Compiling historical family data is not easy. Luckily, my wife has taken the job. This summer, she has been attempting to piece together our ancestry from a variety of sources. Ancestry.com has provided valuable census records which have been useful in tracking the migration of both of our families across the Unites States since the late 18th century. Relatives on either side have donated old memorabilia including pictures, letters, and diaries that have been an enormous help in tracing birth and death dates. These dates have been the single most important clue in searching the census records provided by Ancestry.com. Unfortunately, Ancestry’s transcribed data contains numerous misspellings that has made our quest harder than it should be.

Earlier this year I learned of the website, Geni.com, from the net@nite podcast provided by the TWiT network. Geni has proved a useful tool for recording genealogy data. The site itself is very well designed. It uses Flash as its backbone to provide a user-friendly means for adding and updating family records. Without even registering, users can immediately get to work by adding relatives to a dynamic family tree. The tree can easily be navigated with the click and drag of a mouse. Throughout the past six months, Geni has been adding new features at break-neck speed. None of which has caused the website any serious downtime. Not too bad for a Beta release.

The backups kick that I’ve been on lately prompted me to have a long conversation with my wife as to how we’re going to store our data for future generations. Will a SATA hard drive formatted in an arcane file system even be readable in 100 years? Will Geni.com exist? I doubt it. As our forefathers, my wife and I have begun to record our history on a media that has proven timeless, paper. To our benefit, Geni provides a data export service. This service allows data to be exported in two versions of the Genealogical Data Communication (GEDCOM) file format. Version 6.0 happens to use XML as its format. Reading this, my imagination immediately entertained several geek fantasies involving data migrations, SVG, and… JSON? My wife quickly squelched these dreams by reminding me of her pressing deadline.

I did, however, harbor the notion of converting the raw GEDCOM XML into DOT scripts so I could then use Graphviz to render some intricate graphs of my lineage. A quick test proved this possible, but manipulating the graphs would have taken too much time. Searching Google for Linux genealogy software yielded a handy program called GRAMPS. With little effort, I was able to import a GEDCOM file from Geni and begin testing GRAMPS’ reporting tools. Generating text reports was easy, but the graphing functionality in GRAMPS provided less than desirable results. With some time, I’ll master this new program and create a suitable low-tech solution for archiving the family tree.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I needed a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. To recap – a NAS device would provide me a better backup solution with the added benefit of a shared storage location on my home network. Given the criteria that I previously listed and a little bit of research, I purchased a Linksys NAS200 and a pair of 500GB SATA drives for a total of $350.18. This is about $150 under my $500 budget constraint.

Before my purchase I had been leaning towards the D-Link DNS-323, but secretly hoping the Linksys NAS200 would arrive in time. Sometimes it pays to wait. I don’t usually purchase hardware that is so new on the market, but a couple of factors persuaded me to make my decision. The Linksys NAS200 retails for about $40 less than the D-Link DNS-323 and packs quite a few more features. This combined with the NSLU2’s success and my overall good luck with Linksys hardware helped seal the deal. Since my home network runs entirely on Linux, I wanted a device that would work well in this environment. I’m not suggesting that I won’t run into problems, but with the NSLU2’s reputation I feel a little less worried. I’ll be sure to follow up with a full review once my new hardware arrives. To be continued…

UPDATE: My final review of the Linksys NAS200 has been posted.

I can be extremely indecisive about things. So much, in fact, that I even wrote a script to help me choose a name for this website. Is it strange that a random number generator can make me feel better about making decisions? My wife thinks I’m crazy, but she also calls domain names, donames. Besides, I think there is something novel in a computer choosing a name for itself. Anyway… Given some user input, the code below will read words from a file and then mash them together to provide unique combinations. Here is a words.dat file to help get you started. Happy mashing.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

words = Array.new
i = 0

def mash_words(words, mash_count)
  new_word = ''

  1.upto(mash_count) do
    new_word += words[rand(words.length)]
  end

  return new_word
end

begin
  puts 'How many mashed words would you like to create?'
  word_count = gets.chomp.to_i  

  puts 'How many words would you like to mash?'
  mash_count = gets.chomp.to_i  

  input_file = File.new("words.dat", "r")
  while (line = input_file.gets)    
    words[i] = line.chomp    
    i += 1
  end  

  1.upto(word_count) do    
    puts mash_words(words, mash_count)
  end  

  input_file.close  
rescue => err
  puts "Exception: #{err}"
  err
end