Wens' blog

Yesterday was poetry day here, but I didn’t come around to post a poem then, so here is one. I love this one by Constantine Cavafy.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Newsweek posted an article about Geert Wilders. You can find it here. I just read and I think it gives a good impression of the man. That impression is rather limited though as the man does not give many interviews and never shows his true colours. He is mostly known for his diatribes. You have to wonder if he really believes all his own nonsense or if his statements are only politically convenient.

I’ve never seen the man as someone we’d have to be bothered by for long. He has no vision and only feeds on fear. I still believe that, but we are now entering a prolonged economic and financial crisis. Instability feeds right wing beliefs. This might give his movement more momentum. Let us hope it will not.

Ever since I replaced two drives in my four drive NAS, a Synology DS408, I wanted to do something about the RAID partitions of that NAS. I had replaced the two drives because I kept having data issues with them. This in the end turned out to be an issue with the cables. Synology was nice enough to quickly send me new cables, but by that time I had already replaced two of the four 1 terabyte drives by 2 terabyte drives.

After replacing the two drives the RAID volume had been rebuilt as it would have had I filled the empty slots with one terabyte drives. So two terabytes of space was now unallocated and therefore wasted. I was considering putting a RAID 1 volume on the two empty spaces, but nowhere could I find an option to add another volume.

I read up on how Synology’s software running on the NAS works and it seems the only way to use all of the space on all drives if you have drives of different sizes, is using Synology’s Hybrid RAID technology. Pretty soon I found out there are some limitations. SHR doesn’t allow for different types of RAID volumes next to each other. So I could use all the space on all disks, but only if I used a single RAID 5 volume. RAID 5 only tolerates one faulty disk and I didn’t get a four drive NAS to have a system that could only handle a single drive crash at a time.

So now I’m back to RAID 6 with four one terabyte RAID partitions giving me about 1.8 terabyte of storage. Oh well, better safe up for two more two terabyte drives.

For years now I haven’t had a blog. I deleted my previous one, as far as I can recollect, about three or four years ago. Since the deletion of that blog I can’t say I have really missed specifically writing for my blog. But I kept missing a place to put some technology related stuff or a picture of some sort to share with friends or acquaintances.

There are loads of sites for sharing things, text, pictures, but I never did like what photo sites do to my pictures or the rights of my pictures and facebook or twitter both their advantages and disadvantages.

So, here I am again, with my own blog…