Diary of a geek

[politics] On the Australian Federal Election results

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:33:00 PDT

Well this is all a bit exciting, isn't it?

No seriously, it's pretty busted. A hung Parliament is going to be next to useless, and I predict another election in the near future. It's interesting that if a minority government can't be formed in some reasonable time frame, then it's back to the polls again. I'm not sure if that means a double dissolution (I'd hope it would, as I can't see how voting again so soon is really going to make a significant difference to the outcome).

It looks like my vote was a bit of a waste: The Secular Party candidate so far has mustered just under 2% of the vote. It looks like Fraser will remain a safe Labor seat. Trying to interpret Senate results always makes my head hurt.

I'm happy to see the swing towards The Greens, and that they're now going to be the force to be reckoned with in the Senate. I will be interesting to see how the minority government thing plays out.

I have to disagree with Russell Coker's assertion that refusal of how-to-vote cards at a polling place is an indicator of an informal vote.

I've refused how-to-vote cards for every election I've voted in (I think). I've never voted informally. I've just made up my mind how I was going to vote before I got there.

[debian] Belated happy 17th birthday to Debian

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:37:00 PDT

Between work and parenthood, I'm struggling to keep on top of things a bit at the moment, but so I'm a bit late to the party.

Debian turned 17 during the week. I think the first thing that brought the fact to my attention was someone sent me a thank you note for maintaining dstat (of all things) via thanks.debian.net, which Marga set up.

I've been a Debian Developer for 7 of those 17 years now, and it's been great. I've learned heaps about Linux and Linux software packaging, and been able to give something back to the distro that I love. My time commitment waxes and wanes as real life permits, and my involvement in the community has dropped to almost nothing, again for time reasons, but I hope to be able to get more involved again in the future.

[politics] On the Australian Federal Election

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 14:23:00 PDT

We've managed to retain our enrollment in Federal elections from last time, so we requested postal ballots and they arrived last Monday. I was quite impressed with how quickly they arrived (the Australian Government keeps exceeding my expectations, must be because the US Government has lowered them so much). That said, they did manage to omit some envelope for returning the ballot papers internationally, so we just mailed them to the Australian Consulate in San Francisco instead.

We're still enrolled in the electorate of Fraser. Interestingly, Bob McMullan isn't seeking reelection. I have no idea if that is going to make any difference to the "safe Labor seat" status of this electorate or not. I was once told that Canberra being a public service town, tended to largely vote Labor.

Anyway, we've got some interesting minor party candidates for the House of Representatives. We've got the Secular Party of Australia, which I haven't heard of before. They have a nice looking website (if you overlook the spelling mistake in the URL) and I like their policies, so I've decided to give Quintin Phillips my first preference. He's keen on a light rail for Canberra, which I think would be great.

My second preference I've given to the Greens' Indra Esguerra. I'd have given them my first preference, except I'm told that the Greens blocked the Emissions Trading Scheme stuff recently, because it wasn't strict enough. That was a very dumb move in my opinion. Something is better than nothing, especially in this regard.

I put Labor next, because as much as I'd normally vote Liberal above Labor, I think the Liberal party doesn't deserve to return from the wilderness just yet. They got thrown out on their ear in the last election for a reason. I also don't really find the prospect of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister all that enamoring.

On to the Senate. I always vote "below the line", because it's way more fun.

I gave my first preference to Kate Lundy, because she's the greatest Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy that Australia's never had. Tangentially related: Victoria, please sack that nimrod, Stephen Conroy. If there was some way I could change my enrollment to Victoria, so I could help, I'd be all over it.

I believe I gave my second and third preferences to the Greens candidates, in no particular order, followed by the Democrats, because I believe they should live again in the Senate. I think I then went for the Independent candidate, followed by the remaining Labor candidate and the two Liberal candidates.

But the basic theme that I'm trying to convey with the way I voted is that I'm fairly disenchanted with both of the major parties. The Liberal party completely imploded when it lost the last election, and I found they way they backstabbed Malcolm Turnbull (and the ETS) quite disturbing. Until the party big wigs stop being all denialist about climate change, they're not getting my vote, I'll vote Green instead.

I also found the way the Labor party turfed out Kevin Rudd to be quite disturbing. I'm seeing this trend in Australian politics where if you stick to your guns on something necessary but politically unpopular, you can expect a good old-fashioned backstabbing. I also not a fan of Labor's factional system. I find that it tends to mean that the best man (or woman) for the job doesn't get it. People say that the Liberal party is just as bad, they're just not so open about it. That may well be the case, but I can see it for a fact with Labor, and I don't like (to quote Pauline Hanson).

So I'd mainly be voting Green, but I decided to give this Secular Party a bit of a run for its money.

Oh, and I'm also very pleased to see that the High Court threw out that despicable legislation change that the Howard Liberal Government brought in, which closed the electoral rolls to new registrations 24 hours after an election was called. That was the most underhanded thing I've ever seen in Australian politics in my voting life.

[politics] QoTW: "We're all bloody boat people" -- Bob Hawke

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:27:00 PDT

Bob Hawke weighs in on the immigration debate

[life] Citizen Zoe

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:40:00 PDT

I'm totally gobsmacked by how fast this happened, but Zoe's certificate of Australian Citizenship arrived today. I only sent off the application on Saturday, and it would have arrived in Washington DC at the Australian Embassy on Monday morning. For us to get it back on Wednesday means they processed it either the same or next day and got it back into the mail on Tuesday. Pretty amazing, given that the form itself sets the expectation of up to 12 weeks, and Embassy-specific web page sets the expectation of 3-4 weeks.

Next step, get an Australian passport.

[tech] Farewell, Sonic.net, hello Comcast Business

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:17:00 PDT

In all my born days, I never thought I'd be saying that.

I've been a happy customer of Sonic.net for the entire time I've been in the US, but I recently became aware of an offer through work with Comcast Business that I couldn't refuse.

So I've gone from

to this

You really can't beat it. I'll still recommend Sonic to all and sundry, but if you want some real speed (and with baby photos and videos galore to upload, I was really more interested in additional upload capacity), it's time to give DSL the flick.

[life] Zoe at 3 months

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:03:00 PDT

Again, there's been this surreal time warp effect. 3 months has passed, and it feels like both a long time and a blink of an eye. It more feels like a long time though. I've mostly forgotten what it was like before Zoe came along.

Zoe is growing well. She weighs around 11 lbs 11 oz (5.3 kg), and I swear she's getting very long. When I'm holding her in my arms, there's legs everywhere. She started being able to roll from her stomach onto her back at 2 months, and her neck strength is pretty good now. I guess her next significant milestone will be being able to sit up properly. When she's on her tummy, she can prop herself up on her elbows and look around. She smiles all the time.

We had a few nights of 8 hours of sleep, then everything went completely out the window, and we had about a week of very disrupted sleep at night. I think she's starting to settle into a routine now though, with a few 5 hour stints the last few nights.

Her US passport arrived yesterday. We still need to get everything together to lodge her Australian citizenship application, which is the first step towards getting her an Australian passport.

Sarah's back studying now (two subjects this semester), which is proving to be a bit of a juggling act.

[geek] Cleaning up from 20 years ago

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:41:00 PDT

I'm a terrible hoarder. I hang onto old stuff because I think it might be fun to have a look at again later, when I've got nothing to do. The problem is, I never have nothing to do, or when I do, I never think to go through the stuff I've hoarded. As time goes by, the technology becomes more and more obsolete to the point where it becomes impractical to look at it.

Today's example: the 3.5" floppy disk. I've got a disk holder thingy with floppies in it dating back to the mid-nineties and earlier. Stuff from high school, which I thought might be a good for a giggle to look at again some time.

In the spirit of recording stuff before I throw it out, I present the floppy disks I'm immediately tossing out.

MS-DOS 6.2 and 6.22: Ah the DOS days. I remember excitedly looking forward to new versions of MS-DOS to see what new features they brought. I remember DOS 5.0 being the revolutionary one. The dir command grew a ton of options.
XTreeGold: More from the DOS days, when file management was such a pain in the arse that there was a business model to do it better. ytree seems like a fairly good looking clone of it for Linux.
WinZip for Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows 3.1: Ha. I actually paid money for an official WinZip floppy disk.
Nissan Maxima Electronic Brochure: I'm amazed this fit on a floppy disk
Turbo Pascal 6.0: Excluding GW-BASIC, this was the first "real" language I dabbled in. I learned it in Information Processing & Technology in grades 11 and 12. I never got into the OO stuff that version 6.0 was particularly geared towards.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?: Awesome educational game. I was first introduced to this on the Apple ][, and loved it. This deserves being resurrected for a console.
Captain Comic II: Good sequel to the original, but I never found a version that worked properly (I could never convince it to let me finish it)
HDM IV: Ah, Hard Disk Menu. A necessity from the DOS days when booting up to a C:\> prompt just really didn't cut it. I used to love customising this thing.
ARJ, LHA, PK-ZIP: Of course, you needed a bazillion different decompression programs back in the days of file trading. I guess things haven't changed much with Linux. There's gzip, bzip2, 7zip, etc.
Zeliard: I wasted so many hours playing this. The ending was so hard.
MicroSQL: This was some locally produced software from Brisbane, written in Turbo Pascal (I think). It was a good introduction to SQL, I used it in high school and my first stab at University.
DOOM and DOOM II: Classics. I don't seem to have media for it any more, but I also enjoyed playing Heretic and Hexen. Oooh, Hexen has been ported to Linux? Must check that out...
SimCity 2000: I wasn't a big fan of this game, but I liked the isometric view that 2000 had, compared to the previous version.

[tech/security] Detecting capabilities with strace

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:56:00 PDT

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

Linux's maturing support for POSIX.1e capabilities is cool. Here's how to figure out what capabilities a binary needs, using strace.

[life] First Father's Day

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:22:00 PDT

Father's Day in the US has always been a weird one for me. I've been pottering through the day oblivious, when a friend who is a father will tell me that they've been thinking of me especially today because of our loss. Then I'm reminded that Father's Day is in June and not September. I wonder what the deal is with that? It seems very few countries observe it on the first Sunday in September. Weird.

Zoe hits the 7 week mark tomorrow, and I return to work. Boy is that going to be a shock to the system for all of us.

The 7 weeks of paternity leave has been absolutely wonderful. Google's Paternity Leave benefit is now firmly my number one favourite employee benefit. Co-workers had complained that taking it all at birth was a bit of a waste, because all the baby does is sleep, but it's definitely been worthwhile taking it all now.

Because we've been predominantly bottle feeding with pumped breast milk, I've been able to be very involved with the feeding, and I've been able to do a lot of the running around helping Sarah, so I wouldn't have done it any other way. It's also been great to watch Zoe grow and develop. She's interactive enough at this age, and it's just great to cuddle with her, or share a nap with her.

On the sleeping front, things are a bit all over the place. She definitely gets fussy in the evenings, at around 5pm to 7pm. Often we have trouble getting her to go back to sleep after a feeding around this time. Sometimes the trouble can extend past the 10pm to midnight feeding. She sleeps magnificently during the day, and travels fairly well. She sleeps quite well in her car seat, and stays asleep in it when we're at a cafe or restaurant.

We had our first overnight trip while Sarah's Mum was visiting. We went down to San Simeon to take her to Hearst Castle. It was fun having Zoe in a hotel room with us. Whenever she fussed during the night, we'd just grab her and bring her into bed with us. She spent quite a lot of time in our bed asleep on our chests. It was very sweet. It was like a little baby vacation.

Zoe also had her first outing to the California Academy of Sciences, and we managed to spend about 5 hours there without any major meltdowns from anybody.

It was absolutely fantastic having Sarah's Mum here for 4 weeks too. She's great to have around. She was a big help in cleaning up the back yard significantly, and generally helping out around the house. It was great having her take care of the 7am feeding when Sarah and I were both zonked out from overnight interruptions. It was also nice not to have to think so much about how dinner was going to materialise.

My parents have decided they will come and visit in September, which is excellent, as they won't have to wait until February to meet Zoe. One of the other nice things about the Google Paternity Leave is that you keep accruing vacation time while you're on it, so I should have enough vacation time to take a couple of weeks off while they're here, as well as in February when we go back to Australia for Sarah's residential school at the University.

The next big event will be Zoe's vaccinations at 8 weeks. Hopefully that will be as uneventful as possible.

[tech] The ondemand CPU frequency governor should be better in Linux 2.6.35

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:56:00 PDT

I'm still wading through my backlog of LWN articles, but I found this one to be of interest.

From my interpretation of the article, I/O intensive workloads currently cause the ondemand governor to drop the CPU frequency, whereas it ideally shouldn't.

It looks like the fixes have been merged into what will become 2.6.35

[debian] ISC DHCP 4.1 package progress report

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:39:00 PDT

It's been a while since I've been able to make any progress on the ISC DHCP 4.1 packaging. I had to cannibalise my test infrastructure to deal with hardware failure that would have rendered my MythTV installation out of commission, we bought a condo, did some renovations, and had a baby. I'm still playing catch up.

The other day, I was able to recreate a test environment on my laptop using KVM, instead of Xen on a dedicated machine, and it's 37% more awesome than my old setup, so I'm back in the saddle again.

I've been able to do some basic testing of the 4.1 packages that are in experimental, and they appear to work, and they upgrade cleanly from the 3.1 packages.

There's the small issue of third-party packages that are plonking files in /etc/dhcp3 (it's just /etc/dhcp now). I finished filing bugs for the transition this morning, so I think the next step is to upload to unstable, which I think I'll do on the weekend.

[life] Zoe, 2 weeks later

Mon, 17 May 2010 22:12:00 PDT

The fact that it's only two weeks feels totally surreal. I think it's the feeding approximately every 3 hours. That's approximately 100 interactions that we've had with her in only 2 weeks.

We had her two week weight check at the paediatrician's today. She's now weighing 6 lbs 12 oz (3061 grams), so she's made back her birth weight and then some.

We're still largely bottle feeding her with pumped breast milk. The paediatrician said that once she's 7 pounds she should have enough strength to breastfeed exclusively, so we'll get a lactation consultant involved if that isn't the case in another week or so.

Other than that, everything's going swimmingly. She eats, sleeps and poops. She sleeps amazingly well. I keep telling myself it won't last, but we're making the most of not needing to tip-toe around the house. In the last week, we had a new stove installed, which involved the contractor using a hammer drill to install the anti-tip brackets. He also used a drop-saw to modify one of the drawers. Didn't bother her. We had some shutters installed in the kitchen, which involved a lot of cordless drilling. Also didn't bother her. The gardeners for the complex were mowing the lawn and using a leaf blower right outside her window. Not a peep.

Today, after the paediatrician's appointment, we dropped in to Palo Alto Animal Services, the animal shelter where Sarah has volunteered for the last 4.5 years, to show them Zoe. They threw a bit of a surprise baby shower, and gave us a ton of baby clothes, which was very nice and totally unexpected. Zoe slept in her car seat on the table in the lunch room while a good dozen people or so made a lot of noise around her, and she was oblivious to it all.

Sarah's Mum arrives on Wednesday. Tomorrow will be a busy day of final cleaning up in preparation.

[life] One week later

Mon, 10 May 2010 21:13:00 PDT

Zoe's a week old today. As such things tend to do, this feels like both an eternity and no time at all.

We've been back to the paediatrician twice since I last blogged. Zoe's weight is now on the increase again. Today she weighed in at 6 lbs 3 oz (2806 grams) (I think. My brain has gone a bit fuzzy)

We're largely sticking with bottle feeding pumped breast milk for now. Apparently 7 lbs is the magic size where they've got enough strength to feed exclusively at the breast.

Sleep-wise, I think we're all doing reasonably well. Zoe just eats, sleeps and poops. Sometimes we need to wake her up to have a feed. I think the longest we've let her got is 4.5 hours. She's taking a lot of milk at each feeding session - up to 90 mL, so I expect that she'll have blasted past her birth weight by the time she's two weeks old.

It'll be good when she's exclusively breastfeeding. The current regime is a little bit tiring. Zoe wakes up (or gets woken up). I change her diaper and give her a bottle. Sarah tries a little bit of breastfeeding. I put Zoe back in her crib. Sarah pumps some milk for the next feeding session, and I go and wash and sterilise bottles and pumping paraphernalia.

If Zoe's feeding every three hours, this only really gives us two hours to get anything else done.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. At the paediatrician's this morning, there was another father with the same LPCH diaper bag that we'd received while we were in the hospital. Turned out he had a two-week old boy. I asked how the sleep levels were going, and he exclaimed about how they were only getting 2.5 hours at a time, and his son would raise the roof. I mentioned the 4.5 hour stint that we'd managed to have, and he was totally gobsmacked.

In other news, it seems like Sarah has a bit of UTI, which has totally wiped her out this afternoon. She got a 3 day course of antibiotics this afternoon, so hopefully that'll fix her up.

[life] And we're home

Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 PDT

It took longer than expected, but we were finally discharged from the hospital early this afternoon.

There was some concern about jaundice in Zoe, so the hospital paediatrician ordered a bilirubin blood test, which we had to wait for the results from. It came back fine though.

The other concern was weight loss. She's still hovering around the 5 lbs 13 oz mark, which is at some magical 10% of birth weight lost, which seems to cause some concern for the doctors.

So for the next week or so, we're going to bottle feed her breast milk, as she seems very sleepy when she tries to nurse, and we want to make sure she's getting enough. It's nice to be able to more actively participate in the feeding routine.

Since we've been home, Zoe's not been sleeping terribly well on her own, so right now her and Sarah are having a nap together.

We've got our first appointment with Zoe's ongoing paediatrician tomorrow. She was the recommendation of a friend, and seems to be highly regarded by all of the hospital paediatricians we saw.

I'm feeling very disorganised in the nursery, because I didn't really participate in any of the set up of it. I knew where everything was in the hospital, so for a diaper change, everything was under control. I'm going to have to get a couple of totes tomorrow, so everything is on hand. I may also go berserk with a label maker.

Looking forward to a hot shower and some shut-eye after this next feeding.

[life] Going home today

Thu, 06 May 2010 07:49:00 PDT

The OB resident dropped by on her rounds this morning and asked if Sarah wanted to go home today or tomorrow. There was some brief indecision regarding stairs, but Sarah has decided to go home today. We only stayed 3 nights in hospital after Joshua's C-section as well.

So the staples have been removed, and we're getting discharged at about 11am.

[life] Crazy few days

Wed, 05 May 2010 22:49:00 PDT

Here's why:

Zoe Dianne Pollock was born at 12:30pm PDT, at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, via Caesarean-section.

Her birth weight was 2920 grams (6 lbs, 7 oz) and she's 49.5 centimetres (19.5 inches) long.

As for why she was born 11 days early than her previously scheduled early arrival...

Monday morning started off like any other normal Monday morning. I got up at 6am to go to the gym with Dan. I got home at around 8am. I asked Sarah if she'd felt any baby movement, and she said she hadn't. Even after some jiggling and a cold glass of orange juice, there was nothing.

Not wanting a repeat performance of what happened last time, we wasted no time in heading to Labour and Delivery to get things checked out. When we were nearly at the hospital, Sarah felt some small movement, so that was a relief.

When we got to the hospital, they performed a non-stress test as they have previously. They spent a good couple of hours with Sarah hooked up to the monitor, and then the on-call obstetrician asked us how we'd feel about just having the baby today.

I asked if there was anything particularly concerning about the NST, and the OB said that she (the baby) was doing marvelously now, but was "less than marvelous" when we first came in. I haven't had a chance since to ask her if there was anything untoward observed during the delivery.

Anyway, she (the on call OB) said that rather than have Sarah get stressed out for the following 11 days, she'd talked with our regular OB, and they felt that since she was at 37 weeks (and considered "full term") that it was okay to deliver at that point. At the end of the conversation, it was upgraded to a recommendation, rather than an option.

So so much for an attempt at VBAC. We got to the hospital at around 9am, and I think they/we made the decision to deliver at about 10:30am. I had enough time to race home and grab the camera and race back again, and the next thing I knew we were all in the operating room, and Zoe was being delivered.

It was amazing getting to see the "extraction". They dropped down the sheet that was blocking our view of the action right at the end, and I got to see (and photograph) Zoe's head and whole body being pulled out. She gave out a little cry, and Sarah and I totally lost it with relief.

Things were a bit of a blur after that. I got to come over and meet Zoe while they were weighing her and measuring her, and then they bundled her up and let me take her back to Sarah's head-end on the operating table, so Sarah could get a look at her.

Sarah handled this C-section better than last time. She didn't get any nausea, but she still got the itching and involuntary shivering, courtesy of the morphine.

While they were still putting Sarah's insides back in, Zoe and I went to the nursery, where they put her under a heater for a little while to warm her up a bit. Then it was back to the recovery room to have a proper meeting with Sarah.

Once Sarah was ready to move to the maternity ward, Zoe and I again returned to the nursery, where she got her first bath, had her umbilical cord trimmed some more, and her anti-theft device fitted to her umbilical cord clamp. Then it was off to the maternity ward. I think we were all in the maternity ward by 3pm.

After a little while, we managed to get bumped to a private room, which was a lot better than the shared room (the other bed was vacant, but just having more space made a big difference), and that's where we've been ever since.

I've stayed each night on the roll away bed, helping out with diaper (sorry Aussies, I've been here too long, and dealt with too many babies, I never think of them as "nappies" any more) changes, and burping and other miscellaneous tasks.

Monday night was okay. Tuesday was a bit rough. Sarah didn't get any sleep on Monday night, and the anaesthesia totally wore off and she was in a fair bit of pain. She slept better on Tuesday night, and today, the breastfeeding has been going well, and the post-operative pain is well and truly under control.

She's lost a bit of weight since delivery (as is to be expected). She was down to 5 lbs 14 oz (2664 grams) at last night's weigh-in, and at tonight's weigh-in she came in at 5 lbs 13 oz (2636 grams). So the weight loss is starting to plateau. We're already supplementing the breastfeeding with syringes of colostrum/milk that Sarah's pumped previously, so I hope the weight loss will have turned around by tomorrow night's weigh-in. The breastfeeding in general is going pretty well as of today. Mum and bub have both mastered the latch. I think it's just a matter of Sarah's milk coming in now.

I've brought forward my 7 weeks paternity leave (an excellent benefit Google offers) to start as of Zoe's delivery. Sarah's Mum arrives on the 19th for 4 weeks, which will be great. We expect to be discharged from hospital on Friday.

Luckily we were pretty much all ready for this happening a little bit earlier. We had our last baby classes on the weekend. The nursery is ready enough to bring a baby home to, so aside from Sarah's Mum being disappointed that Zoe's going to be a bit older when she first gets to see her, we're all good.

The WiFi in the hospital is great. We've already Skyped with both grandmothers and they've had a chance to see Zoe. We've had a steady trickle of visitors, and the whole baby routine is making the time go pretty quickly.

[tech] How to set up my Mustek 1200 UB Plus scanner under Linux

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:22:00 PDT

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"

[life] 17 days

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:06:00 PDT

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).

[life/americania] TransLink to become Clipper

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:25:00 PDT

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?

[life] Baby wearing class

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:39:00 PDT

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.

[life] 34 weeks down, ~5 weeks to go

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:25:00 PDT

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.

[tech] On the iPad

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:09:00 PDT

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.

[opinion] Queensland and daylight saving: the epic battle continues

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:34:00 PDT

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.

[tech] Using capabilities from Python

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:08:00 PDT

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.

[life] I (apparently) have obstructive sleep apnea

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:10:00 PDT

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.

[tech/security] How not to do it

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:54:00 PDT

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.

[life] It's done!

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:55:00 PDT

(It's actually been done since last Friday, I just haven't had time to sort out photos and write about it)

It's so nice to have our home back to normal. The kitchen is all done, with the exception of being down one handle, and two design bugs that need to be sorted out.

Bug number one is that the trim on the warming drawer underneath the oven sticks out a little bit more than the rest of the whole range, meaning if it's pushed all the way in, the cabinet door to the left rubs against it when opened. Solution: accelerate replacement of the range.

Bug number two is the drawer to the right of the range can't be opened when the oven door is closed (it runs into the handle). What I think happened is the kitchen designer didn't take into account the thickness of the new back splash behind the range causing it to come out further from the wall. This is disappointing, and replacing the range won't help. They all seem to have oven door handles that protrude that far out. The solution is to modify the width of the drawer on the left-hand side.

Other than those two issues, the kitchen is fantastic. We've very happy with it. The amount of counter space we've got is wonderful.

Here's some before and after photos, the whole lot are here

We just need to sort out some window treatments of some sort now.

[tech] Netflix instant streaming on the Nintendo Wii

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:25:00 PDT

On Saturday we received the disc from Netflix that enables instant streaming on the Wii.

This gave me a good excuse to plug the Wii back in, as I hadn't gotten around to it since we moved house.

The set up procedure is very nice. You put in the disc, start the "game", and it spits out a code. You go to http://www.netflix.com/Wii and enter the code. I imagine it looks for a request from the Wii with that code, and an authenticated submission with the same code from a web browser, within a certain period of time, and puts two and two together. It beats having to enter your username and password for your Netflix account on the Wii.

The UI is very nice. You get a horizontal list of the titles in your Watch Instantly queue, and you just pick what you want to watch, and away you go. The video quality seemed fine.

We'll definitely be watching more stuff from our Watch Instantly queue now.

Full disclosure: I am a Netflix shareholder

[debian] Transitioning to a new RSA key

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:27:00 PDT

Julien's blog post reminded me that I needed to announce that I'm in the process of transitioning to a new key myself.

I've been meaning to do something about the whole weak 1024-bit DSA key thing ever since everyone started freaking out about them, but I liked how well connected my old key was. Oh well. Time to suck it up and start over.

Here's my transition document, now that I've figured out how sign a file with multiple keys

[tech] How to get GPG to sign with multiple keys

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:23:00 PDT

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get GnuPG to sign a file with multiple keys. It's not at all obvious from the man page, but you can use the -u option multiple times, with each key ID that you want to use.

[life] The saga of the kitchen remodel continues

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:11:00 PDT

Well, it's been a month since the initial demolition started

It's nearly finished.

We had a slight bit of scope creep in that we decided to redo the floor now as well. This was brought on by the fact that the new cabinets didn't quite meet up with the footprint of the old ones, on one side, leaving maybe a 5 centimetre gap between the new cabinets and the floor.

I wasn't a fan of having to haul the fridge and stove back into the living room again at some point in the future (the fridge is too big for the doorway and needs to have its doors removed) so it seemed like the best thing was to do it while everything else was being done.

Fortunately, it hasn't blown out the overall time of the work, as we're still waiting for the counter tops to be cut or manufactured or something. The ETA for them to be installed is Friday or Monday.

So in the meantime we got just the kitchen floor tiled.

The plan is to replace all of the floating wooden floor with tiles, but just not right now. To do the rest would involve faffing around with the downstairs bathroom, and pulling out the washer and dryer, as well as the hot water heater. Doing that now, on top of having all of the kitchen stuff in the living room just gives me the heebie jeebies, so the compromise is to keep the existing flooring for the rest of downstairs, and just buy enough tiles to cover it later. Maybe at Christmas time, if we go back to Australia, we'll get it done then while we're not around to be disrupted.

When they ripped up the floor in the kitchen, some huge cracks in the slab were immediately apparent, so they had to put down some DITRA as a foundation to prevent the tiles cracking as a result of the slab expanding and contracting.

The tiling should be finished by tomorrow I hope, and then we have to let the grout cure for 72 hours before we seal it.

The one small delay we've had was due to a miscommunication with the kitchen company: we'd never ordered any handles for the cabinets and drawers, so they only got ordered after the cabinet installation was completed. Had we had them on hand, we could have started occupying the cabinets and drawers already, which would have reduced the chaos in the living room a bit. Oh well.

Blow-by-blow photos of the work so far (I'm lacking photos of the cabinets with the doors on) are here.

[life/americania] We've officially left our mark on the US

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:53:00 PDT

We received our US census form the other day. Sarah's already filled it out, but I wanted to look at it before we mailed it back, just out of curiosity.

I'm astounded at how incredibly basic it is. Literally all it asks is name, age, date of birth and race. It's somewhat laughable how you're either "white", or one of a bazillion other racial ethnicities. They don't seem to be interested that I'm Australian. Or if I were a white Samoan, for example.

I can only remember having filled out one Australian census since I moved out of home, which was the 2001 census. I missed the 2006 census since I was living in the US. The US census seems to be a 10 year affair, compared to Australia's 5 years.

"Census night" was always a big deal in Australia. You were supposed to fill out the form on that particular date, for whoever was in that particular dwelling. So you really didn't want to be out visiting friends that night.

The US census form claims to care about the state of affairs on April 1, but it also says to mail it back immediately. It seems to only care about "full-time residents", so the whole visitor problem doesn't seem to exist over here.

Wikipedia tells me that the 2006 Australia Census had 60 questions, all compulsory, except for the questions about religion. I'm still gobsmacked by how small an amount of data the US tries to collect. I just quickly reviewed the 2001 Australia Census form, and I'm rather amazed at how many questions it asked.

I remember there being a meme at the time of the 2001 census to put down "Jedi" as your religion, with the word on the street being that if enough people said that was their religion, it would become officially recognised as one.

[life] T minus 10 weeks

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:10:00 PDT

Sarah hit the 30 week mark yesterday, and we had the 30 week anatomical ultrasound.

Fortunately, it was far less eventful than the 20 week one.

She's growing really well. She's on average in the 51st percentile, so we couldn't ask for better than that. She's currently head up, but there's still time for her to flip over.

We've got another ultrasound in 6 weeks.

Looking back at my blog, it's amazing how much has happened in 10 weeks.

Sarah's Mum booked her flights to come out for the birth. I think she gets here the week before the due date.

Quite by accident, we managed to find a second hand nursing chair at the Home Consignment Center (which we'd only learned of the day before, and is an awesome place for a browse), so I think that rounds out the large items we need to get.

[life] Walking to work

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:47:00 PDT

Sarah's doing her phlebotomy externship at San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and needs to leave home fairly early to get there by 9am. As a result, I've been walking to work those mornings.

I remembered to record a track this morning:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

It's certainly an improvement on the old commute. It's a shame there's a slight back-track involved.

I'll have to try rollerblading in another time.

[tech] Backspacegate

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:51:00 PDT

I just updated to the latest beta of Chrome, and the backspace key stopped working as a keyboard shortcut for the Back button.

After a few times of stabbing the backspace key and not getting the result I wanted, I decided to go looking into what was going on here.

It looks like it all started with bug 30699, where someone didn't like the default behaviour. That led to bug 36533, when the people (like me) noticed the functionality they were relying on disappeared.

Now I fully understand that Backspace == Back is not the default behaviour of Firefox (on Linux), but it is a configurable option, and I'd had it enabled there for years. I think it all started with when I migrated from Windows to Linux. It's normal for Backspace == Back with IE and I think Firefox for Windows, and I've just developed the muscle memory for it, and I've never had a problem like what the submitter of bug 30699 was complaining about.

I look forward to it becoming a configurable option in Chrome.

[debian] Bits from the ISC DHCP maintainer

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:34:00 PDT

It's been a while since I made an upload of anything DHCP-related, so I thought a general update was deserved.

The lovely test infrastructure that I built had to be cannibalised to stand in for some other hardware that failed on me, so that prevented me from being able to test as easily. Add to that, the distractions of moving house, and I just haven't had the time to do any work on the DHCP 4.1 packaging.

That said, I haven't been completely idle. I've been pressing the ISC DHCP developers to incorporate the LDAP patch, which is extremely popular in some quarters. At the same time, I was able to flush the author of the LDAP patch (he'd seemed to have disappeared) and connected the two parties together. Hopefully we'll see something in 4.2

Today, I updated the 4.1 packages in experimental to 4.1.1, which includes a reintroduced LDAP patch. I think if there's no unfavourable feedback, I'll look at uploading this to unstable in the next month or so, and the great transition to DHCP 4 can commence (assuming the release time is cool with this).

If I could just figure out how to do bridged networking with KVM and still use NetworkManager for my WiFi, I could probably set up a similar test environment to what I had before, on my laptop...

[life] Kitchen update

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:19:00 PDT

The kitchen renovations are slooowly progressing. Running away to New York for a week certainly helped.

The cabinets arrived on Monday, and our contractor started installation on Wednesday. Templating for the counter tops is supposed to happen on Monday, and then it apparently takes a couple of weeks for the stone to get cut to size. So much for this whole thing only taking a couple of weeks :-(

I expect the overhead cabinets can be installed once the templating is done (that's something I need to check with the contractor today).

It's very exciting to see the kitchen start to take shape. I'm dying to be able to actually use it.

Photos of the progress so far are here

[debian] How to check the status of a dinstall run remotely

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:12:00 PDT

I had this vague recollection of it being possible to do so, but I think Joerg's blog post has a poor page rank, so this is my attempt to give it a little boost.

[life] Kitchen renovations started

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:36:00 PDT

Sarah got a call from the contractor on the weekend, saying he wanted to make a start on the kitchen demolition on Wednesday. So we've moved everything from the kitchen into the living room (fridge and stove included), and they started work today.

Boy, did they start!

It's all gone already. All of the cabinets, and the existing lighting, and the fan.

Here's how it looked last night:

Unfortunately there's no working lights any more, so I couldn't take photos of how things look tonight. I'll have to try and get some in the morning before the contractor gets here.

It's sounding like it's going to take longer than one and a half weeks, so we're going to be eating out for a while (or cooking with the microwave in the living room). Conveniently (depending on how you want to look at it given the temperature there) I have a work trip to New York next week, and Sarah's going to come along for a few days as well, so that'll help kill some time.

I think our next immediate need is to decide on what colour to paint the walls. Some light shade of green is a current contender.