When I was in Montreal in last 2005, I happened into the Ta-Ze in the anachronistically-named Centre Eaton on Sainte-Catherine near University. The store sells nothing both olives and olive-related products — oil, soap, books. You can taste all of their products in the store, and they seemed quite knowledgeable about the differences between different varieties.

The store is related to the Turkish Taris Zeytin company.

I set [[Oliver]] up with the BBC’s Clifford the Big Red Dog page this afternoon and went into the kitchen to start dinner. When I came back to check on him ten minutes later, he was looking at the online advertising rates page for The Buzz. This was either due to an accidental click somewhere, or Oliver has something to advertise.

There’s now somewhat-public-access WiFi at the Confederation Centre Public Library in [[Charlottetown]]. I say “somewhat” because they’ve WEP-enabled the network, and you need a WEP password to connect. The password is made freely available at the front desk, though, so as long as the library is open you shouldn’t have trouble getting online.

Of course the Library is now a Plaze too.

Initial impression from 30 minutes of use this afternoon: seems like I’m sharing the bandwidth with hundreds of other people; everything is slow as molasses. I may have simply caught them on a bad day; then again, the province’s network isn’t known for having buckets of bandwidth available.

Back in 2004 I wrote about my habit of naming servers after my grandparents. Well, earlier this year, after naming my iMac louise, my iBook ada and my [[WRT54G]] nettie, I ran out of grandparents.

So when it came time to name the new Linksys NSLU2 on the weekend, I had to reach back a generation: I named the device edgar after my great-grandfather Edgar Caswell.

Here’s the obituary that ran in The Northland Post in Cochrane, Ontario on August 24th, 1950 after Edgar died:

Edgar Caswell died early Sunday morning in his 79th year, taking from the life of Cochrane one of its earliest pioneers and most energetic, enthusiastic citizens as well as its public servant with the longest record of service. Northern Ontario lost one of its most efficient and most-honoured fire-fighters and an untiring prophet of the country’s greatness.

When Mr. Caswell resigned as fire chief of the town in January 1946, he had completed more than 29 years of service in that post, and had been nearly 33 years on the staff of the town. Then in his 74th year, he was unable to endure an easy life, and built a new service station operating it until the end of the following year. Even a stroke could not keep him down for long, and although he had suffered a couple of periods of enforced idleness this year he was “on the go” practically until he was admitted to the Lady Minto Hospital last Friday. Just the week before he had taken his brother John to Timmins, Schumacher, Iroquois Falls and other communities to show him the sights, rather grudgingly permitting his son-in-law to drive, and had followed that excursion with a trip to Lowbush.

Edgar Caswell was born in Carleton Place, Ont., on June 2nd, 1872, the third child in a family of 11. While he was still young the family took a first jump north to Cobden, in the Ottawa valley, and there Ed entered in partnership with his brother Bob upon a brickworks and building enterprise which prospered for several years until a local building boom began to subside. Bob scouted west, Ed through Northern Ontario, and when the former died in 1907 Ed was ready for a move.

It was at the beginning of 1909 that Ed reached Cochrane, his family following in the spring. He carried on as a builder and contractor, one of his first contracts being for the foundations of the new station. Then he started a grocery store, which Mrs. Caswell carried on for a time while her husband worked out of town on railway construction. Following an attack of typhoid, however, he returned to town, sold the store, and entered the service of the municipality in May, 1913. During the next 30 years he filled practically every position on the town staff outside the offices. He was town foreman and building inspector for many years, and at one time even served as acting chief of police.

Mr. Caswell’s period of residence here of course covered the three great fires -1910, 1911 and 1916- and the many smaller ones. His possessions were wiped out in the 1911 conflagration, and he became fire chief shortly after the 1916 fire. It was in this capacity that he won widest recognition, not only in district, but in provincial and national circles. He was president of the Temiskaming Firemen’s Association for the year 1922-23, and of the District of Cochrane Firemen’s Association 1940-41.

Outside the strict line of his duties, Mr. Caswell has shared in the work of organization connected with most of the important events in the municipality’s history. He had much of the responsibility for organization during the terrible epidemics which scourged the community, the ‘flu epidemics and the fever. He was untiring not only in connection with such events as firemen’s tournaments and conventions, but with every type of town and district celebration, and served as vice-chairman of the committee for the recent Old Home Week until about three months ago when even he realized that he would have to “slow down” somewhat.

Mr. Caswell made it a practice, however, while a town employee, not to serve officially on town boards and associations. He made one exception, for the Cochrane Board of Trade, on whose executive council he served continuously from the time of the Board’s reorganization in 1943 until he submitted his resignation this spring. He had been offered the presidency if his health permitted, and a few weeks ago, following resignation from the council was informed that recommendation was going forward to the Board that he be made a life member and honourary president. Under the constitution such action requires several months to complete, and he did not live to receive these honours in a formal way.

From the time of his arrival here he was an active member and office-bearer in his church, first the Methodist congregation, then the local union, and since 1925 the United Church congregation of which he was an elder form the time the Session was constituted.

His exceptionally retentive memory made Mr. Caswell a walking history of the town, and in recognition of his contribution to the printed story Mrs. B.D. Marwick’s recent history, “Northland Post”, was dedicated to him.

Mrs. Caswell passed away in March, 1946, following a tragic fire accident. Surviving are three daughters, one son, six grandchildren, and on great-grandchild. The children are Vera (Mrs. R.E. Wilson) and Ada of Cochrane, Lena of Toronto, and Ross of Cochrane. There are also two brothers and two sisters living: John of Beachburg, Reuben of Cobden, Mrs. Mary Collins of Cochrane, and Della (Mrs. Morgan Doyle) of Finch, Ont.

St. Paul’s United Church was filled to capacity on Tuesday afternoon when the funeral service following a short service in the home, was conducted by Rev. C.C. Gilbert, assited by Rev. H.C. Mateer of South Porcupine. Members of the volunteer Fire Brigade formed a guard-of-honour, and the pallbearers were all men who had served with Mr. Caswell on the Brigade for many years: Messrs. Gordon Cook, Murray Fingland, Donat Gamelin, Bert Pollock, Alex David and Earl Hurst. Interment was in Cochrane Cemetery.

Among those present from other communities were Mr. Robert Jones of Toronto; Mr. Reuben Caswell of Cobden, (his brother John had been here just a few days before); Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Collins, Cobden; Mr. and Mrs. Ted Thomas, Timmins; Mr. and Mrs. J.S. MacLaren and Jean, Iroquois Falls; Mrs. Dave Price, Lowbush; Mr. and Mrs. Bob Best and Miss Lena Caswell, Toronto; Miss Grace Wilson and Mr. Bert Wilson, Kingston, Representing out -of-town fire brigades were chief Wm. Stanley of Timmins; chief M. McMillan of Schumacher; inspector Jos. R. Miller of the Fire Marshal’s office; chief Geo. McKelvie and Mrs. McKelvie, Hill-Clark-Francis brigade, New Liskeard; Mrs. Roy Grills, new Liskeard; Mrs. Roy Grills, New Liskeard; chief Herb Wilkes, Iroquois Falls; chief Ed Campbell, Montrock; chief Secord Robinson and Mr. A.P. Griffin of Kapuskasing.

A very unusual incident at the beginning of the week testified to the widespread and high regard in which Mr. Caswell was held. Flowers and sprays were at first refused because of the express embargo made necessary by the impending railway strike, but then the C.N.R. ordered that an exception be made for floral tributes for the deceased only, and flowers came through while the trains continued to run.

I finally got down to cobbling together an affordable and practical way of flying over to Switzerland for LIFT.

Total cost of flying Charlottetown to Geneva on Air Canada, leaving January 31 and returning February 5: $5263.

Cost I actually paid, by combining an Air Canada flight to London with an Easyjet flight from London to Geneva: $997.

Of course I have to bear the cost of a bus ticket from Heathrow to Stanstead, but as long as that costs less than $4266, I’ll be ahead of the game.

My mentor as regards data backup is David Cairns, Director of Computer Services at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Many years ago David and I were talking about backup systems, and David suggested that backups should be designed to address the situation when hard disk storage systems fail, not if they fail. In other worlds, design as though you expect failure to happen. Any minute now. David’s wisdom has stayed with me, and I’ve always tried to keep an extra eye on how I’m backing up my data.

For the last year I’ve been doing a full nightly backup of the [[Reinvented]] servers to Strongspace. They offer a network-based backup solution that’s cheap and simply to use; I posted about my positive experiences in dealing with them back in August.

The problem with using Strongspace for a nightly backup was that it was hard to do a simple incremental backup (i.e. only sending over what changed in the previous 24 hours) because I was sending the data as encrypted, compressed tar archives (encrypted because no matter how secure they claim to be, I didn’t want to leave my data, in the clear, on somebody else’s servers; compressed because I wanted to limited bandwidth usage). While Strongspace supports the use of tools like rsync, that really wouldn’t work in my situation, so I was ending up sending everything, every night. About 2GB worth.

Eventually my friends over at [[ISN]] noticed that I had suddenly started using an extra 60GB of bandwidth every month, and politely suggested that I either cut down or pay more.

I opted for the “cut down” approach, and resolved to find a new backup solution.

What I settled on was a Linksys NSLU2 and a 300GB Maxtor OneTouch USB/Firewire hard drive.

The NSLU2 is a neat little Linux-based device with the sole purpose of allowing USB external hard drives to be connected to an Ethernet LAN. While I could have plugged the new 300GB drive directly into my iMac, I wanted it tucked away in the server room, and I wanted it to be available to all the workstations and servers on our LAN here without depending on my iMac to be up and running.

I started off trying to use the NSLU2 in its stock condition, using the web interface to set up SAMBA shares that could be accessed from my Linux and OS X machines. While this worked fairly well, and was rock-solid on the iMac-NSLU2 side, I ran into reliability problems with using smbmount on the Linux servers to mount the NSLU2 shares, so I decided to upgrade the unit’s firmware using the open source Unslung replacement: this was a fairly painless process, similar to installing OpenWRT on my Linksys router. In about 30 minutes I was ready to go with SSH into the NSLU2.

In terms of the actual backing up, I settled on a simple Perl script from Norway called rsyncbackup that lets me use rsync over SSH to sync selected files and folders from my Linux and OS X machines to a copy on the Maxtor drive. After an initial sync that took many hours to complete for each machine — there was a lot of data to transfer over! — the daily sync now happens in only a couple of minutes because rsyncbackup is only moving the changed files, not everything.

I’m not going to give up on Strongspace entirely — it’s still nice to have an off-site backup in case the whole server room goes up in flames. But I’ll only run the data up there every week or so, which will make [[ISN]] happy.

The only hitch I’ve run into so far with the system is that my old IBM PC 300GL, which is the “old webserver” that’s still in operation as a DNS server, backup webserver, and general purpose workhorse, started to crash every time the backup routine started. Crash like “needed to be hard rebooted.” I eventually traced the problem back to the Promise-brand 20268 IDE hard drive controller that, it seems from what I’ve found in Google, has problems in DMA mode in certain situations with certain Linux kernels. Rather than trying to hack my kernel, I settled for simply turning DMA off; the drive got a lot slower (about 10x), but it’s stable now, and I don’t really need the speed given what the server is tasked for.

Otherwise, backups are purring along silently every night, and I can sleep a little easier know that when a disk fails, I’ll not have lost client web pages, photos of Oliver, or pithy posts in this space.

There have been two interesting developments in the world of brand-names here in Canada recently, both of which have been very public and somewhat confusing.

The first one is most obvious, as I can’t imagine there’s a television-watching Canadian who doesn’t know that “Cottonelle is changing its name to Cashmere.” For those of you from outside of Canada, Cottonelle is the brand name used by Scott Paper Limited here in Canada for “Canada’s #1 selling bathroom tissue.”

You, like I, may have wondered why Scott Paper, after years of drumming us over the head with the “you can feel the cottony softness… Cottonelle” television commercials, would change horses in mid-stream. It turns out that the change is the result of a complicated set of corporate maneuverings:

• Scott Paper Company, a U.S. company, was founded in 1879 in Philadelphia (reference).
• Westminster Paper Mills, a Canadian company, was founded in 1922 in British Columbia (reference).
• In 1954, Scott Paper Company acquired a 50.1% controlling interest in Westminster Paper Mills (reference). The relationship allowed Westminster Paper Mills to use its new parent company’s brand names in Canada.
• Westminster Paper Mills changed its name to Scott Paper Limited in 1964 (reference).
• The brand-name Cottonelle was introduced by Scott Paper Company in the U.S. in 1972, and sometime thereafter was used by Scott Paper Limited to market toilet paper in Canada.
• In 1997, multinational giant Kimberly-Clark acquired Scott Paper Company (reference) and, with the acquisition, controlling interest in the Canadian Scott Paper Limited.
• Partly due to concerns from Canada’s Competition Bureau, in 1997 Kimberly-Clark sold its interest in Scott Paper Limited to the Canada-based Kruger Company.
• As part of the sale, Scott Paper Limited was given a 10-year license to use certain Kimberly-Clark brands, like Cottonelle, in Canada.
• With the brand licensing agreement soon to expire, in 2004, Scott Paper Limited began the brand transition from Cottonelle to Cashmere (reference).

And so we now wipe with Cashmere, not Cottonelle.

Slightly more dramatic is the situation with Radio Shack, which sort of split into two:

• Radio Shack was founded in 1921 in Boston (reference).
• In 1963, Radio Shack was acquired by the Tandy Corporation and in 1968 Tandy opened the first Radio Shack stores in Canada (reference).
• Tandy Corporation spun off its foreign operations into a company called InterTan in 1986.
• InterTan spun off its UK operations in 1999 and Australian businesses in 2001 (reference), leaving it with operations in Canada.
• In 2004, InterTan was acquired by Circuit City Stores Inc., a U.S. electronics retailer.
• The same week, Radio Shack launched a law suit against InterTan, alleging that InterTan had breached the terms of its brand license agreement.
• In 2005, Radio Shack won its case, when a Texas judge ordered InterTan to stop using the Radio Shack brand name.
• Circuit City subsquently announced that it would re-brand its 900 Canadian Radio Shack stores to The Source by Circuit City.
• The following week, Radio Shack announced that it would be forming a Canadian subsidiary to oversee its expansion into Canada, using the Radio Shack brand name.

The result is that we now have two separate and distinct electronics retailers in Canada: Radio Shack, owned by U.S.-based Radio Shack Corporation through a Canadian subsidiary, and The Source by Circuit City, owned by U.S.-based Circuit City.

If you live in Charlottetown you may have been confused that the Confederation Court Mall location of Radio Shack got re-branded in the middle of last summer while the Charlottetown Mall location has retained its Radio Shack branding. This is about the change: apparently the Radio Shack sign is coming down tonight, and if you visit tomorrow morning you’ll be shopping at The Source by Circuit City.

At Christmas time, however, my [[Dad]] was shopping at the Radio Shack in Burlington, Ontario and noticed that it was still a Radio Shack. He asked the store for information and was told that the store was, in fact, one of the new Radio Shack-controlled stores. A call to the store tonight confirms that the Burlington location was the first of the new crop to open, in November of 2005, and that there are currently 9 locations open in Canada.

Research assistance for this post from Betty Jeffery, University of Prince Edward Island, through the isle@ask program.

Browsing Google Earth using reporter Declan Butler’s excellent avian flu map layer, I found a report that hit close to home: on October 19, 2005, 35 swans were found dead of H5N1 in Viroviticko-Podravska County, Croatia (according to this FAO report). That’s about 35 miles from the area of Croatia where my relatives live in Disnik. Fortunately there have been no reports of human to human (or even bird to human) transmission in Croatia to this point.

The World Health Organization has an RSS feed for Disease Outbreak News. Right now you’ll find a lot of information about the avian influenza situation in Turkey. The same information is available on a companion web page.

Last week I made the mistake of watching Black Dawn: The Next Pandemic, a fifth estate special on [[CBC]] Television. This is a “fact-based docu-drama” that takes the viewer through a fictional avian influenza pandemic as it spreads around the world. The essential message of the special was “there’s very little you can do except wash your hands, and you have a pretty good chance of dying anyway.” I can only assume that their goal was to shake us out of complacency; on that level, they did their job.

Unfortunately they dropped the ball on the “steps you can take to mitigate the problem” end of things, leaving we viewers to simply cower in fear. They did prepare a Answers to Questions page that is somewhat helpful, but the program itself could have used a companion hour with practical advice: show us the best way to wash our hands, for example. Run through a checklist of good items to have around the house. Offer suggestions for doing things like shopping during a pandemic.

If the pandemic is, as the special suggests, inevitable, it would seem a prudent use of broadcast time to concentrate on offering useful, practical advice now instead of waiting until it’s too late and we’re all wrapped up in panic.

It’s been four days since the CBC News updated its visual and sonic identity (details). And I must say that I absolutely love the changes: the typography is clean, crisp and bold, the sonic pageantry is dialed way back, the “graphics for graphics sake” quotient is greatly reduced, and everything seems to have an extra spring in its step.

I even like the new Compass introduction: short, to the point, and great looking.

Favourite change: the [too] subtle “when the item we’re promoting now is coming up” analog clock they used during The National has been replaced with an actual count of the minutes until said item airs: much more useful.

Directional change: Boomer now appears on the other side of Bruce on Compass (I like the new weather graphics too).

Subtlest change: all the Compass reporters got new socks for the ends of their microphones.

I’ve heard lots of grumbling about the CBC “wasting lots of money on stupid design changes when things were perfectly good before.” But I don’t agree: design matters, and I laud any organization that invests in it; good design lets CBC News communicate more effectively, and that makes everything they do more valuable.