Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

My LaCie Ethernet Big Disk gave up the ghost last Monday after just one year of service. This device functioned as a basic NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit on our network and accommodated, amongst other things, all of our Ogg Vorbis and MP3 music files.

All of this stuff was backed up, of course, so we didn't lose any data, but we did lose an integral part of our network. For example, our Sonos system was now able to play only Internet radio stations. More significantly, we had lost one of our back-up devices.

it was therefore important to find a replacement device as soon as possible. I could have just rushed out and bought another disc of the same model or a drive from a rival make, but I wanted to improve on the LaCie and get something a little more professional.

It would be nice, for example, but not essential, to have a box that supported NFS in addition to CIFS. It would also be nice to have redundancy in the disc configuration. After all, any single-disc system, such as the LaCie, is an accident waiting to happen. It would be nice to be able to lose a disc without losing any data.

For several months, I've had a browser tab open, pointing to the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The tab has literally remained open for the last few months, to remind me to look more deeply into the product when I have a moment. I still hadn't got around to it, but this week's events forced me to make it a priority.

I know several people with a ReadyNAS unit and all of them are very enthusiastic about the product. As I read about it, it quickly became apparent that the ReadyNAS device would be the way to go. The death of the LaCie was the perfect excuse for the outlay of cash.

Infrant was bought by Netgear at the start of May and their products now carry the Netgear badge. I wanted the largest ReadyNAS available at the time, so it wasn't long before I decided on and ordered the ReadyNAS NV+ RND4410. I ordered it last Monday and it arrived Friday afternoon.

It's a small unit, but quite heavy, because it houses 4 SATA discs, totalling some 4 Tb of disc space. 4 discs is the maximum that can be accommodated in the ReadyNAS. It's not quite as capacious as it sounds, though, because when configured with Netgear's patented X-RAID volume management and further gnawed on by file-system overhead, the usable disc space drops quite drastically to 2.6 Tb. If you then enable snapshots, you'll reduce the user-writeable data area yet further.

It comes at quite a price compared with basic consumer NAS products, but the ReadyNAS is a beautiful piece of kit. It's easy to configure, but offers powerful, advanced options for file-sharing and protecting data. It supports all the common file-system protocols, such as NFS, CIFS and AFP, and even has a built-in rsync server. Very cool.

I spent yesterday evening tweaking the configuration. Today, it was time to start copying our data onto it. So far, I've copied over 72 Gb of music, back-ups of caliban.org and home directories.

Since the ReadyNAS serves up NFS, my server in the cellar has been retired as the home directory server and replaced by the new boy. The disc in that server has seen a lot of activity over the years; it was our file-server back in Mountain View, so it's seen its fair share of seeks, reads and writes. It had started to give errors via SMART monitoring, so decommissioning it really didn't come a moment too soon.

I do love it when a product comes along that is simply great at what it's supposed to do. Whether it's Postfix, Ruby, MythTV, Rockbox, Sonos, FRITZ!Box or now the ReadyNAS NV+, they're all excellent at what they're supposed to do.

Of course, I could still have done without the death of a disc and the ensuing demands on my time, not to mention the unforeseen expense, but we do now at least have a system that will grow with us into the future and that offers the peace of mind of knowing that, if a disc fails, it's no big deal. We can simply hot-swap a new drive into the unit and the RAID array will rebuild itself.

I think the time has come to buy a few gigabit Ethernet switches for use by certain machines in the house. Then we'll really be able to tap into the full power of the ReadyNAS.

Add the usual incubation period of chicken pox to the date Lucas and I first started showing symptoms of the disease and, lo and behold, you arrive at Friday last. That's the day that Elo&ium;se started sprouting pocks.

Thankfully, she doesn't seem bothered by it at all. Her spirits are high and she had plenty of energy today at the Little Gym. Hopefully, it'll have blown over within a few days and we can finally stop thinking about chicken pox in this house.

We took Lucas to the consultatiebureau last Friday.

It turns out that he now weighs 5830 g, is 60 cm long and has a cranial circumference of 40.4 cm.

That's quite a leap from his birth weight of 3500 g, so he's now above average in all measurements for his age. What a bouncing boy.

Eloïse has quite a bad case of chicken pox. Whereas a lot of children get away with a handful of pocks on their face and chest, Eloïse is covered in the bloody things. They're all over her face, chest, arms, and bum; and she has a good number on other parts of her body, too. They must number several hundred, I'd say. She may even have as many as I had a couple of weeks ago.

The whole family endured a pretty much sleepless night last night, thanks to Eloïse 's discomfort. We had to get up at irregular intervals, every half an hour or so, to put calendula cream on her welts. They're very bothersome to her now and she's feeling very sorry for herself. In particular, the ones on her bum are clustered very densely and are very itchy. She says they hurt a lot and she is visibly in pain when she attempts to sit on a hard surface.

We've also put some menthol talc on her today, but it's hard to say whether it's helping. She's suffering with diarrhoea, too, and her mood is very depressed. Poor little girl. She went to the peuterspeelzaal this afternoon, which I hoped would help lift her mood, but she came home again within a few minutes.

We're treating her with the same two homeopathic remedies that I took when I had the virus, namely Antimonium tartaricum 200K and Rhus toxicodendron 200K.

I do hope she'll be feeling somewhat better tomorrow. It's the worst torment in the world to see your child suffering in front of you and be unable to do anything to help.

The latest release of Ruby/AWS is out. It fixes a few bugs and improves remote shopping-carts by adding support for the Save For Later area of the cart.

Cart#modify now takes an extra parameter in order to support this new functionality. Cart#include? now checks both the active and the saved area of the cart before returning true or false, and there are two new methods, Cart#active? and Cart#savedforlater? for checking the two areas.

Numerous bugs were fixed, too, so all users should upgrade.

Today is the big one.

In just a few hours, I'll be meeting my natural father for the first time. You may recall the story.

The next week is going to be a very interesting one, as two directly related strangers attempt to bridge an unbridgeable 41 year chasm. We'll play it by ear see how far we get.

Their flight lands at 12:15 and Sarah and I will be at Schiphol to pick them up.

Ruby/AWS 0.3.2 has been released.

This release addresses (de)serialisation issues with Marshal and YAML, caused by the inability of objects spawned from dynamically defined classes to be reinstantiated at load-time.

It's been quiet on the blog front, as a few people have doubtless noticed. The days have been long and full, leaving precious little energy and time for blogging.

My natural father arrived in Amsterdam last Thursday, courtesy of a delayed Aer Lingus flight. We amused ourselves while we waited by watching Daphne Dekkers recording a segment for what was obviously some low-brow American reality show, because the production crew were all American. We were surprised by their arrogance, as they acted as if they owned the airport.

Anyway, Tony finally emerged with his wife, Bernie, just when I was starting to think they hadn't made it onto the plane. He was easy to recognise from his photos. In fact, he was easy enough to recognise from my own reflection.

Tony was clearly moved by the meeting. We hugged for what seemed like an eternity, the culmination of an almost 41 year search. "Long time, no see", I said

It's different for me. I obviously have no memories of him from the first few months of my life. I'm also not the one who has spent the better part of his life searching for a lost child, wondering what happened to him and whether he is dead or alive. For me, therefore, it was not the fulfilment of a drawn-out and agonising process. It was simply the meeting of a stranger, one with whom I happen to share an unusually large amount of DNA.

Which isn't to say I wasn't curious, of course; it's just that the reunion wasn't fulfilling a need for me.

That matter-of-fact attitude to the reunion pretty much set the tone for the stay. From the outset, the atmosphere was very relaxed. We played it by ear and engaged in small talk as much, if not more, as we did in discussions about the past.

As the days passed, we got to know one another better and, by the end of the trip, it felt as if we'd known each other a lot longer than we have. Chewing the fat came naturally, there were no pregnant pauses and it felt very comfortable to just sit in silence in the same room or out on the patio.

Opa Tony was certainly a big hit with Eloïse , too. Right from the first moment, he was running around with her and playing the jester, an approach that served to completely obviate any need she might have felt to first gain some familiarity with him. She fell for him on the spot.

Lucas , too, would beam from ear to ear every time that Tony went anywhere near him. He definitely has the magic touch.

And, lest anyone reading this wonder otherwise, it was a pleasure to have Bernie stay, too. I'm sure Tony is the person he is today in no small part thanks to Bernie.

The next step is to prepare for a car trip to Ireland, which will also take in my step-sister, Fenella, and her children, Eloïse 's cousins, on the way (well, they live in Cornwall, England, so it's kind of on the way). Not only will we meet my three half-brothers, Ronan, Shane and Jason, but we also hope to get around a sizeable chunk of Ireland at the same time.

With the recent arrival of our truly excellent ReadyNAS NV+ box, the time had come to upgrade the house's internal network to gigabit Ethernet, i.e. 1000 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps.

The house's internal cabling is all CAT5e, so all that was required was to purchase some gigabit switches. I finally settled on a trio of Netgear products, the 16 port GS116 for the server cupboard under the stairs, the 8 port GS608 for my office and the 5 port GS605 for the TV area in the living-room. More switches will doubtless follow at a later date, but that's all we need for now.

In fact, even now, we scarcely need that kind of speed. It's handy for the short bursts of high traffic that our network occasionally sees, such as when performing back-ups at night, but not for much more than that. Once we start sending video around the house, though, the network's new-found agility will come in very useful.

The switches are all operational, but the one in the office is still only operating at 100 Mbps, so I suspect the wall socket has been hacked, and four of the CAT5 wires split off to wire a second socket to provide service to a telephone. I'll have to look into that and, if necessary, unsplit the port.

I haven't done any testing to determine how good our network throughput now actually is, nor to test how fast NFS reads and writes to the ReadyNAS are performed. Jumbo frames are enabled on the network, though, and you should take care when selecting gigabit equipment to ensure that anything you buy provides this feature. Otherwise, you'll needlessly surrender 10 to 15% of your potential network performance and put a higher load on your equipment.

Apart from back-ups, basic file sharing service and providing the music storage for our Sonos system, the ReadyNAS is now also providing the accommodation for some of our MythTV recordings.

Since MythTV 0.21, the system has had the concept of storage groups. Basically, this allows one to define a set of storage directories and give the grouping a unique name. Subsequently, when telling MythTV what to record, one can dictate which storage group is used for any given recording. In this way, the storage load can be split over two or more file-systems.

MythTV doesn't actually do much in the way of load-balancing, however. It won't use the second directory unless two recordings are scheduled to record the second time, or the first directory fills up. Consequently, not a lot of programmes will get recorded onto the NAS unless I explicitly set it as the storage group for some of our recordings. Currently, only live TV viewing and Eloïse 's episodes of Nijntje are explicitly set to record onto the NAS.

In short, after a couple of weeks with the ReadyNAS, I'm enormously happy with it. Just having the protection of redundant network storage is already a great feeling, but upgrading the network to gigabit speed unleashes its full power.

I hadn't got around to an update on Eloïse 's chicken pox until now, and I wanted to finish the saga.

She had a couple of really difficult days with the itching and fever and then it broke. Who knows how much good the homeopathic remedies did, but the calendula cream certainly eased provided some relief.

She's well on the mend now, but since she had such huge pocks on her forehead, the sores are going to be a long time healing. We hope they won't leave scars, but it's hard to imagine there won't be at least a few small ones.

Elsewhere on her body, the sores are healing quite quickly. Her buttocks are settling down now, as is her chest.

In the spirit of generosity, we've passed on the dreaded lurgie to at least one other child, whose mother brought her to the house to deliberately expose her. It sounds cruel, but it's better to get the virus when you're well-prepared for it. We'd previously exposed Eloïse , but she just couldn't seem to catch it.

Anyway, our girl was already feeling much better by the time Opa Tony and Oma Bernie came, but I just didn't get around to blogging about it. That's hereby rectified.

I wrote last year how the Nokia Communicator E90 telephone had no ability to permanently accept an untrusted (e.g. self-signed) certificate when picking up e-mail over SSL. This omission required the user to go through the rigmarole of setting up a certificate authority (CA) with which to sign the certificate, thereby vouching for its credibility.

Well, I upgraded the firmware of my E90 a couple of days ago from version 7.40.1.2 to 210.34.75 (don't ask me about the change in version number schemes).

This update doesn't appear to do very much, apart from improve Flash functionality in the Web browser. However, one small yet significant improvement that has probably gone unnoticed by most other users is that it's now possible to permanently accept an untrusted certificate, without having to go through the bother of becoming a CA to vouch for it.

It's a small change, but significant to a few people like me.

It's only been a week since the release of Ruby/AWS 0.3.2, but 0.3.3 is here already.

Actually, there are almost no visible changes for the user. The only development of note is that the library is now available as a so-called gem for the RubyGems packaging system.

People have been on at me for years -- basically, since RubyGems first became usable -- to package my Ruby software as gems, but I've lacked the motivation to get to grips with a new packaging system.

It turns out that I overestimated the work involved. You can learn to create RubyGems in under an hour. The system is much less complex than building RPMs, for example. I really should have done this sooner.

Summer's here and it's time for us to head out onto the road again for our first holiday since the birth of Lucas . Yes, this time we will be travelling as a family of four.

This trip has been planned very quickly and, in fact, the planning is still quite thin at this stage. We'll have to do the rest once we actually get underway.

We'll leave Amsterdam this coming Sunday morning, driving south through the Netherlands to Belgium, where we'll continue down along the coast of Flanders until we reach the port of Calais in France.

We'll spend the night in France and then take the Channel Tunnel Monday morning to Folkestone on the English side. From there, we'll drive on the wrong side of the road along the M20 and M25 to Henley-on-Thames to visit friends of ours who recently returned to England to live.

Tuesday morning, we get back in the car and head towards the county of Cornwall to visit Fenella and family. That will be at least a five hour drive, so whether we'll actually make it to our final destination that day is rather unpredictable at the moment. It all depends on how well Lucas travels. I hope this trip serves to break him in and make him as good a traveller as his sister.

After an as yet undetermined number of days in Cornwall, we'll drive to Cardiff and spend a night or two in the Welsh capital.

Then, it's on further to Fishguard for the ferry across to Rosslare in Ireland.

Once on the emerald isle, we'll drive north towards Dublin, where Opa Tony, Oma Bernie and my three newly discovered half-brothers will be waiting for us.

We haven't got any further than that yet, but even that slice of the route is already good for around 1800 kilometres.

After the family visit, we'll do a coastal loop of Ireland, including Northern Ireland, playing the intermediate stops pretty much by ear. We're therefore not yet sure where exactly the trip will bring us.

We'll be gone until the second week of August, so it's going to be quite a lengthy road-trip of some five weeks or more. Our return is dictated only by Eloïse 's need to be back for the new term at her peuterspeelzaal.

We're very excited about this new trip, but there hasn't been a lot of time to think about it in the run-up to our departure, due to all kinds of tedious tasks that have to be taken care of before we leave. In just a few short days, though, we'll be back on the road, visiting friends and exploring new places. I can't wait.

We had to make a big decision today.

Eloïse was set to move after the summer from Het Speelhol to a new peuterspeelzaal, namely that belonging to the Amsterdamse Montessori School, about a kilometre from here.

The reason for the move was that Eloïse had been guaranteed a place at the Amsterdamse Montessori School from the age of four. However, places at the school are almost exclusively guaranteed to children who previously attend the school's own play-school from the age of three. In other words, to make use of the place promised to Elo&ium;se at the school proper, we'd have to move her away from her beloved Wanda before she's ready.

For months now, I've been trying to engineer a compromise for this situation. The school is adamant, however, that an exception to their policy cannot be made.

We'd started to resign ourselves to the idea of having to just swallow the situation. After all, you'd don't want to jeopardise years of education at the right primary school for the sake of a few months at a fantastic play-school. We'd also met the staff of the play-school and Eloïse had enjoyed her visit there, so we had agreed to move Eloïse there the second week of August.

But over the last few months, criticisms of the Montessori method have started to reach my ears. They suggest an overemphasis on cognitive development and too little time spent on art and craft, music and movement. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the Montessori approach of letting children pick which works they want to do, ultimately leads to many children excelling in the things they enjoy, whilst neglecting the subjects that they don't.

A lot of these criticisms come from adults who went through the Montessori school system themselves, so I take them seriously. At the same time, however, none of the stories is shocking.

Nevertheless, we decided to rethink the situation and look around yet again at other schools, even though we're already either on the waiting list of most neighbourhood schools, or we've been told that we're too far down that list to ever stand a chance.

Our attention ultimately turned to the Geert Groote School, a vrijeschool (a.k.a. a Waldorf or Steiner school) about one and a half kilometres from here. We hadn't previously considered this particular school -- didn't even really know about it, in fact -- but after some research, decided that it would be a suitable school for Eloïse .

Compared to the schools of other didactic philosophies, it's perceived as quite radical. Its doctrines flow directly from the school of thought known as anthroposophy. At its most basic, Steiner education incorporates physical, emotional, artistic and intellectual elements, rather than dealing purely with the cognitive. Sarah and I feel a great affinity with this approach, because the role of the child's imagination is strongly emphasised.

Steiner schools are named after Rudolf Steiner, their founder, and also the founder of anthroposophy, eurythmy, and biodynamic agriculture (more commonly known these days as organic farming). Clearly, Herr Steiner spent a lot of time thinking about things.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Eloïse has been offered a place at the Geert Groote School for the school year 2009/2010. That means she can start there when she's four, after the summer of 2009.

This comes as a great relief to us. Not only do we identify more strongly with Steiner education than with the Montessori method, but it also means that Eloïse can stay at Het Speelhol until she's four, which is something we're all really happy about.

It's also encouraging that the Geert Groote School has shown itself to be flexible and accommodating. That promises good things for the future.

In the course of my research, I downloaded and read the last few years' worth of the educational inspection's reports on the Amsterdamse Montessori School and both locations of the Geert Groote School. The AMS actually comes away with the better judgement, but I believe that educational inspection favours the more cognitive schools. Not everything can be measured, especially a child's emotional development.

That said, the second location of the Geert Grote School (known in that community as GGS2), receives an alarmingly bad report. The school has earned the unenviable predicate of zeer zwak, which translates as 'extremely weak'. In fact, the school is threatened with closure if it doesn't manage to raise standards in very short order. The GGS1 location, happily, is free of these problems.

One very useful site I found that helped with my research into schools was that of the Onderwijs Consumenten Organisatie (Education Consumer Organisation). Amongst other things, they maintain a news archive, containing stories on all of the Dutch education-related news from the past few years. For one thing, that enabled me to follow the GGS2's descent into difficulties.

Incidentally, the Dutch vrijescholen community has its own Web site.

A few weeks ago, I got out of bed and discovered I had a bad back. Well, shit happens, I thought; I'm not getting any younger. This old body isn't what it used to be, and believe me when I say that it wasn't much to begin with.

Such twinges tend to occur from time to time. After a day or so, they're usually gone. Not so, this one.

Depending on the day during the last few weeks, this lower back pain, somewhere in or near my sacrum, has been anywhere from manageable to quite debilitating. By that, I mean that even walking has been painful.

It's really been quite unpredictable. I go to bed each day with no idea how bad the pain will be when I get out of bed the next morning. Bending to pick something up, lifting children, walking: it's all been very painful at times, tolerably uncomfortable at others.

In such situations, Sarah usually nags me to go and see someone. I usually respond by ignoring her until the noise of her nagging becomes louder than the persistence of the ailment from which I'm suffering.

Earlier this week, it had become obvious that this rather painful problem wasn't going to go away on its own in the near future. With our long holiday starting just a couple of days from now, I couldn't allow myself to be incapacitated in any way, so I relented and went to see a physiotherapist.

Half an hour after going in, I was feeling worse than before. He had applied a technique that I'm going to refer to as violent massage, although the plaque on the door read 'medical massage'.

Yesterday evening, I finally started to feel a bit better, which was a great encouragement. I had another appointment with my torturer today, and again, I left his building brutalised and bruised. However, I did feel a lot better again.

The first visit didn't yield most of its benefit until yesterday evening, so perhaps it'll take another couple of days before I begin to feel the full benefit of today's treatment.

Anyway, I want to be fully over this backache as soon as possible. I can deal with having it in my daily home life, but I don't want it while I'm on holiday.

Tomorrow's the big day, the start of our holiday. Today is therefore, as you might imagine, the day of the final preparations:

• Printing out hotel and travel bookings.
• Having all recently arrived CDs ripped and on my personal audio player.
• Making sure there are enough CDs in the car; and that they're the right ones.
• Making sure enough children's television programmes are on the hard drive of my laptop.
• Charging the camera batteries, the personal audio player, etc. Also, gathering all of our chargers and plug adapters together.
• Mounting the baby mirror in the car, so that the driver can see Lucas , even though he's facing away.

I've already purchased new hiking shoes and had my hair cut, so I'm more or less ready. My office still needs a long overdue whirl to clear my desk and I have photos from yesterday's play-school party in the Amsterdamse Bos to upload.

One way or another, I'm sure it will end up being a late night, even if I work all day to try to prevent it.

At the Consultatiebureau a few days ago, Lucas weighed in at 6320 g, with a length of 61 cm and a head circumference of 41.4 cm. He's well on the way to doubling his birth weight, which was 3500 g.