any player that can't handle that immediately falls out of consideration.

For the last few months, I've had my eye on the 60 Gb Cowon iAudio X5, but was put off by reports of its suffering from poor firmware. I consequently decided to hold off until Rockbox was ported to the device.

Well, Rockbox played an MP3 file for the first time two months ago and development has been forging ahead since then. There's actually less work to do than one might imagine, because the X5 uses the same Coldfire CPU as some of the iRiver players, amongst which the ever-faithful iHP140. Most of the work, therefore, is in the bootloader, making the remote-control work, etc.

Once I saw that Rockbox was coming along in leaps and bounds, I decided the time was right to complement my iHP140 with the purchase of a 60 Gb X5, so I ordered one from MP3shop.nl, along with a remote control, a case and a desk cradle. They turned up on Friday, as did our friend Geoff, so there wasn't any time to play with them. I plugged it in, flashed the firmware to version 2.10, started an rsync of my music repository and then went to bed.

On Saturday, I found some time to compile Rockbox and its X5 bootloader. I applied the dual boot and album art patches, merged the official Cowon firmware with the bootloader and then reflashed the device. Finally, I unzipped the Rockbox files onto the hard drive. Sure enough, after holding down the REC button whilst turning on the device, the familiar boot screen of Rockbox scrolled by. I tried a couple of the plug-in games, satisfied myself that everything was working, then went to bed again.

Rockbox is still at quite an early stage on the X5. For one thing, the power management work has scarcely started, so a battery charge lasts only a fraction of the time that it does when running the official firmware. That's a major problem, so I'll be booting into the official firmware until the Rockbox team gets the power management under control.

Still, it's great to see it already running and know that great things are just around the corner. Rockbox is so good, that it's hard to imagine considering any DAP for purchase that would remain unsupported; especially one that didn't support the Ogg Vorbis codec by default.

I think the Rockbox project is destined for great things. The goal of the project is of great widespread interest: to create high-quality open-source firmware that supports all of the major codecs and fully utilises the power of the hardware of each platform on which it runs. It's made the iHP140 a much better player than it ever was with the official iRiver firmware, for example; and it was a great player to begin with.

With the iPod port firmly underway, I predict that the project will soon explode and achieve widespread recognition and acclaim. An iPod with decent battery life and the ability to play Ogg Vorbis files would be a player worthy of consideration, perhaps. Of the people who already own one, I suspect that enough people will try Rockbox and like it for the necessary word-of-mouth advertising to rapidly ensue.

Wiesje is getting rather large and tiresome now for Sarah to always be carrying her around in the sling. Although we have a pram, too, there are certain situations and kinds of terrain where a pram just doesn't work: whilst on hiking trails, for example.

With an eye to our upcoming trip to Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, we decided to invest in a baby carrier; not one of those Baby Björn things that make your back ache after fifteen minutes if the baby's more than three months old (we have one of those, too, but got very little use out of it), but a more heavy-duty construction that will remain comfortable for both baby and beast of burden for a couple of hours at a time.

After much farting around in Bever, Demmenie and Carl Denig, we finally settled on the Vaude Butterfly Comfort, because of its comfortable harness and cradling head-rest. Eloïse just seemed to be the most comfortable in this model. For me, too, the carrier is highly adjustable, so that I can obtain the right fit and centre of gravity, enabling me to carry her for longer without developing aches and pains.

With this device in the back of the car, I'll be able to share the baby-carrying duties with Sarah and Wiesje will get a new, slightly raised perspective on the world.

Now all we need is a bit of cooperation from the weather, which, it has to be said, has been total shite for about two weeks now: endless grey skies and downpours that last most of the day, stop for about half an hour -- just long enough to coax you outside and away from the safety of shelter -- and then mercilessly punish you by recommencing with a vengeance, which then goes on for the remainder of the day. That's not really the ideal weather for going on holiday and, since we have no jobs to dictate our schedule, we're quite flexible about when we leave.

Above, you can see Rockbox running on my iAudio X5 player. The code was taken directly from today's CVS and cross-compiled on my laptop for the Coldfire CPU. The album art patch by Nicolas Pennequin was also applied. This allows one to configure the WPS (While Playing Screen) to display a bitmap image related to the track currently being played. The main purpose of this, obviously, is to allow one to display an image of the album from which the track is taken.

I needed a quick way to get album covers onto my X5, so I wrote some Ruby code that uses my very own Ruby/Amazon to pull album images from Amazon. Basically, the approach is to take one track from each album directory and inspect the Ogg Vorbis tag of that track. From this, artist and album title data is derived. Then, an Amazon search is performed to find the album in question.

Some albums are available exclusively on either Amazon UK or Amazon US, so I first try to pull the album cover from Amazon UK and resort to the American site only if I can't find it there.

The album cover images arrive from Amazon in JPEG format, but Rockbox needs BMP files, so I use ImageMagick to convert from one to the other and then save the image as cover.bmp in the same directory as the album.

The Ogg Vorbis tag data isn't accurate or specific enough in some cases to locate the album on Amazon. Occassionally, the album isn't even available from Amazon, which obviously also results in a failure to locate its cover art. In the end, approximately 75% of my albums end up having a cover image retrieved. It remains to be seen how many were mismatched with the wrong album!

I've had no time to hack together my own WPS file for the X5, so I'm currently using Markus Haselboeck's boeselhack_v1 theme. It's pretty nice, I think you'll agree. Having a small image of the album cover on the screen really is a nice touch and gives the software a very professional edge.

Here's a full photo of the X5 running Rockbox, just to place the above in context.