Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

A week ago today, two of my three half-brothers arrived at Schiphol from Ireland. It should have been all three of them, but Ronan, the oldest, fell ill a few days before he was due to fly and was hospitalised. I thought Shane and Jason were playing a belated April Fool's joke on me, but I quickly realised that Ronan really wasn't waiting in the wings.

Over the initial disappointment, we piled into the car and headed for home.

It was the first trip for my brothers since they and I discovered the other party's existence a year ago. In fact, the anniversary of that discovery fell during their stay.

Although I'd met them in Ireland last year, they were working by day and out with their girlfriends in the evening, so this trip to Amsterdam represented the first proper opportunity for us all to get to know one another.

I still can't believe how fortuitously everything has turned out. I mean, it's one thing to find long-lost relatives, but it's quite another to actually like them. We grew up in different decades, with different families, in different cultures. We could so easily have turned out to not especially care for each other's company. To my relief -- and I think to theirs, as well -- it hasn't turned out that way at all. We actually like each other.

Apart from a lot of chin-wagging about this, that and the other, the boys (as their father calls them: I have taken to the same habit) found some time for a few tourist pursuits, including the all but obligatory visit to the red light district.

And then, in the twinkling of an eye, it was Monday and they had left again.

Eloïse and Lucas love their uncles and the feeling appears to be mutual. In that regard, it's nice that I'm having my children rather later in life than a lot of people, because it means that their uncles and grandfather can still play an active role in their life, even though they, in their capacity of brothers and father, have been absent from most of my own. My children therefore don't have to miss out on that side of their family.

Anyway, the stage is now set for enjoyable visits on either side of the Irish Sea, without any sense of family obligation being required to make such a visit actually happen.

Am I the only person left alive who's not on Facebook? I know I'm not, but I sometimes feel as if I am.

You see, I'm too good for Facebook. It's beneath me. Honestly, it is. It sounds like something I'd say in jest, but my tongue is nowhere near my cheek as I write this.

If there's one site out there that I think is massively overrated, it's Facebook.

Facebook trivialises human relationships and reduces them to single sentence status soundbites. It's a place of congregation for the bored, the unimaginative and the irretrievably nosy. What counts as a friend in the patois of Facebook disparages the very concept whose name it so blithely employs. I suppose the word acquaintances just doesn't have the same ring in a product manager's ears.

So, it was with some amusement that I received an e-mail from a headhunter at Facebook, looking to recruit me to work there. I wouldn't be the first ex-Googler to make the leap; far from it, in fact.

The days when I'd work for a company whose product I didn't believe in are many years behind me now, so it's an offer I won't be pursuing. It was amusing to be approached for this particular firm, however, because I actually get very few job offers these days. Of all the firms that could have approached me, there can't be many less likely candidates.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit to having a deactivated Facebook account. I created the account some time ago with the specific purpose of reading something written by a relative. When I logged in and discovered that I would first have to formally ask that person to be my friend, I lost interest and immediately deactivated my account. After all, we were already friends.

Now, by now, some of you are probably thinking, 'Jesus, this idiot just doesn't get it.' To you, I pose the following question: Think of all the people you had lost touch with during the course of your life and have now rediscovered, thanks to Facebook. Why do you think you lost touch with them in the first place?

Ponder that for a while as you update your status message with the details of your latest bowel movement and the kind of mood it has left you in.

Of course, I ask the above as someone with almost no friends in the real world, so draw your own conclusions.

Our Wii Fit congratulated me today on five weeks of uninterrupted daily use. It could have been longer, but our holiday in Tenerife threw a spanner in the works.

With nearly forty hours of time racked up on the balance board, I still have a lot of fun working out on the Wii Fit. A couple of other titles, bought at the same time as our Wii, are still sitting on the shelf in their cellophane. That says enough, I think. The Wii Fit disc resides on a near-permanent basis in the Wii's slot.

Although I can't claim to have lost much weight by playing them, the balance games are still my favourite. I have achieved four star scores at all except Zazen, Ski Jump and Snowboard Slalom, at which I'm still pretty average. Football Heading, Ski Slalom, Table Tilt, Tightrope Tension, Balance Bubble and Penguin Slide, on the other hand, are much more my cup of tea.

Of those that offer advanced play modes, I have achieved four star scores there, too, except for Ski Slalom, at which I've so far only managed three stars in the more difficult setting. Heading, on the other hand, boasts a top ten score chart containing nothing but my perfect (655) scores. It took me quite a while to work up to that and I got plenty of criticism from Sarah for spending too much time on it.

Next favourite are the aerobics, of which the Super Hula Hoop, Rhythm Boxing and Step Plus are my activities of choice. I frequently also do the Jogging, although I enjoy it much less (and we have the much superior cross-trainer, if I really want a decent running session).

Getting four stars at the boxing is tough and I've only managed it once, even in basic mode. In advanced mode, I can't even remember the moves it tells me to do, so it's a bit of a non-starter, really.

I was useless at the Step games when I started, but am much improved now. I've managed to get within a couple of points of the maximum score, but a perfect routine still eludes me. Of course, it's ultimately not about the score one achieves, but the exercise itself.

Less appealing to me are the muscle and yoga routines. Some of them are very hard for one who's not very limber. Others are just really knackering; which is the point, I know, but since my main goal is to lose weight, I'm better off with a longer aerobics session. I'm lucky if I can score two stars on most of the yoga and muscle activities.

It has to be taken with a pinch of salt, but my Wii Fit age is usually a good few years younger than my actual age when I take my daily body test. Once or twice, it even told me I had the body of someone in their late twenties, although I'm sure it must have been a very fat young man, whoever it had in mind.

All in all, the Wii Fit is a terrific piece of software and very reasonably priced, when you consider that it's supplied with the balance board. The Wii Fit was virtually unobtainable in most of Europe until a couple of months ago. Every time a few units came in, they were sold within minutes, so we had to be very patient before we finally managed to get hold of one. Nintendo has quite a hit on its hands.

Sarah, on the other hand, doesn't like the balance games and prefers the yoga and muscle exercises. As you might imagine, she's also a lot better at them than I am. Where our tastes meet is with the aerobic activities, which we both like to do.

The Wii Fit has garnered some criticism in certain quarters as not being a serious tool for anyone trying to get fit. It's also said that almost no-one still uses it after the first month.

In the case of our family, that's clearly not the case. Sarah and I still use it daily and enjoy doing so. Even Eloïse manages at least a body test on most days. If used with discipline on a daily basis, it can absolutely lead towards becoming fitter. As for those who don't stick with it, you can't blame the product for that. You may as well write off every diet that's ever been devised, too, because there will always be people who abandon those after a few weeks, too.

If I have any criticism of the product at all, it's that you can't skip certain text screens when logging in for a new session. Some of the dialogue gets very repetitive when you use the system on a daily basis. It's a minor quibble, though, with an otherwise excellent product.

When you don't blog very often, it's easy to forget the important stuff, such as Lukie now crawling at great speed around the house. He's been doing this for several weeks now, managing to start in advance of his first birthday. We'd been wondering whether he would.

Lukie's crawl is reminiscent of a soldier crawling under barbed wire, using his elbows and shins to edge forward. That shouldn't be taken to mean that he's slow, though; far from it.

Luuk's first birthday was a quiet affair. The boy himself, as you might imagine, was oblivious to the proceedings and eyed his cake with great suspicion. He was quite reluctant to get his hands dirty on it.

The folks at Bagels & Beans treated us to free drinks on his birthday. They were aware of the big day, thanks to the personalised number plate on his pram. We get quite a few questions about where we got it.

Guitar Hero World Tour is finally out of our PS3, but usurped only by another guitar game, namely Rock Band 2.

A lot of people prefer the Rock Band games to the Guitar Hero ones, but after a week or so of playing Rock Band 2, I have to say that they're very similar in quality.

For example, Guitar Hero WT has better song-playing statistics at the end of each song. It also displays song high scores per difficulty level and clearly indicates songs that have been played perfectly, using gold stars. Rock Band 2, on the other hand, notes only the highest score attained for a song at any difficulty level and doesn't indicate which songs have been played perfectly.

Guitar Hero WT is also harder than Rock Band 2 at any given skill level. Where the two titles have an overlapping track listing, those songs are easier to play at, say, medium difficulty in Rock Band 2 than in Guitar Hero WT.

Guitar Hero WT also looks better than Rock Band 2. The characters have more detail and the player has even greater control over the design and clothing of his character. Rock Band 2 is by no means bad in either area, but Guitar Hero WT is definitely its superior here.

Where Rock Band 2 scores better is in the area of downloadable content, or DLC as it's commonly known. Simply put, there's a lot more of it, and it's even possible to import songs from the original Rock Band title into Rock Band 2.

To do this, one simply installs the latest Rock Band patch, which adds the export feature to the game. Then, one visits the on-line PlayStation Store to purchase an export key for €3, the proceeds from which are licence fees due for the use of the songs in the game's sequel.

With the export key purchased, you export the songs and then simply slip the Rock Band 2 disc back in the drive. Almost all of the songs from Rock Band are now available in Rock Band 2.

The actual game play is quite similar in both titles, with just a few conspicuous differences. For example, Rock Band 2 allows freestyle guitar playing at the end of some songs, similar to the drum fills allowed in Guitar Hero WT. The addition of this feature for the guitar is a welcome bonus.

Career mode from Guitar Hero WT is known as Tour mode in Rock Band 2. It's similar in idea, but the execution is slightly different, in that there are single song sets and mystery set lists, where the songs are basically chosen at random. It's also impossible to change the difficulty level halfway through a set in Rock Band 2, which can lead to the unpleasant discovery that one is unable to finish a multi-song set at the current level. This results in having to abandon the gig, resulting in the forfeiture of a few thousand fans.

That brings me to another difference. One plays just for money in Guitar Hero WT, but one plays for money and fans in Rock Band 2. The notion of playing gigs in different venues, cities and countries has also been enhanced by the ability to unlock vans and planes, which carry one away from one's home town to other cities, then countries and eventually continents. On the way, one can hire staff, such as managers and promoters, although it's unclear to me what effect these actually have on the game.

There are many other differences, such as in the on-line play against remote players, but in the final analysis, I consider both games pretty much equal in terms of the gaming experience that they offer. It's even hard to pick a winner as far as the track list is concerned, because many tracks that are fun to play aren't ones you would necessarily choose to listen to.

Eloïse seems to prefer Guitar Hero WT, though, as she's forever telling me to play "Ozzybourne", necessitating a change of disc in order to keep her happy. It's a shame the songs aren't interchangeable between games, but as I mentioned above, Guitar Hero WT can't even play the songs from earlier games in the GH series.

So, my Guitar Hero WT ranking has pretty much stalled while I now plough my way through the tour mode of Rock Band 2. It remains to be seen whether I will then find myself coming back to one title more than the other. In the end, the tiebreaker may just turn out to be the track listing.

We returned from Tenerife at the beginning of March and I had the best of intentions with regard to getting our photos quickly on-line. Alas, after some initial sorting and deletion of the obvious dross, I lost interest and moved on to other, more pressing matters.

There's nothing like an impending new trip, however, to move one to clear one's backlog. And so it is that our photos of Tenerife are finally public. Almost nothing is captioned, I'm afraid. We just don't have the time to do it any more. The best I can manage is to split the photos across an array of logical albums and remove the superfluous shots, but even that takes longer than you might think.

The new trip I hinted at is to the former Turkish capital of Istanbul, where we'll be heading this coming Wednesday afternoon for nigh on a week. I'm very much looking forward to it.

No doubt I'll emerge from that trip, too, with the intention of putting our photos on-line as soon as we get back.

The trusty Netgear GS116 that serves as our core switch had recently found itself the victim of unexpectedly rapid growth in the number of networked devices in this house, its 16 gigabit-capable ports filled to capacity. When I purchased it, the proposition of needing more than 16 ports within the next three or so years had seemed an unlikely one. It just goes to show.

With the growing number of networked devices comes greater network complexity and so I started to look for a replacement switch that would provide more visibility into what's going on within the network.

Having enjoyed reliable service from various Netgear routers and switches over the last few years, both professionally in the US as well as at home in Mountain View and Amsterdam, that company's offerings were my natural starting point.

Amongst other devices, I looked at the GS748TR and its beefier brother, the GSM7248R. I preferred the latter, but was put off by its relatively high latency, 20 µs for a 64 byte frame. 5 µs is more typical these days.

Ex-colleagues from the Google networking fraternity were adamant that no switch other than the HP ProCurve 2848, a large, heavy, not to mention expensive slab of a device, should even be considered. Such a monster would be overkill for my needs, to be sure, but with the knowledge that I'd already misjudged our growing networking needs in the recent past, I had all the justification I needed for indulging myself with the purchase of this industrial-strength bit-pusher.

After a bit of poking around, I found a Dutch supplier selling the switches quite a bit cheaper than his competitors. I could have bought one second-hand on eBay, but the purchase was expensive enough that I didn't want to risk possible problems with a used unit.

The switch arrived the very next day, if I remember correctly. I placed it in the server room (a grandiose, but nevertheless accurate name for the cupboard under the stairs), but there was nowhere to really put it, because of its size. The GS116 was sitting on top my patch cabinet, but there's no way the ProCurve 2848 could be made to balance there; it was much too big.

I was therefore forced to simply place it on top of the box it came in, which put it far enough away from the patch cabinet that I could only connect a few devices to it for testing. It was important not only to conduct a burn-in, but also to get to grips with configuring the switch, prior to putting it into full service.

Not being a consumer grade device, the switch's factory state meant that some work on it needed to be done before letting it loose in production.

First of all, I upgraded the firmware on the switch to the latest version, I.10.70.

Next, I had to figure out which features were turned on by default and which were off.

For example, the switch's DHCP relay was turned on, but needed to be turned off, because DHCP service on our network is provided by a different device on the same subnet. ssh was turned off, but needed to be on. Jumbo Ethernet frames, desirable on a gigabit network, are similarly off by default.

The lack of proper housing for the new switch provided the perfect opportunity to dispense with the existing patch cabinet, which had, in any case, also reached full capacity, and replace it with a larger model in which the 2848 could be properly mounted.

A first attempt at this yielded a new patch cabinet that was welded together and couldn't be dismantled, which meant that it was too wide to pass through the door of the server room. I would need a patch cabinet that could be assembled in situ.

It took a while to find a cabinet that was deep enough to house the new switch, but also available in kit form. Actually, that bit was quite easy: my installer did the homework for me. What took rather longer, however, was waiting for the cabinet to arrive, once it had been ordered.

Last week, finally, the new cabinet came through and I had my installer come over to do the rewiring. It was a huge job, as every cable had to be unwired from its port in the old patch cabinet, labelled, and then later rewired to a port in the new patch cabinet.

Because the patch panels in the previous cabinet had already reached full capacity, there were also a number of CAT 5e cables emerging from holes in the wall or gaps in the ceiling, from where they fed straight into the previous switch, bypassing the patch panels. These errant cables would now also need to be wired into ports in the new patch panels.

The work took a very full day to complete, thanks to the assembly and mounting of the cabinet on the wall, all of the rewiring, and finally the testing of every port to make sure they were all functional. Only one port turned out to be incorrectly wired and that was quickly rectified.

Thanks to the new switch, I could quickly ascertain that all of the ports that should have been operating at gigabit speed were, in fact, doing so.

The home network had been down for the entire day, which, in this house, makes the telephones unusable and even renders watching TV a tricky proposition. You really realise the value of your network at a moment like that.

Thankfully, though, the work has been completed. I'm very pleased with the new hardware and, at the risk of being proved wrong a second time, I'm confident that the new patch cabinet and switch will allow our network to grow for the next several years without running out of capacity.

Last week, I managed to snap up a copy of the very first issue of the Linux Journal, dating from 1994.

The LJ has had more than 180 issues published over the last fifteen years and I've had a complete run of it from issue two onwards since 1997, if I remember correctly.

Since then, I've had an automatic eBay search keep an eye out for a copy of the first issue, but, to my surprise, it has turned out to be an incredibly hard item to find. I've seen only three of them go in the last eight or nine years, but one of those was as part of a complete set and the owner had had them bound, possibly irrevocably. I can't remember what was unusual about the other copy that I came across, but there was something odd there, too.

Anyway, after all these years of waiting, I've finally completed my set for the princely sum of £5. The Linux Journal has been a constant presence throughout my career in Linux, so there's some sentimental value there, but it's primarily just the collector in me that wanted to complete the run. After all, there's little of practical use in a fifteen year old computer magazine. Not only has the face of Linux changed beyond all recognition in that time, but just think of the environment in which it operates. The Internet explosion was but a glimmer on the horizon back then.

I was the only bidder on this item, which probably says something about me.

I'm nearly as happy as a few years ago, when I purchased a dog-eared set of the original two volume Bell Labs' UNIX Programmer's Manual (yes, a hard copy of the original Seventh Edition UNIX man pages).

I'm a sucker for UNIX and Internet history; that's all there is to it.

Better late than never, we're in Istanbul.

Our flight from Amsterdam was delayed, due to one of the airline staff opening the door of the gangway down to the plane. Evidently, only airport security staff are allowed to do that these days. This effectively tainted the entire G2 gate area, causing the plane to have to be evacuated, after which everyone had to pass through the security check a second time. As you can imagine, this took quite some time.

The flight itself was uneventful. Once on the ground in Turkey, we purchased visas, cleared passport control, retrieved our bags and met up with the man sent by our hotel to collect us.

The traffic was manic and it must have taken us a good hour and forty-five minutes to get from the airport into the heart of Istanbul. I was very glad I hadn't had to drive it myself.

Our hotel is quite lovely and situated in the Sultanahmet area of the city, close to many of the sights of historic interest.

We spent only a couple of minutes in the room after checking in, before venturing out for dinner. The hour was late and it must have been close to 22:00 EEST.

The walk through the cobbled streets to a local restaurant was a lovely one, as was the meal that ensued. I'm in my element with Turkish cuisine and I have no doubt that the next few days are going to hold a lot of tasty treats for all of us.

Anyway, the exploring starts tomorrow and I need a good night's sleep. Eloïse and Lucas didn't hit the sack until around 23:30, but they were little troopers at dinner, so hopefully they'll awake in good humour tomorrow.