I spent some time with the family in Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia earlier this week. Gorgeous places, both. Especially under twenty hours of daylight in June.

We’re still in Finland, looking forward to our second wedding party on Midsummer’s eve this coming Saturday with the family who couldn’t make it to the US last November. :)

“Mr Obama’s Internet strategy was at the heart of his plan to win the Democratic nomination, according to expert Phil Noble, who tracks trends in relation to the Internet and politics.”

Sun & MySQL: A New Hope.
IBM & EnterpriseDB: The Empire Strikes Back.

I’ve been in the market for a media storage and/or backup device for my home network for some time now.

I don’t have any more free bays in my server, so adding space there wasn’t an option. Reusing any of the spare machines cluttering up the basement didn’t make much sense either, from a power or capacity point of view.

I had considered a few consumer network attached storage devices, but nothing really felt right for my needs; an SSH interface for nightly rsync backups, relatively easy setup, and future expandability.

Fortunately, I bounced the idea off of my gadget-savvy co-worker Kashif. He pointed me to a product called Drobo.

At first, it didn’t seem to fit in with what I wanted to do, primarily networkability and an SSH interface. But after watching the demo, I was sold. I was going to make it work somehow.

Drobo is intended to plug into your Mac or PC as an external USB drive. To your computer, it looks like any other external storage device, but while it just appears a chunk of capacity, Drobo uses a hot-swappable pseudo-RAID approach internally to protect data and provide extreme flexibility for future expansion.

That said, Drobo only officially works with Mac and PC. You can format it in their mutually incompatible filesystem formats; HFS+ and NTFS respectively, or share it between platforms with the old FAT32 standard.

To mount it under Linux, I had to choose to use either FAT32, NTFS-3G on FUSE, or ext3. In order to get the ext3 support, you’re supposed to use the DroboShare, which costs an extra $200.

Instead, I used that money to get two 500GB hard drives and approached ext3 support a different way. I connected the Drobo to my Linux server and formatted it as I had for the new drive I mounted internally last year.

This meant that the storage isn’t directly accessible on the network, but I could easily share it out via the server. This also makes backups from the server faster.

Following are the steps I took:

• Unbox the Drobo and put in two drives from Newegg. (Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM).
• Plugged it into my Windows XP machine to check for firmware updates, not to format the drive. There were none so I could have skipped the step.
• Plugged it into my CentOS 4.6 Linux server, then ran lshw to find the device name (/dev/sdc).
• Entered the following commands to format the drives and mount the Drobo at startup:
  [root@192.168.1.1]# /sbin/mke2fs -j -i 262144 -L Drobo -m 0 -O sparse_super,^resize_inode -q /dev/sdc
  [root@192.168.1.1]# mkdir /drobo
  [root@192.168.1.1]# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc /drobo
  [root@192.168.1.1]# vi /etc/fstab
          /dev/sdc   /drobo  ext3    defaults     0 0
• Reboot and chown’d the filesystem to my rsync user name.

Everything seems to work well for now, but I’ll post an update when I add capacity later this year.

I suspect I’ll have to make some changes in the future, but for easily adding expandable protected storage to a home Linux server the Drobo is a highly recommended option.

Another tip from Kashif: use the promo code “Cali” when checking out at drobostore.com to save $50.

I spent ten days on business in Charlotte, North Carolina in the middle of February. The city and its metropolitan area were much larger than I had expected.

The airport’s big, the IBM complex is massive (it used to be the home of 6,000 manufacturing jobs), and the city really does have a relative importance I hadn’t realized (forgive my Northeastern, non-finance sector prejudices). On top of that it’s growing fast.

I found out later that had I stuck around a few more days I could have stopped by the SIRDUG meeting and had a chance to hear from DB2 gurus Robert Catterall and Roger Sanders at the same facility. Damn.

I didn’t have much time to see the sights, but I did grab some not-so spectacular pictures of downtown.

One of the highlights was a Saturday afternoon trip to the outskirts for some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had, at a biker bar called Mac’s.

Perhaps the most incredible part of the trip was that not one, but two places sold Genny Cream Ale by the bottle. The importance of this can not be overstated, though I don’t have time to go into the details just yet…

I was shocked this morning to hear about the near-hijacking of a short domestic flight in New Zealand on the BBC (More coverage from the NZ Herald and CNN).

Catherine and I flew to Auckland from the same airport in Blenheim less than 2 months ago as we returned north from the wine country at the end of our honeymoon.

We enjoyed many great experiences in New Zealand, but we regard our time in the Marlborough region as the most pleasurable part of our trip (my wife sure liked the wines, mussels and farmer’s market. I particularly dug the beer).

I hadn’t told Cat about how small this particular airport is, nor did I realize how petite the actual plane would be. Those particular details were best left for the time we actually got there - why ruin such a nice weekend?

I can’t say I wasn’t worried about how much the plane could carry though… I shipped home some 50 pounds of laundry and souvenirs the day before we planned to leave.

The rental car return amounted to leaving the car anywhere in the small lot and dropping off the keys at an unattended kiosk. I suppose this really isn’t a problem if you can hear the horn sounded by the panic button at the far end of the tarmac.

Taking off, the plane generates a surprising amount of thrust for two propellers. Cat shut her eyes, clenched her teeth, and swore to exact her revenge on me for most of the 2 hour flight, but I really enjoyed it. For the most part…

We came down into the remnants of a tropical “anti-cyclone” when approaching Auckland. I really didn’t need to see how unstable our approach was looking through the front window even from the back of the plane, but the landing was remarkably smooth.

The crew from Eagle Air who operated the flight for Air New Zealand were both excellent pilots and great hosts. It’s a credit to the company to hear how well they handled the trouble in the sky yesterday.

New Zealand is a beautiful country well served by its domestic network of short flights. The Marlborough region in particular would have been out of reach for us if we had to take another ferry ride and drive hundreds of kilometers back up the North Island.

It’s disheartening that this type of incident took place, not least for the unfortunate folks whose lives were put in jeopardy.

Sigh.

Well, not exactly this week. I gathered a few links from the end of January that I figured would have some blogworthiness to them.

Instead of dedicating a whole post to each, here they are with a bit of commentary.

First up, because it’s my sister’s first appearance on TV, are Mona’s remarks to local news in St. Louis on what the female demographic means to this year’s presidential campaigns. While it is a Fox affiliate, congrats are still in order. :)

Yossi Leon announced that Zend Studio for Eclipse was tantalizing close to release. We heard a few more details at NYPHP about its launch. The Zend page carries the official announcement.

If you’re wondering exactly how the new Zend Studio for Eclipse differs from the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools), this chart breaks it all down.

Jon Udell backs up my “.htm is dogsqueeze” argument in his much more eloquent .NET-specific rant, .aspx considered harmful.

I caught a glance of this article on naming the Triborough Bridge for Robert F. Kennedy in the New York Times.

I too am a little weary of the Kennedy badge on so many public buildings, but have an alternate suggestion… Rename the bridge for John F. Kennedy, and rechristen his namesake disaster of an airport for someone worthy of its reputation for mismanagement, George W. Bush.

And finally, though it pains me greatly to see Tom Brady’s name on a Web site I lovingly crafted for all that is good, there is an interesting press release on how IBM and the NFL have gone about making all those random stats available to announcers in real time.

That about wraps it up. Enjoy the weekend, I know I will.

I recently dug up the following set of notes for a video Web site I was planning a little over 2 years ago. I brainstormed a bit, but in the days before YouTube, I didn’t think the video encoding, storage or bandwidth needs would be feasible.

I still think it’s a fun idea with a lot of potential. Whether I ever find the time to put it together, I don’t know. In the meantime, enjoy…

Editor’s note: the cats are now six and we all live in a house in Bridgeport, CT.

Between working from home three days a week and moving from a two-bedroom apartment to a studio, I’ve begun to really take notice how often my two cats have at it during the day.

I’m using this site to prove my hypothesis that despite her smaller size, Tarball normally wins the fights. It’s also my belief that Tahoma picks most of the fights.

The contenders
Tahoma and Tarball are a pair of 4 year old siblings that I adopted from New Yorkers for Companion Animals when I lived in Manhattan. Tarball is a 7lb solid black female. Tahoma is an 8lb male tabby. Both hail from Queens, NY. Both now reside in Stamford, CT.

The battles
Most battles only last about 3 minutes, and end when one of the contestants runs away, either out of boredom, hunger, or exhaustion. They never draw blood, and their tails never fluff out, so despite the intensity, no one is hurt and I know they are playing.

Scoring
It’s my general feeling that Tarball wins these battles, but I’ve come up with a scoring system to confirm that. Since most battles seem to start when both cats are sleeping peacefully (1, 2, 3) on my bed, and one shifts position which annoys the other, I will consider the “ring” to be my full-size bed.

Result tally
For every given battle, the following information should be tracked for statistical purposes.

Rate this battle
One to five stars.

Pictures and video
Thumbnails, all time best battles, highlight montages.