Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Finally, some sixteen months after moving into this house, we've got rid of the two lightbulbs protruding on wires from above the television in the living-room and above the sideboard in the sitting-room. The lights we've had on order for months were finally delivered and installed today.

Now we just need to purchase a few standard lamps and possibly a small table lamp to go on top of the sideboard, and then the house will finally be starting to achieve that lived-in look.

We finally hit the 10,000 km in our car in the last week. It thus took us a little more than a year to drive the first ten thousand kilometres, nearly half of which were completed during our two month trek around Czechia and Slovakia last summer.

It's getting harder and harder to reach our house. Not only is the Sophialaan closed off by roadworks, which stops us biking home via the Amstelveenseweg and the Saxen Weimarlaan, but now the crossroads of the Emmalaan and the Koninginneweg is closed off for work on the tram rails. By bike, we can still opt to use the Vondelpark to get in and out of our neighbourhood, but by car we now need to go to the end of the Oranje Nassaulaan where it joins the Koninginneweg.

A week from now, they're going to be doing nightwork on the tram rails, too. God knows how much of a din that's going to kick up, and I'm not looking forward to finding out.

As we walked along the Emmalaan today, we saw Porgy Franssen, Roos Ouwehand and Daan Schuurmans chatting on the street, in between shooting the third series of Keyzer & De Boer Advocaten. Daan seemed to be flirting quite a bit with Roos. Ssh... don't tell the gossip rags.

The last couple of days have been gloriously sunny. Unfortunately, I've been gloriously sick and slept through most of Sunday. Still, I got to enjoy the Vondelpark with Eloïse this afternoon. We had a good time over at the Melkhuis playground.

I also have to do our taxes in the next couple of days. Bah.

It's all go here, as I'm sure you can tell. We need to plan our next trip.

Jason sent me this excellent article by Noam Chomsky on how Iran's nuclear programme is a direct response to the historical danger posed in the region by the US, and how the answer to the issue may lie in promoting democracy back on American soil.

It's an extremely eloquent and incisive piece of prose.

What is going on?

As I write this, it's 28°C (82.4°F) outside. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the warmest 15th April in history. We're only halfway through April and it already feels like the end of July. I'd add the word incredible as a descriptor, were it not for the fact that we're all painfully aware these days of the underlying cause of such extremes.

A few days ago, we had a Sonos system installed in our house. Six ZP100 ZonePlayers make for six so-called zones in the house, one per major room on each floor, and we have three CR100 controllers, one per floor, to control the music in that floor's two zones.

Each zone allows separate music to be played in that zone, meaning that we can have six different audio sources booming out around the house. In practice, we're unlikely to do this.

One nice feature of the system is the ability to link zones, so that the same music can be played, for example, in both the living-room and the sitting-room. Then, if someone else wants to use one of those two rooms, you just drop one of the zones from the link group. This means that you can add zone B to zone A, then drop zone A from the group, which effectively allows you to pass music sources between zones. Very clever.

The zone system is very sensibly implemented and it's therefore possible to control any zone in the house from any of the remote controllers. So, I can be in the living-room on the ground floor and turn on music in the guest room two floors higher up. The logical extension of this idea is setting alarms, so that music can be automatically be made to play in any zone at any time. Again, the simplicity of the software makes this child's play to configure.

After a session in the listening room of the hi-fi shop (where Sarah was close to vomiting and Eloïse was going mental to go home: not a terribly relaxing environment for listening and making well-informed decisions), we finally settled on a mixture of KEF, Bowers & Wilkins and Paradigm speakers for the house. The living-room has the KEF pillar speakers, whilst the sitting-room has B & W speakers hung in the corners. A REL Quake subwoofer completes the picture in the sitting-room.

The first floor rooms already contained built-in speakers, left behind by the previous owners, so we simply hooked up the two ZP100 ZonePlayers to those. We think they're B & W, but we're not sure. They sound pretty good; good enough for bedrooms, at any rate.

The second floor has the Paradigm pillar speakers in the guest-room. In the office, I simply hooked up the ZP100 up to the line-in socket on my computer's sound card, which plays through some fairly decent Klipsch speakers. Most of the time I'm in there, it's late at night and I have to listen on headphones, anyway. I may get better speakers for the office later on, if the need arises.

The ZP100 in the sitting-room is wired over Ethernet; the other five operate wirelessly over an AES-encrypted protocol on top of 802.11 (which Sonos calls Sonosnet). The single Ethernet-wired ZonePlayer is an installation and usage requirement, as it functions as an Ethernet bridge, allowing the other units to request and be assigned IP addresses over DHCP. The ZP100 units also conveniently feature a four port Ethernet switch on the back, which allows one to network other devices. Depending on whether the ZP100 unit in question is wired or wireless, it functions in this capacity as either an Ethernet or a wireless bridge.

The system is able to automatically check for new firmware versions and install them. It's also able to automatically refresh its list of Internet radio stations, which is great for having new stations added and updating the URLs of stations that move around. I really like systems that are able to perform self-maintenance in this way.

The whole system appears to works very well. After a few days of use, I have few complaints. The only ones that spring to mind are:

• Internet radio stations must support WMA or MP3 streams to be usable by the Sonos system. RealAudio streams, for example, don't work. By way of contrast, the MythMusic module of MythTV can do this.
• Only SMB network shares are supported for accessing one's music collection. Samba to the rescue.
• Whilst one can shuffle the play order of songs, there's no smart mode, whereby songs are picked pseudo-randomly, weighted according to the number of previous plays. Again, MythMusic has this feature and it's great for picking songs out of a hat, but with a bias towards the music that one prefers.
• All the features and functions of the remote controller are also available via the so-called desktop controller, which is a piece of software that runs under either Windows or MacOS X. This makes it very inconvenient for me to use and I would like to have seen a Web-based controller operating via the Ethernet-wired ZonePlayer.
• The person who installed the system had already flashed the various units to the latest version of the firmware at his workplace. Unfortunately, this required him to register the system using his own name and e-mail address. Surprisingly, after calling Sonos, it turns out to be impossible to later rectify this situation without performing a reset of the entire system to the factory default state. On the plus side, having everything registered in my own name doesn't actually appear to matter very much.

All in all, then, it's an impressive system with a lot of flexibility and it beats installing PCs all over the house.

I mentioned the other day that I would like to see a Web controller for the Sonos music system to supplement the remote controller and the (to a non-Windows, non-Mac user) largely useless desktop controller software.

Well, it tuns out that an inventive user has done just that, and written a Web-based controller in Perl. It actually works as advertised, too, although it's not quite as functional as either the remote controller or the desktop controller. Still, I can now manage the Sonos from the comfort of my laptop, which -- let's face it -- is where I spend a lot of my time.

How it works is quite clever. You install it on any system that can run Perl, so I put it on our MythTV box. When run, it starts a Web server on port 8001. Pointing a browser at the server yields a menu that allows one to select a UI and various plug-ins. Once that is done, one can access most Sonos functions, including the all-important ones, such as selecting zones, playing music and altering the volume.

On the back-end, a UPnP control point listens for UPnP events and talks to the Sonos boxes. With my scant knowledge of UPnP, this has the appearance of happening rather magically.

I'd like to see Sonos take this piece of software and continue its development. There's clearly a need for a controller that one can manage from one's Web browser.

My one day photography course planned for last Saturday ended abruptly before it had even begun when I had to rush to the aid of a sick friend. Happily, the Volksuniversiteit has agreed to allow me to move my enrolment to the next instance of the course on 1st June.

I'll be starting a separate three-part digital photography course this coming Friday and am looking forward to getting stuck into that.

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to attend Lisa Gerrard's concert at the World Forum in The Hague. It was a fabulous concert, but I was slightly preoccupied during the show, on account of the fact that just a few minutes before the concert had been due to start, another car had collided with mine in the venue's underground car park.

In his enthusiasm to secure a parking space being vacated by a car on his left, the driver of the errant car slammed into reverse and shot backwards without looking and before I could sound my horn. A couple of seconds later, he rammed my stationary vehicle with the towing hook of his vehicle, thereby knackering my number plate, its holding frame and the grille behind.

The car is due to be fixed next Wednesday and shouldn't cost more than €300 or so, which -- barring any anomalies -- the other party's insurance will be paying. The other driver immediately admitted culpability and hopefully won't have a memory lapse later on.

Speaking of the car, its ECU (Electronic Control Unit) was flashed with new software a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to fix a problem with the keyless starter mechanism. It seems funny to have one's car flashed, but cars contain an amazing amount of computing technology these days, so it makes sense. I suppose it's just because I still tend to think of them as being more hardware than software, but these days, they pretty much contain equal measures of both.

Geoff has been here for the last few days, which has been fun. He headed back to Dublin for a few days on Monday afternoon, but will be back at the weekend in time for Koninginnedag. That's going to be a good laugh.

What else? Well, we've finally joined the ranks of the responsible refuse disposers and purchased a paper shredder as a precaution against identity theft. Yes, yes, we should have done this ages ago, but at least we've finally done it now.

April 2007 isn't even over, but it's already the warmest April ever in The Netherlands. It's also the driest calendar month in 100 years; and it's not even a summer month!

Of all of the Aprils since 1900, there have only been 14 with a day in which the temperature rose above 25°. April 2007 has already had 6 such days and more are expected before the end of the month.

The broken records for April go on:

• The temperature was, on average, 5°C higher than normal.
• There were more hours of sun than ever before.
• The first >25° day was never before so early in the year: 14th April
• It has never been so dry for so long before. Some parts of the country have had no rain since 22nd March.

Will it be the warmest Koninginnedag ever next week? We'll see.