The latest release of Ruby/AWS is out. It fixes a few bugs and improves remote shopping-carts by adding support for the Save For Later area of the cart.
Cart#modify now takes an extra parameter in order to support this new functionality. Cart#include? now checks both the active and the saved area of the cart before returning true or false, and there are two new methods, Cart#active? and Cart#saved_for_later? for checking the two areas.
Numerous bugs were fixed, too, so all users should upgrade.
Eloïse has quite a bad case of chicken pox. Whereas a lot of children get away with a handful of pocks on their face and chest, Eloïse is covered in the bloody things. They’re all over her face, chest, arms, and bum; and she has a good number on other parts of her body, too. They must number several hundred, I’d say. She may even have as many as I had a couple of weeks ago.
The whole family endured a pretty much sleepless night last night, thanks to Eloïse’s discomfort. We had to get up at irregular intervals, every half an hour or so, to put calendula cream on her welts. They’re very bothersome to her now and she’s feeling very sorry for herself. In particular, the ones on her bum are clustered very densely and are very itchy. She says they hurt a lot and she is visibly in pain when she attempts to sit on a hard surface.
We’ve also put some menthol talc on her today, but it’s hard to say whether it’s helping. She’s suffering with diarrhoea, too, and her mood is very depressed. Poor little girl. She went to the peuterspeelzaal this afternoon, which I hoped would help lift her mood, but she came home again within a few minutes.
We’re treating her with the same two homeopathic remedies that I took when I had the virus, namely Antimonium tartaricum 200K and Rhus toxicodendron 200K.
I do hope she’ll be feeling somewhat better tomorrow. It’s the worst torment in the world to see your child suffering in front of you and be unable to do anything to help.
We took Lucas to the consultatiebureau last Friday.
It turns out that he now weighs 5830 g, is 60 cm long and has a cranial circumference of 40.4 cm.
That’s quite a leap from his birth weight of 3500 g, so he’s now above average in all measurements for his age. What a bouncing boy.
Add the usual incubation period of chicken pox to the date Lucas and I first started showing symptoms of the disease and, lo and behold, you arrive at Friday last. That’s the day that Elo&ium;se started sprouting pocks.
Thankfully, she doesn’t seem bothered by it at all. Her spirits are high and she had plenty of energy today at the Little Gym. Hopefully, it’ll have blown over within a few days and we can finally stop thinking about chicken pox in this house.
My LaCie Ethernet Big Disk gave up the ghost last Monday after just one year of service. This device functioned as a basic NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit on our network and accommodated, amongst other things, all of our Ogg Vorbis and MP3 music files.
All of this stuff was backed up, of course, so we didn’t lose any data, but we did lose an integral part of our network. For example, our Sonos system was now able to play only Internet radio stations. More significantly, we had lost one of our back-up devices.
it was therefore important to find a replacement device as soon as possible. I could have just rushed out and bought another disc of the same model or a drive from a rival make, but I wanted to improve on the LaCie and get something a little more professional.
It would be nice, for example, but not essential, to have a box that supported NFS in addition to CIFS. It would also be nice to have redundancy in the disc configuration. After all, any single-disc system, such as the LaCie, is an accident waiting to happen. It would be nice to be able to lose a disc without losing any data.
For several months, I’ve had a browser tab open, pointing to the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. The tab has literally remained open for the last few months, to remind me to look more deeply into the product when I have a moment. I still hadn’t got around to it, but this week’s events forced me to make it a priority.
I know several people with a ReadyNAS unit and all of them are very enthusiastic about the product. As I read about it, it quickly became apparent that the ReadyNAS device would be the way to go. The death of the LaCie was the perfect excuse for the outlay of cash.
Infrant was bought by Netgear at the start of May and their products now carry the Netgear badge. I wanted the largest ReadyNAS available at the time, so it wasn’t long before I decided on and ordered the ReadyNAS NV+ RND4410. I ordered it last Monday and it arrived Friday afternoon.
It’s a small unit, but quite heavy, because it houses 4 SATA discs, totalling some 4 Tb of disc space. 4 discs is the maximum that can be accommodated in the ReadyNAS. It’s not quite as capacious as it sounds, though, because when configured with Netgear’s patented X-RAID volume management and further gnawed on by file-system overhead, the usable disc space drops quite drastically to 2.6 Tb. If you then enable snapshots, you’ll reduce the user-writeable data area yet further.
It comes at quite a price compared with basic consumer NAS products, but the ReadyNAS is a beautiful piece of kit. It’s easy to configure, but offers powerful, advanced options for file-sharing and protecting data. It supports all the common file-system protocols, such as NFS, CIFS and AFP, and even has a built-in rsync server. Very cool.
I spent yesterday evening tweaking the configuration. Today, it was time to start copying our data onto it. So far, I’ve copied over 72 Gb of music, back-ups of caliban.org and home directories.
Since the ReadyNAS serves up NFS, my server in the cellar has been retired as the home directory server and replaced by the new boy. The disc in that server has seen a lot of activity over the years; it was our file-server back in Mountain View, so it’s seen its fair share of seeks, reads and writes. It had started to give errors via SMART monitoring, so decommissioning it really didn’t come a moment too soon.
I do love it when a product comes along that is simply great at what it’s supposed to do. Whether it’s Postfix, Ruby, MythTV, Rockbox, Sonos, FRITZ!Box or now the ReadyNAS NV+, they’re all excellent at what they’re supposed to do.
Of course, I could still have done without the death of a disc and the ensuing demands on my time, not to mention the unforeseen expense, but we do now at least have a system that will grow with us into the future and that offers the peace of mind of knowing that, if a disc fails, it’s no big deal. We can simply hot-swap a new drive into the unit and the RAID array will rebuild itself.
I think the time has come to buy a few gigabit Ethernet switches for use by certain machines in the house. Then we’ll really be able to tap into the full power of the ReadyNAS.
