It's been a long time

Wow.  It's been a long time since I've written anything here.  Work really got in the way of most things and the blog got set to the side. I will soon have a lot more free time to work on non-work things, and the blog should get a bit more active.

Since the last post, I've changed jobs, and discovered I have Swiss ancestors. It's led to a new outlook on living here in Switzerland. 

It's been awhile

Indeed, it's been quite a while.  About 3-1/2 years since the last post.

It's been a busy time.  And mostly I've been hanging out on FaceBook, or a bit on Google+.  My personal server had some disk problems a couple years back, and I decided it wasn't worth fixing.  It was costing quite a bit each year to do the server housing.  However, it was still WAY cheaper than going with a hosted server.  But all I needed was some web hosting.

Still, I needed to do a bit of data recovery.  I eventually got around to doing it even though I was busy doing other things for the most part.  But I got the data back, and then just ignored it.

Eventually, I thought that FB was getting a bit too much of my attention.  Of course, this is over at Google, technically... Anyways, I figured I would put a couple of my websites back so that they at least had a bit of the old content.

I might end up doing more of this.  I might not do too much more here on Blogger.  It's pretty easy to post things here though.  And I don't have to deal with maintaining any code, which is good.

The Sonos boxes are still providing me music, and they do a great job at it.  They still get music from a ReadyNAS, albeit a newer version that has Intel Atom processors instead of the open-source Sparc hardware.  The Atom processor is quite a bit faster though.

As for work stuff.  I probably won't discuss too much of that.  Other to say I've been doing a bit with PostgreSQL, an open-source relational database that's pretty good.

Logitech puts the Squeezebox out to pasture

This is a bit of sad news for Squeezebox fans.  I myself had moved on to a Sonos setup awhile back.  Though there was always a little bit of doubt if it was absolutely the right decision.  With the decision of Logitech to discontinue the Squeezebox, no more doubt exists that I made the right decision.

Still, I loved the sound of my Squeezebox Boom.  And it was always nice to be able to see what was playing on it by just looking at it, which was the major advantage over the Sonos.

The Squeezebox Boom!

And then I found a job. Which was bad for me writing stuff on this blog, but it was great for my cashflow.

During the first couple of months working, I decided I needed to upgrade the my music player from the Noxon 2 to something else. Many of my friends loved their Squeezeboxes, and since the Squeezbox's server ran on the NSLU2, I decided I'd take the plunge and buy one. The model I bought was the Squeezebox Boom.

First the good things. The Squeezebox Boom is pretty much self contained, with one big exception. There is the possibility of using either a wired or wireless network connection. The display is easy to read. The size is convenient. And, the sound is great.

But, there were some serious drawbacks. First off, the version of the Squeeze Server that supported the Squeezebox Boom didn't work on the NSLU2 so well. Second, I have most of my music encoded as Apple Lossless formatted files, I found out that my music files were required to be transcoded on the way to the device. I was surprised, as the Squeezebox was advertised as being able to play Apple Lossless files. And, it still is advertised as being able to play Apple Lossless files. You may have to go and select the 'features' part of the website. With this, I'd expect that the device should be able to play the music. However, the transcoding is to FLAC, so it sounds decent when it gets to the device.

So, a big issue with the Squeezebox devices is that they are more or less 'dumb' clients. That is, most of the work is taken care of on the server, with the device pretty much just a set of speakers and a display with a remote. This means that you have to have a server doing the heavy work. You can use your desktop PC to do this, but then it has to be turned on. Rather than use my desktop to serve up the tunes I decided to get a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo network attached storage device and stream the music files from that. Well, it worked, but not so great. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that the MySQL database that the Squeezebox Server was using to keep track of the music files was horribly tuned. Adding a bit of RAM to the device and tuning the database fixed most of the problems. There were still a few problems with the Squeezebox not playing as instantly as desired, but worked okay. Okay, that is until Logitech released an update to the server. This new version took more resources than my little ReadyNAS had, so I remained with the old version. However, the NOXON worked great with this setup, other than it couldn't play the Apple Lossless at all.

Another option for the Squeezebox is to use it with Logitech's online service, which works pretty good. However, it does occasionally drop out, which can be annoying.

So, that was pretty much it, until Apple came out with Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard has what's called the 'Bonjour Sleep Proxy'. And what the Bonjour Sleep Proxy does is to sleep your system until you need it, for things like printers, your iTunes server or whatever you might connect remotely to your mac for. Suddenly, the Squeezebox Boom could just start the mac when it needed to and not require it to be on all the time.

I ended up getting a mac mini server for all sorts of reasons, and one of the things I used it for was to run the Squeezebox Server software. This worked okay, but the Squeezebox Server software had a memory leak that wrote something like 20GB or more of swapfiles.

Eventually, I started looking at upgrading the ReadyNAS, which at this point is doing duty as the backup server for the mac mini. I noticed that Netgear had done some significant updates to their product line, and I got a ReadyNAS Ultra 2. This device is many, many times faster than the old Duo, and many times quieter too. So far the Squeezebox Server seems to work pretty good.

Then, there is the issue of what to use for a remote. The web client for the Squeezebox is okay, having gone through a recent update that allows one to choose the volume a bit more granularly. But a big issue is that Logitech doesn't provide a remote iPhone/iPad app. I've been using iPeng, which is pretty good, but this is something I think Logitech should really provide with the system. It'd be great if Logitech underwrote iPeng.

All in all, the Squeezbox Boom is a great sounding system. But the infrastructure required to get music to the actual box is involved. You either need to have your PC feeding it files, or you have to set up a dedicated server. It would be great if you could just access files from a file share and be done with it, but you can't.

The Noxon

So, I got to the point where I didn't want my music server to run on my laptop. The little iBook was pretty good, but I didn't want to deal with music playing on it at all times. I just wanted something to play music from the NSLU2.

So I did a bit of research and considered players from Terratec, Roku and SlimSystems.

Roku had the soundbridge. It was a fairly cool looking cylindrical player. There was a smaller, cheaper version as well. The big problem was that my home network was now 802.11G, and the soundbridge only did 802.11B. That meant slowing down my wireless network. That wouldn't do.

Slim Systems had their Squeezebox, which is still a popular system. The problem with the Squeezebox is that it was still way too expensive, and it only had support for 802.11B networking.

Then there was the Noxon 2 from Terratec. It was basically a Phillips Streamium. Swisscom had a decent deal on the Noxon, so I got one. I was able to configure the Twonky UPNP server to feed music to the Noxon 2. The Noxon also supported more modern wireless and wireless encryption, so that it would work with my wireless network much better. I could run Elgato's EyeConnect software to allow the Noxon to play from iTunes. This worked okay. But I tended to use the Noxon to listen to Internet radio stations, especially to NPR when I had my bike set up on rollers to do some exercise. I'd use the Noxon for a couple of years. I was never really happy with it, as Terratec had made a special model for Swisscom and then abandoned it while upgrading the firmware for all of the other Noxon 2 units. But the Noxon did have pretty decent sound.

Backing up your blog

Just because I was reading a story about some blogs getting deleted from a hosting service, and it's just a good idea to make backups. You can make a backup by looking at the instructions on how to make backups from Google.

iPhone Picture

I thought I would post a picture from my iPhone just to see how it turned out. This is a picture I took at the Wiedikon train station in Zürich on my way home from work tonight. When it is dark, the windows in this bridge over the station have a rather eerie look to them.

A post from the iPhone

I downloaded an app that allows writing posts on Blogger from my iPhone. So far it seems okay. The name of the program is BlogPressLite. Quite a few reviewers did not like the program as it requires a Blogger.com account. That is not a problem for me, however. One nice feature is that it seems that you can edit offline and then upload to the web.

More music server stuff.

So, after awhile of living in Switzerland, I decided it'd be nice to be able to access my music over the network. To do this, I'd have to rip all my CDs, what I brought to Switzerland and have in some nice storage cases, though they do take up a bit of space.

I thought it'd be nice to have some sort of server to store the music. At first I thought a PC would be good, but they were to expensive and too loud. At some point I stumbled upon the Linksys NSLU2. This is a great little device with a 266mhz processor and 32mb of memory. It draws something like 3 watts of power when not connected to the USB drives that one can connect to it. It runs Linux as an OS, and as the source was available, people figured out how to modify and replace the OS. When I think back, this little machine is several times the machine that the VAX 11/780 we had in college. It has no fan, and is absolutely quiet. I found a fanless external disk drive that was also fairly quiet and that was my hardware configuration.

The next thing I needed was a way to serve the music to iTunes. The answer was what was called mt-daapd at that point, and is now called the firefly media server. Firefly does a great job of serving up to iTunes. The only big drawback is that you don't get coverflow. But, if you just want to fire up iTunes and play random music, this is a good way to do it.

This was a great solution for a bit, but my little G4 iBook didn't have that much power, and so I started thinking about another way to listen to music....

Music over the net.

One thing you miss incredibly when you're living in a country other than your own is the radio that you had in your country. I suppose there are some interesting Swiss radio stations. And, actually I rather like Radio Swiss Jazz, but one channel isn't really enough. Sure, there's World Radio Switzerland as well, but the music they play on the station is stuff I just can't stand, even though I like the content. There was also the English Show in Basel, but they had the same problem.

After awhile I decided it would be good to check out the options on the Internet. At first there were a few stations on iTunes. It's still a pretty good option. Stations like those of RadioIO are pretty decent, even if they're all music and no news. Of course for news there's always the option of listening to NPR, which I can get over iTunes, various network players and even my cable TV box. However, I still end up watching CNN or Swiss TV for most of my broadcast news these days, even if it's just for the background noise.

But, the listening to of music on a computer isn't always a great experience. It's okay to use iTunes at work with some headphones, but at home I want to just kick back and listen. I'd also like to listen to something played over some nice speakers and not have to deal with the headphones. So it was gadget time! :-)

The first thing I'd actually tried was iTunes with a Airport Express. I bought my first AX before leaving from the US. I was using it as a extension wireless router at first. It worked quite nicely for this. I also tried using it with my iTunes collection, then on my little G3 iBook. The iBook didn't have enough room to store my entire collection, which I wanted encoded as a lossless collection, but it did play some stuff nicely. It was fun to play with for a bit but I ended up deciding I needed to use the disk space on my iBook and so ended up going back to just using my five disc changers. However, in Switzerland, I no longer had my five disc changers....

Travels...

I had a recent business trip to San Francisco. Work was nice enough to let me travel via Seattle, so I was able to spend a week there.

The reason for traveling to San Francisco was Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference. Obviously, I can't say too much about it that hasn't already been covered much better in places like The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Engadget or Slashdot. I did find the conference pretty interesting though. And I managed to learn all sorts of new things. What I didn't do, is to wander around San Francisco much. Apple manages to keep you pretty busy. About all I had time for outside of the conference was a quick trip to Borders books and one night I saw Star Trek.

When the conference was over, I headed up to Seattle for the next week. I hung out with family and friends, but with just a week I was pretty limited in what to do. I did manage to get a short kayaking trip in up near Bellingham.

Back to posting

It's been awhile. I've been busy. Mostly busy working.

The job is quite interesting. I'm working while speaking pretty much nothing but German. It's not so easy, the German part, but it keeps me on my toes, and I'm never bored.

I won't say too much about the job on the blog. However, it gives me the chance to look at and evaluate technology. I find this pretty cool. And...where appropriate I might even comment on a few thinks. Expect me to say stuff about things like my iPhone for instance.

I've also been playing around with Facebook, which I find cool for the most part. However, it's not a good platform for more than short snippets of information. That's better to do with blogging. But I do like the way I can post pictures. The stupid games are sometimes fun as well. Still, it's Facebook is easy for the most part, and my friends all can reply with ease.

Customer Service...

Yesterday, I woke up to find my DSL line no longer working quite right. I was cut off from the net. Well, mostly, I did use the dial-up to get to the football score I was looking for.

Eventually, I decided to call up the big phone company and after about 15 minutes I was connected. The guy answering the phone was obviously first-level windows support and tried his best to help me. The first bit was to have me reset and power on and off my modem/router. I'd done this about ten times already, but I gave it another try. Didn't work. Then he tried to escalate my call. Being Sunday in Switzerland, this wasn't the easiest thing for him to do, and it ended up being impossible. So, he then started with my router configuration. I'd mentioned it'd been working fine for several months and that I'd not changed it. It was possible that it could be a hardware problem, but not the configuration.

Not having any other options other than my suggestion that there was a problem with the DSL line, he suggested I do a factory reset of the router. There was no way I was going to do this, after all, it'd been working fine for months. I suggested again that it was probably the line. He decided that he'd make a call to see if this was a possibility.

Yep. There was a problem with the line, and a number of folks in the neighborhood had already called it in. So there goes an hour of my life and I ended up with a cold pasta lunch yesterday. Magically, this evening the un-reconfigured DSL modem was once again functioning perfectly....

Four Years!

I just passed the four year mark of living here in Switzerland. Now that I've got a job and my German is good enough...guess I'm here for good.

Thinking in German.

One interesting thing I've noticed about working totally in German is that I get used to doing pretty much everything (except for coding) in German. What this means is that I've actually slipped into thinking in German whilst working.

The past few days I've noticed that the couple of rare events where I've had to speak english, it's been a bit difficult switching back. Not horribly difficult, but it's taken a minute or so to shift gears.

Back at home, where I deal with many things in English, it's not so much a problem. Go figure.

We went to a curling class on Friday, I'll have to write something up about that in the near future....

First day at work!

Today was my first day at the new job. I'm not going to really say too much about it. After all, I prefer to separate my work and personal life. However, there is just one thing I want to say about the day. Somehow, I managed to survive an entire day speaking pretty much nothing but German. I had some doubts I could do it, but I did. What was surprising, is that I actually got comfortable speaking German and was able to relax and enjoy it.

The end of the dream.

Well, it's happened. Someone hired me and so my life of "Living the Dream", as many of my friends call it, is soon to end. I'll be starting the new job on the 1st of October. I'm actually quite looking forward to doing something constructive again, and it'll be nice to have a paycheck as well.

I've been pretty busy with all sorts of things of late. We just got back from a trip to the US. There was some good kayaking to be had and the weather was pretty good for the most part.

I took a break from blogging as my camera wasn't always working as well as I wanted it to. So I went out and got a new Olympus E-410 with a dual zoom kit. I've now added a 25mm pancake lens that makes it really, really light for hiking. I expect to take quite a few more pictures with the new set-up. I'm also really enjoying having a D-SLR, as it's a much nicer experience taking photos than to look at my old S40's little screen.

The Euro '08

On Sunday I was lucky enough to go to one of the games of the European Football Championships 2008. We managed to get four tickets in the lottery. Even better, we managed to get them to a game that Switzerland was playing against Portugal.

Switzerland didn't do so well during first two games, losing both. Still, it's always fun to go to a game in St. Jakob Stadium. I hadn't been to a game in Basel since we've moved to Thalwil and so I was looking to see what the upgrades to the stadium were like.

It was fun watching the game, and surprisingly Switzerland won. They played a good game, though many of Portugal's starters did not play. Still, a win is a win.

The only big drawback to the game was the incredible amount of cigarette smoking going on. So much, in fact, that there was a haze in the stadium.

Remote maintenance of servers...

I'm going to geek out a bit with this entry. Apologies to you non-techies.

To keep myself entertained during my time between jobs, I've decided to get myself a server to host a few projects I've been working on. I don't want to host them on a home sever because a home server is too noisy and too warm. Besides, I'd have to share the outbound traffic with my web surfing. So, rather than getting more bandwith at home, I can just put the server in a data center for just a little bit more money.

And there's the issue. It's in a data center. Behind locked doors. No monitor or keyboard. So, how do I access it? An Serial-over-IP device would be cool, but they're expensive and don't do much. I've looked into IPMI, which my server supports, but It needs a VPN to get out of the local network. I've found a KVM-over-IP device that looks pretty cool, but I need to get it shipped out from the US.

But, there's always the option of putting a DVD in the DVD drive. Most of the time it won't be used. In fact, I'll probably not use it unless I need to do an install from the console. So, I'm thinking having a Linux live dvd might be a good thing to keep in it, just in case of an emergency. I got Puppy Linux to work, but it doesn't have LVM in the package, so it looks like I'm off to figure out another option with a different distro, or trying to work out how to get LVM into Puppy Linux...

At least it keeps me out of trouble.

Frank worth more than US Dollar

I checked this morning and Oanda.com had updated their site with values from the weekend. Yes indeed, the Frank did officially overtake the US Dollar on Friday.

The Frank's had a long journey to this point. Back in 1970 a US Dollar was worth FIVE Swiss Franks.