So we pretty much gave up on the condemned house. The more we hear about it, the worse it looks. Our agent got some paperwork on the red-tagging today. Apparently the large room out the front used to be a car port, and enclosing that was done without a permit. There's also a standalone room out the back that has had a bathroom added without a permit. Apparently the owner is getting fined $2,500 a day by the city until it's either brought into compliance or reverted. No idea if that's actually being paid, or who's responsibility it would become in the event of a sale, so we'll just quietly back away from that whole mess and pretend it never happened.

Sarah was poking around Redfin again last night and found this property, for less than what the condemned house was going for (granted, this is a condo, not a house).

We got our agent to show it to us today, and we really liked the look of it, so we're going to put an offer in on it and see what comes of it.

We have to spend about three hours with our agent tomorrow morning going through paperwork. Wee.

It certainly seems like a good time to be buying. Interest rates are low, the AUD is high against the USD, and prices are down.

Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I can write a review.

The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a picture a day type of thing.

So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the iGala being sold pretty much exclusively by ThinkGeek.

The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it appealing.

So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we headed to Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's the highlights.

WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA)

Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the frame would not associate with my Linksys WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2, and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure.

I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped.

The automatic updates are brain-dead

Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds.

So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented the HEAD request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic a day. Taking these frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles.

I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly sufficient.

Transitions are unavoidable

It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one.

Automatic on/off time

I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's "off".

Photo check frequency is configurable

Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day (that we change it).

Built in photos are a bit too sticky

There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to have at least two photos in your online source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix. The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works...

Touch screen UI was adequate

Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections.

Fairly responsive support

The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation" period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I was raising with them.

I have no familiarity with Lua, other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to be a Blackfin based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware.

Easy to update

Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back. The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have.

Conclusion

I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the price, I expected a more polished product, though.

I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their Linksys WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.

Yesterday, we managed to inspect the property that was for sale that we'd discovered.

I think you could best describe it as a renovator's delight that's had a bit of work done on it. The kitchen is pretty new. The bathrooms are pretty good. There's some cracking around the place, and the floating floor looks like it's a bit of a dodgy job.

That said, it definitely had potential, and for the asking price, assuming it wasn't structurally unsound, was something we could see ourselves doing up and flipping when we finally move back to Australia.

So our agent told us we needed to get pre-approved for finance as the next step, and hooked us up with a mortgage broker, who was able to see us today.

She said that pre-approval would be no problem, and we got what seemed to be a ridiculously good rate for a 5 year adjustable rate mortgage.

Our agent called us back tonight and told us that there was another offer on the table for less than the asking price, and that the property had been red-tagged. It would appear that none of the modifications had permits.

He's going to check with the city tomorrow to find out exactly what the nature of the red-tagging is all about, and what would be involved to get the property un-red-tagged, but I've got that feeling that it's going to be better to just walk away from it at this stage.

So that's how we've spent our weekend. Speculating on real estate.

Our lease runs out at the end of January, and we're thinking about moving to a bigger place.

In the four years we've been here (yeah, we just crossed the four year mark the other day) we've often thought about trying to buy as well. We go through these phases where we really feel like buying, then we run the numbers and run screaming back to the warm bosom of renting.

A couple of months ago we had the most serious foray into buying. We'd just checked out the models for Mondrian and we really liked the floorplan for Bleu, and found the price to be the least breathtaking of anything we'd looked at in the Bay Area.

I got as far as talking to mortgage brokers and running the numbers, and the things that killed it for us were the property taxes and homeowners association fees. The monthly repayments would have been doable, but it'd have really been a ball and chain. We're over here to see the country as much as anything else, and if the mortgage is going to be a significant impedance on our ability to travel, then there isn't really any point in doing it.

So we sadly passed up on Mondrian.

The three bedroom townhouses in our current complex are going for around the $2500 a month mark, which is a pretty serious jump on what we're paying now for our two bedroom one, so Sarah's been scouring Craigslist for anything better.

She found a 2 bedroom plus loft condo being rented privately in Mountain View, which we took at look at on Wednesday. The immediately downsides are it's older (the kitchen and bathroom are really a bit dated) and has no data cabling (this is something I've really loved about our current place) and no microwave oven included. The upsides are it's significantly bigger (about 500 square feet larger), the kitchen has heaps of cupboards, it has a washer and dryer, a lock-up garage, a small, fairly private yard (the rent includes a gardener), and it has what looks like a communal garden bed (the thing that really caught my eye were the compost bins).

So I think overall, as long as we can live with the kitchen and bathroom, it's going to be an improvement on where we are now. The windows are all double glazed, so it should be fairly well insulated. It's got a gas furnace and gas hot water, and I think the landlord pays for the water, so I think the utilities would at best come out the same as what we're paying here.

We've decided to put an application in for it and see what happens. The landlord is living overseas, so we're dealing with a real estate agent for the letting. Apparently we'd be paying the rent via PayPal or something. He's got a home warranty arrangement for maintenance, which sounds like it'll be pretty good.

Meanwhile, Sarah was scouring Redfin and found a house nearby that is for sale (a short sale), which is pretty reasonably priced. We've called up a real estate agent, and we're taking a look at it tomorrow, just because we can.

I took advantage of the four day weekend for Thanksgiving, and finally got around to upgrading mirror.linux.org.au from Debian Etch to Lenny.

The upgrade went fairly well. Notably, Drupal completely blew up, but it looks like we were still running the package from Sarge, as Drupal wasn't in Etch at all. I cut my losses, installed Drupal 6 and put something basic together from scratch.

MoinMoin upgraded fairly painlessly, and I figured out how to fix Cacti for my installation at home at the same time, so that was a general win all round.

I love LWN. It's the best value for money way of keeping abreast of what's going on out there.

I also love LVM. I'm thrilled to learn from a comment on this article about Btrfs, that LVM is soon to gain snapshot merging support.

This is going to be absolutely fantastic for rolling back upgrades that go bad. I can't wait.

I don't usually get around to blogging about UDS, but since I've got a couple of hours to kill and WiFi on the plane, I might as well write something while it's all fresh in my mind.

Unfortunately, I came down with a head cold on the way back from Australia, so I was not my usual perky self all week, so as a result I probably did less networking than usual, but I did start to feel more human by the end of the week.

Four of us from work went, and I think this worked out well, as our kernel engineer was able to cover the kernel track, and there were frequently three applicable sessions on in parallel, so this allowed for good coverage.

That said, there were frequently less than three things of interest as well, and I take this as a good sign: there aren't plans to really do too much weird or wonderfully different things in 10.04, which I think is the right approach for an LTS. Couple that with the fact that Lucid is based off Debian's testing distribution instead of unstable, and I've come away from UDS with a very good feeling that the third time is going to be the charm as far as Ubuntu LTS releases go.

This was also the first time that we submitted blueprints of our own. I think the upgrading running software one was well received. There was certainly a lot of discussion. I'm not sure if anything will be implemented for Lucid, but at least we got the problem onto the radar.

We also managed to score an impromptu demonstration of Landscape, and while I don't think it's quite at the point where we'd want to buy it, it definitely has potential and apparently all of the things that we found to be lacking have already been identified as features that need to be added, so I think that maybe by a 2.0 release, it'll be more compelling. I don't think the Dedicated Server Edition existed last time I'd looked at it, and this sounds like a much more sensible (and reasonably priced) option.

This was my fourth UDS. The first one being the one for the Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS release. The entire team went to that one, and we were all completely uncalibrated for UDS and didn't really know how or if that UDS differed from ones for non-LTS releases. Since then I've learned that every UDS is different anyway, and it's a fairly evolutionary process. Aside from the venue being multi-level, which I think hampered networking, I thought this UDS was the best facilitated one yet.

Russell Coker advocates putting -e on the shebang line of shell scripts.

I disagree. From my experience this is extremely unhelpful to people who may be debugging your shell scripts in the future.

Consider this, you've added -e to the shebang of a script, and some poor schmuck down the track is trying to debug why it spontaneously exits. What's the most obvious way to do this? Run the script with sh -x or bash -x.

What happens when you do this? The shebang is completely ignored, and the script is directly run by the shell interpreter. If the person doing the debugging doesn't happen to transpose all of the shell options on the shebang line to the manual shell interpreter invocation, you're going to get different behaviour.

So I advocate an explicit set -e on the second line of shell scripts instead.

As much as making shell scripts set -e is a good practice, it drives me absolutely batty having to deal with scripts that spontaneously exit as soon as something they run exits non-zero. Particularly when you've chained a bunch of shell scripts together, or have one sourcing a bunch of script fragments from a directory. For this reason, I prefer to write in Bash and use an exit handler, to make it very obvious when a shell script has abended due to set -e.

It's looking all good, so we're game to tell the world: Sarah is 13 weeks pregnant!

She had the nuchal translucency ultrasound today (which, due to the tight timing required for it, I was totally bummed to be unable to attend). The scan came back all clear, which is an enormous relief.

In the nausea department, poor Sarah has had a much worse time than with the first pregnancy. Particularly on the flights to and from Australia. This makes me think it's going to be a girl (just because the nausea characteristics are totally different from the first time around).

It's amazing how fast they grow in just a few weeks.

Here's the ultrasound from 10 weeks:

And here's the ultrasound from 13 weeks:

Well, here I am, sitting in a chair at 10,000 feet (or whatever the altitude currently is), using WiFi. Writing a blog post. And we still don't have flying cars.

I'm on my way to Dallas for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release. Being an LTS release, this is of particular interest for what I do at work.

Sarah's still in Australia (well she's actually on a flight to LAX as I write), so I took the VTA light rail + shuttle to the airport. I must say, aside from not being particularly speedy, it was a pleasant experience. I've finally cracked open The Audacity of Hope, which I received for Christmas or my birthday last year.

I'm really loving the renovated San Jose airport. Now that all of the check-in counters have moved downstairs, they've about quadrupled the space the TSA has, which makes getting through security a much more pleasant experience.

Add to that, the nice lady in the Admiral's Club kindly reseating me in an exit row, all by myself, and this is a pretty sweet trip so far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Well, she didn't make it. The diuretic the vet put her on to reduce the fluid around her heart and lungs was also causing kidney failure, so her condition wasn't treatable. She was euthanised some time today. Our neighbour Carol was able to be there with her.

It really sucks that we weren't able to be there. It's still a real shock how she was a perfectly healthy cat last Friday, and now she's dead.

Sarah's going to really miss her, as she was exceptionally got at being attuned to her (Sarah's) moods. Whenever Sarah was sick or just down, Stumpy would curl up with her.

I'd had bad feelings about this trip, mainly because it was so short. I didn't expect this to happen though...

Back story:

Smudge has always been fairly wary of Stumpy, for some unknown reason (perhaps her boisterousness?) It came to a head when we did our road trip to Atlanta. We got back home, and Smudge had pooped in all the wrong places, and was hissing and growling at Stumpy whenever Stumpy looked at her the wrong way.

The cat sitter plead ignorance, but something must have happened while we were away. Smudge has been pretty hopeless around Stumpy ever since.

One theory was that maybe Stumpy (or Smudge) had some health problem, so we had them both checked out and no red flags were raised. The other option was to put Smudge on Prozac for a while to see if she settled down. I didn't like the idea of drugging her, so we've opted to separate them for a while. Smudge is in our bedroom and Stumpy and Lily have the rest of the house. Smudge and Stumpy only have supervised time together. We've tried a bit of play therapy as time permits, but it hasn't made much of a difference.

So fast forwarding to now, and we didn't want to leave Smudge in our bedroom all by herself for the week, so we thought we'd put Stumpy in a cat boarding place, since we figured she could handle it, and let Smudge and Lily have the run of the house. Our neighbour Carol was going to check in on Smudge and Lily. All good.

I think it was yesterday (my brain is not dealing with the various timezones plus jet lag) Sarah got an email from Carol saying that the cat boarding place had called her because Stumpy hadn't been eating, and was all lethargic. Carol went and brought her home, and she didn't do much better at home, she was just lying around, so she took her to our vet.

She was having breathing problems, and generally showing symptoms of congestive heart failure! Her blood work was otherwise okay. The vet said they couldn't do much and needed to send her to a specialist vet at Campbell, where they could do an ultrasound on her heart. This is where she currently is, in an oxygen tent on diuretics for fluid around the heart/lungs.

The prognosis isn't very good at all. She managed to make it through the night, but I don't know if she's going to make it until I can get home. I've moved my flight a day earlier to Friday night, so I can get out to the vet's on Saturday. The vet was saying that even if she does make it through this, her long-term prospects aren't good. Maybe a year.

This is only a four year old cat! The vet said she has an enlarged heart, so it's some sort of congenital condition she's always had, but was probably triggered by the stress of being in the boarding place.

It's just come as a total shock to us as she's always been really healthy, and the most hyperactive of the three cats.

Sarah, being the cat lover that she is, is particularly upset, because this is "her" cat, and she feels terrible because Stumpy is all by herself. I'm really hoping Stumpy can at least hang in there until I get there. I don't want her to die alone, despite how frustrating she can be.

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our neighbour Carol for doing a lot of running around for us. I don't doubt for a moment that Stumpy would be dead by now if it weren't for her.

Sarah's Mum is flying her back for the scattering of her grandmother's ashes, and I figured that as this will be her third trip back this year, and she's seen my family more than I have in the last 12 months, I should come as well.

So I'm getting my first opportunity to sample V Australia's service. I must say that flying Virgin America to LAX and then transferring to V Australia to fly direct to Brisbane seems like a fairly civilised way to do it. Anything that involves Virgin America is always a delight. My only complaints so far are that the SFO-LAX flight left late, and the check in line for V Australia in LAX was ridiculously slow given it was so short.

The time of the flight is pretty good - it leaves LAX at 10:30pm, so hopefully we'll get a semi-decent amount of sleep. It gets into Brisbane at 6:30am on Sunday, so we'll have to try and imitate the living dead for the day.

I'm heading back again on Saturday, as I have to be in Dallas next week for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

I was very pleased to see that for the next Long Term Support version of Ubuntu, it's going to be syncing with Debian Testing instead of Debian Unstable.

This was something I brought up in a discussion at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona. I always found it somewhat silly that from a development standpoint, an LTS version of Ubuntu was created no differently from a non-LTS version. It still synced from Debian Unstable, it still stabilised over the same 6 month period. They just toned back the release goals so it wasn't quite so full of new, crazy stuff. A high-quality, long-term supportable Linux distribution this does not necessarily make.

As Steve points out, the downside of this new approach is that bug fixes will take longer to appear in Debian Testing, and thus in Ubuntu. I'll be watching how this development cycle pans out with much interest.