One for the note-to-self file...

Strangely, it's labeled as a "Mustek 1200 UB Plus" on the unit itself, but lsusb says it's a "Ultima Electronics Corp. Artec Ultima 2000 (GT6801 based)/Lifetec LT9385/ScanMagic 1200 UB Plus Scanner"

apt-get install xsane sane-utils

http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/ says I should be downloading sbfw.usb, which needs to go into /usr/share/sane/gt68xx

Uncomment override "mustek-scanexpress-1200-ub-plus" in /etc/sane.d/gt68xx.conf

adduser apollock scanner

newgrp scanner

scanimage -L should now report something like "device `gt68xx:libusb:001:002' is a Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus flatbed scanner"

Getting close now.

Sarah had another ultrasound yesterday, just to check things. Unfortunately I couldn't be there due to a self-inflicted scheduling screw up. Apparently you could see hair on the ultrasound, so I'm a bit bummed to have missed it.

The baby has "dropped", so that's good. Her head's still down, and she's swallowing, so that's all good too. Weight-wise she's now in the 38th percentile.

We're booked in for a C-section on the 14th, unless she comes of her own free will between now and then (which is what we'd prefer), in which case our OB will allow an attempt at a VBAC. Our OB is reluctant to allow the pregnancy to go past 39 weeks, given prior history and Sarah's heart, and they don't induce for VBACs, so it's going to require some planetary alignment to avoid a C-section.

The whole heart thing still being an issue was only a fairly recent discovery for us. Sarah's cardiac surgeon had told us we could go forth and have as many kids as we wanted, but it turns out the fine print in that statement is that while the previous aneurysm has been repaired, she has an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder, so there's no telling what might happen with the rest of her aorta in the future. So her OB is just doing what a good high-risk OB should do, and being extra paranoid, on two fronts.

So we've got a couple of weeks to try and convince our daughter to come more than a week and 2 days early. I don't think we have statistics on our side, unfortunately (although I had a surprisingly hard time finding concrete statistics on delivery dates relative to due dates for first-time deliveries versus subsequent deliveries).

No sooner do I discover it, and TransLink up and renames itself to Clipper.

I wonder how much that exercise is going to cost? I'm also curious as to what they're going to do in terms of a new domain name.

Ah, marketing:

Why is the name being changed?

Now that the system is fully operational on five transit agencies - Muni, BART, AC Transit, Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit and Ferry - it is available to the majority of Bay Area transit riders. Giving the system a new name and logo helps make it more appealing to potential customers and also takes away any confusion with other local programs such as FasTrak, Fast Pass, as well as several other transportation programs around the world that are also named TransLink.

With Bay Area public transportation being woefully inadequate, I have to wonder if much of any adoption problems (which is what I presume they're trying to solve with this rebranding) are more a function of overall patronage?

We went to "Slings and Things: The Art of Babywearing" at Blossom Birth this morning.

It was really good. We were the only expectant parents there, everyone else brought their babies with them. Seeing the little 3.5 week-old newborn made me wish we had our baby already!

The instructor talked and demoed us through pouches, ring slings and wraps. I think we're pretty sold on the Moby Wrap. She'd borrow various babies to show how they could be carried with each type of product. It was amazing seeing how content the babies became when they were positioned appropriately.

Blossom Birth seemed pretty good. It was like Day One, without all of the high-priced retail stuff.

Monday saw us at the 34 week mark. Yesterday was the point in Sarah's first pregnancy that we lost Joshua. So we're in scary uncharted territory now.

Sarah's OB has said that he doesn't want her to go past 39 weeks, given prior history, and he won't induce because of her heart (and they don't induce for a VBAC anyway), so if we want a VBAC, then the baby has to come of her own accord between now and the 17th.

That means that in a month from tomorrow, we should be parents!

So far our future daughter is keeping her presence felt, which is very reassuring. We've only had two unplanned trips to Labor & Delivery so far. One for decreased fetal movements at around 30 weeks (the baby had flipped head down it turned out) and the other for an unexplained blood pressure spike on Sunday (it sorted itself out).

Sarah's doing a non-stress test twice a week (up from weekly) starting this week.

The nursery is pretty much all ready to go. Just add baby.

I tend not to be a huge Apple fanboy. They make nice stuff, but it's just too closed for my liking. I like to tinker. I had a PowerBook for a while, but I gave it to Sarah in favour of a Linux laptop.

Sarah's been a happy Mac user for a number of years, and had an iPhone (until I gave her a Nexus One). For a "normal" user like her, a Mac is fine, especially if you want to embrace Apple's entire ecosystem.

Anyway, the iPad. When it was announced, I sat up and took notice. Why? This seemed like something I might actually use as a casual computing device. I mean, I'm almost in the target market for Chrome OS these days. I spend most of my time in a web browser, and the rest of my time in a terminal window SSHing to another computer. I could leave this thing lying around on the coffee table in the living room, and instead of digging my phone out of my pocket to look something up, I could pick this up instead.

It is also appealing because I found Microsoft's Surface to be pretty cool. The iPad is like a more affordable, portable, version of that.

It also appeals to me as a computing platform for my parents. Their computing needs have simplified over the years, but they're still running Windows, largely because I've never had the time to try and foist Linux on them. Since I moved to the US, my visits back home have been too brief to do a proper migration. I think an iPad that supported user switching would be perfect. Mum and Dad could share it, and read their email and do their web browsing from anywhere in the house.

Since the first generation iPad doesn't do user profiles and lacks a camera, I'll wait impatiently for the second generation one. I heard a rumour today that it would have a camera, and do user profile switching based on the face of whoever was in front of it. That would be pretty cool.

I'd also be very interested in an Android tablet. I love Android's speech to text input support, and I could really see an Android tablet stuck to the wall in the kitchen, instead of a whiteboard on the fridge and a paper calendar.

The WePad also sounds intriguing.

So I'm not so bothered by the iPad's closed nature. I think for the set of users who have basic computing needs, and don't care about openness, it's very cool.

I see that Queensland is making noises about daylight saving again.

I personally quite like daylight saving. I think it works great in California. I remember when it was trialed in Queensland, and I enjoyed it when I lived in Canberra.

I can't remember who told me why the farmers object to it so much, (no, it's not that they're worried about their curtains fading), but it was an interesting explanation:

Farmers work the land, from sunrise to sunset, not the clock. The pub, however still closes at the same time. If they're now knocking off work an hour later, but the pub still closes at the same time, that's an hour less drinking.

No idea how accurate that explanation is, but it makes for a good story.

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that I think the idea of carving the state into two timezones is insane. It should be all or nothing.

I've become passingly interested in Linux's capabilities functionality, as a way of reducing full-blown UID 0 requirements.

Unrelated to this, one of my few gripes about Python, coming from Perl, was the inability to do anything like Perl's $0 to alter the appearance of the running program. I used to use this functionality in Perl a lot to provide cheap insight into what a long running Perl script was up to.

Well the other day, I was rather excited to learn that Dennis Kaarsemaker has written a Python interface to capabilities, which also implements a set_proctitle() function.

The python-prctl module isn't currently available in Debian, but as Dennis has all of the packaging in the Git repository, I've offered to sponsor it for him if he wishes.

A while ago now, Sarah commented that one night when she's woken up in the middle of the night, that she'd observed me stop breathing for a while in my sleep. She wanted me to go see the sleep doctors that she'd seen (she was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea a couple of years ago).

So I eventually packed myself off to the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, which is at Stanford's shiny new outpatient centre in Redwood City.

They took a look at me, and declared I had a crowded mouth, and a narrow airway, and asked me to do a sleep study.

I did the sleep study in the middle of January. That was "interesting". I had a ton of wires glued to me, and needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well, but apparently I slept enough for them to be able to diagnose me.

A couple of weeks later, I got a letter with the results. I had a Respiratory Disturbance Index of 16.6. The letter from the clinic defined RDI as including "events of 10 seconds or more with cessation of airflow or discernable reduction in airflow associated with arousal or oxygen desaturation of 3% or more".

I had one obstructive sleep apnea event, and 119 obstructive hypopnea events during the sleep study. At one point my O₂ saturation dropped to 89%, but it was very briefly. The overall average was 96%.

A month ago I did another sleep study, this time while I was hooked up to a CPAP machine, and they fiddled with the pressure. I was fairly exhausted that night, and slept like a log.

Based on the results of the second sleep study, I've been prescribed an auto PAP machine with a pressure ranging between 13 to 15 cm of water pressure (whatever that means).

I got the machine, a ResMed S8 AutoSet II a week ago last Friday. It's slightly more advanced than the CPAP machine that Sarah uses, in that it'll adjust its pressure within the range it is set to, as it deems necessary throughout the night. It also backs off the pressure when you exhale, like Sarah's does.

I'm not particularly thrilled to be sleeping with this thing on my face. The first night I used it, I slept fine. Something like from 10:30pm until 6am. Subsequently, I keep waking up at precisely 3:30am for some reason, and it's hard to get back to sleep with it on, so I take it off. A few nights, some sort of mask leakage alarm has gone off at some random point in the night. I haven't been in any state to try and diagnose what's going on when that happens, so I just take off the mask and turn the whole thing off.

I was curious as to whether I'd notice some sort of life-changing difference between using it and not using it, like Sarah does, but so far, I can't say I've noticed any discernable difference. I also haven't gone a night without using it yet.

Getting a properly fitting mask was a bit of a challenge. I spent ages at the durable medical equipment supplier trying on different sorts of masks. The one I've currently got still leaves a bit of a red mark across the bridge of my nose. I can take it back in the first 30 days, and get refitted, so I might still be doing that.

From http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/active-directory-and-linux...

An alternative to allowing anonymous searches on your Active Directory is to allow the nss_ldap routines to bind as an administrator DN to your directory and perform searches in privileged mode. To do this, insert the following lines in your /etc/ldap.conf file:

binddn cn=Administrator,cn=Users, bindpw

You should be used to the "" thing by now.

WARNING: The above example shows that the administrator user name and password have been coded in clear text in the /etc/ldap.conf file! Unfortunately, this file must always remain world-readable, because otherwise users logged on to the system will not be able to read data from the directory. You should not do this on a system where any user has shell access to your system, or can in any other way read this file.

If you've put the Administrator password in a world-readable file, you've already lost.