I was listening to this interview with Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen by Nicole Simon — one of her podcasts in advance of Digital Lifestyle Day in Munich — on my way home this afternoon.

Nicole starts off the podcast by telling a version of my Hey, Plazes works! story from reboot. Which just goes to prove that success stories are viral. In Nicole’s version of the story, I become the subject — “a person from Canada” — rather than the object, switching places with Ton and Martin). It’s still a cool story, though.

DLD sounds cool, and if it weren’t full, I would have tried to combine it with my trip to LIFT the week after.

I’ve created a frappr map for ruk.ca — if you’re a reader, and want to take frappr for a spin, feel free to add yourself to the map.

During my visit to the Confederation Centre Public Library on Tuesday, I noticed again how “out in public” their public access Internet terminals are: they’re all arranged in a big “L” shape, in plain view of the checkout desk and in plain view of anyone arriving at or leaving the library. The arrangement means that it’s essentially impossible to have any meaningful sense of privacy when using the terminals, and means that “public access” really does mean “access, in public.”

When I was a kid, the public library afforded a rare opportunity for me to find information in an unfettered environment. Indeed libraries were staffed by people, I had the impression, who would be willing to go to the wall for my right to be unfettered. And so if I, as a 14 year old, wanted, say, to see a picture of a vagina, or to otherwise follow my curiosity towards any of the myriad other things that a 14 year old mind is curious about, I could do so simply by wandering the stacks or using the card catalogue. I could then settle down in a comfortable chair and explore the inner workings of the female reproductive system in relative privacy.

As the Internet replaces, or at least enhances, the printed holdings of libraries, I think it’s important that we not lose that right to access information without oversight. This is especially true as governments look to libraries, and other public access Internet sites, to fill the role of making up the “digital divide,” getting people online who can’t otherwise afford to do so.

The Internet is an amazing and powerful tool, a tool that’s even more amazing and more powerful out here on the edge of civilization where our libraries and bookstores have small collections compared to big cities.

I can think of many things that the Internet can be useful for — finding information about where to get an abortion, looking up divorce laws, finding out about that strange growth under your knee, even looking up information about universities or colleges in far away places if you’re in a family that wants to keep you close to home — that it would be inconvenient or impossible to use the Internet for in a situation where your friends and neighbours can easily look over your shoulder.

If we’re going to decide that public access Internet use is going to have to do for a certain portion of society, I think it’s important that we have respect for the privacy rights of those people, and at the very least reconsider the physical setup of public terminals so that they afford at least as much privacy as curling up with a book in a comfortable chair would.

I didn’t know that Kinko’s, or FedExKinko’s as it’s now called, had expanded to Canada. There’s even a store over in Halifax.

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.