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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

I was rather shocked and dismayed to discover via Facebook this morning that there'd been a fatal stabbing at my former school, Saint Patrick's College at Shorncliffe.

The details are a bit sketchy still, so I can't say who the instigator of the attack was, but a Year 8 student is dead, and a Year 9 student was injured and is charged with murder.

There was a problem with bullying when I was a student there, and also when my little brother was there, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was still a problem today.

Very sad. This kind of thing doesn't usually happen in Australia.

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it.

It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers.

I'm really proud of her.

Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her.

She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

In buying a place and moving, we've left the home we've been in for just over 4 years. Central Park Apartments was a wonderful community for us, and we made many wonderful friends there. At the peak of awesome, we knew really well the occupants of 4 out of the 7 other apartments in our building, as well as numerous others throughout the complex.

The company running the place ran it really well. Everything was well maintained. I wouldn't recommend one of the single-level apartments, as the inter-floor sound insulation was pretty terrible, but the townhomes were great (albeit the kitchens were a bit small). We were in a Greenwich floorplan.

The other big plus for me was that it had data cabling.

We'll miss all of our friends there, but thankfully they're not very far away.

The first time we looked at this condo that we ended up buying, I looked at the cupboard under the stairs, and could visualise a small 19 inch rack in the lower part of it, with all of my computer gear in it.

When we got structured cabling installed, I had the CAT-6 cabling terminated onto a basic 19 inch patch panel, with the intent of mounting this in a rack.

Then it became a case of trying to find a rack.

My favourite junk shop, Weird Stuff, didn't have anything that wasn't full height, so I started looking around online.

There's certainly a lot of variance in price. I settled on a 26U Intellinet rack from New Tech, because based on the dimensions on the website, it would fit in the space I had in mind.

When we assembled it, it became obvious that the dimensions quoted were the inside dimensions and not the outside dimensions, and it was about 4 centimetres too tall. In hindsight, I should have figured that out. 26 x 1.75 is 45.5.

This is where I must give a shout out to New Tech. Sarah called them up, explained the situation, and they agreed to take the rack back, and sent us some shipping labels to ship it back.

We managed to find a more simple rack, a 20U Middle Atlantic, which arrived today, and was significantly easier to put together. The only downside: no rear mounting holes. I don't think it'll be a huge problem, though. All I'm planning on mounting in the immediate future are the patch panel, some sort of cable management, a Catalyst switch, and a power strip. At some point in the future, once we stop spending money hand over fist, I'll look at getting a rack mountable server to replace the hodge podge of computers I'm currently running.

What I wish we'd discovered about two days ago, was the Lack Rack. This would have been perfect (and so much cheaper).

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days).

The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks.

The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time.

We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone.

When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive.

The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line.

Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately.

But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

Moving today went as about as well as you could possibly ask for. The movers arrived at a few minutes to 9, had most of the place packed up within 30 minutes, and I think we headed to the new place in a little over an hour.

Mad props to Handle With Care Moving. The guys were really great.

The rain also held off for the duration, thankfully.

There's just dregs left at the old place, oh and the entire kitchen. I think we're both subconsciously dreading (and therefore avoiding) moving the kitchen stuff, because we really don't want to unpack at the new place, because the kitchen is going to get totally destroyed in hopefully a couple of weeks time.

I'm finding wall space to be a bit of a premium at the new place. We're trying to keep the second bedroom as usable as a bedroom as possible, while primarily using it as a study, so that when we have house guests, we can throw some sort of bed down in that room and not have it all become ridiculously cluttered. When you've got desks all against one wall, a built-in wardrobe against another wall, and a full length sliding door on the other wall, that doesn't leave too many options for a bookshelf and retaining space for a bed. I think we might have to avail ourselves of some more elfa shelving and ditch the Ikea bookshelf we currently have.

On the other hand, our bedroom is looking pretty good. For the first time in ages, it's just going to be a bedroom. No desks, no filing, no storage. The wardrobe has less space than our old place, so we're having to be pretty ruthless with clothing. Oh, and the bathroom storage: way less. Not sure how we're going to sort that one out at the moment.

The phone and cable TV should get hooked up tomorrow, and then I'll get the DSL moved over, so hopefully by Wednesday, we'll have Internet connectivity.

We brought the cats over this afternoon. They're still confined to our bedroom at the moment until they calm down a bit.

We have until next Sunday to officially be out of the old place.

There's a release critical bug (that severity is debateable, in my opinion) in elfsign, a package I maintain.

It seems to my casual observation, that switching it to generate SHA1 signatures wouldn't be too hard, given it's using OpenSSL, and OpenSSL has a sha.h file. I really wouldn't know where to start, though, and ideally it should continue to verify existing MD5 signatures, so it's more than just changing an include and a few function calls.

To boot, upstream seems to have disappeared, so it's looking like removal is the best option. The popcon numbers for this package aren't very high either, which is another nail in the coffin.

So if someone reading this cares about elfsign in Debian enough to send me a patch to use SHA1 in the next month or so, I won't file a removal request.

This was born from a need to see how big a ZIP file I could send my accountant in Australia, and scratching the itch to write some code.

The fact that most SMTP servers talk Extended SMTP makes this relatively easy, and Python has some great modules for DNS and SMTP.

One gripe I do have is how long it takes the Python modules to mature. It's taken until Python 2.6 for smtplib.SMTP() to gain a timeout parameter, for example.

Anyway, I was able to write something nice and generic (it works for any domain) in around 100 lines, thanks in no small part to the DNS module, which makes getting a list of MX records stupidly easy.

$ ./maxmessagesize.py andrew.net.au
daedalus.andrew.net.au: -1
$ ./maxmessagesize.py pollock.id.au
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
$ ./maxmessagesize.py debian.org
master.debian.org: 104,857,600
$ ./maxmessagesize.py cameronp.com
mail1.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
mail2.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py ubuntu.com
mx.canonical.com: 62,914,560
$ ./maxmessagesize.py clug.org.au
mx.clug.org.au: 50,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py linux.org.au
morton.linux.org.au: 52,428,800

It's good to see that in most cases of domains I tried, all of the MXes had the same maximum message size.

Source code is here

Yesterday we went back to Stanford for another ultrasound and a fetal MRI.

We had pretty much the same gang doing the ultrasound as two weeks ago, so that was a nice bit of continuity. A paediatric radiologist came in at the end to take a look. She was the most confident of anyone that everything was going to be okay. She thought she could see something resembling the cavum septum pellucidum on the ultrasound. I think the ultrasound report said it was an "unusual shape" or something like that.

After that, we got packed off for the fetal MRI. There was a bit of a wait, as there's only one MRI machine for the children's hospital, and the studies tend to take 30 to 45 minutes, but we eventually got in.

I got to sit in the room with Sarah while they did the MRI. I was hoping to be able to sit in the control room instead, so I could look over their shoulder and see how it was all done. We both got earplugs because the machine is pretty noisy. It's not the hammering sound that they seem to go for on TV, it's more various different pitches of a horn.

The radiologist told us she'd probably read the MRI later that night, as there'd be a bit of a backlog with the long weekend, and that we'd get a call today.

Sarah got impatient this afternoon and called her obstetrician, and he called her back shortly afterwards saying he'd spoken to the radiologist and everything was fine. Exact specifics are not known at this time, but we'll be quizzing the obstetrician at our next appointment in a couple of weeks.

Needless to say, we're both extremely relieved that everything is okay, and can scrub one thing off the list of things to have to worry about at the moment. Now we can just concentrate on trying to move house this weekend.

We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store.

We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff.

The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together.

I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall.

I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

We listen pretty much exclusively to NPR in the car these days, and often when we're pottering around on the weekend, we catch A Prairie Home Companion. It's a light-hearted radio show, which makes us laugh.

When we learned that it was coming to town, we lashed out on some tickets. We went to the recording of today's episode at the War Memorial Opera House.

We had seats towards the back of the balcony on the fourth floor. The opera house is a beautiful building. The seating is incredibly steep. The stage was miles away, I wish I'd brought binoculars. The opera house normally holds 3200, but because there was no orchestra they could put in some extra seats. It was a full house.

It was cool to get to see how the show is put together, and we had an entertaining time.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking.

That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out.

Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued.

I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it.

So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all.

So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely.

It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never.

The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system.

One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

I was driving home from a late night at work recently, and I was almost home, when the car behind me lit up like a Christmas tree.

My immediate reaction was, "Oh crap, I'm tired and I wasn't paying attention to my speed". So I pulled over.

To my relief, it wasn't my speed that was the problem, my left-hand tail light was out. The officer was very nice about the whole thing, but he gave me a fix-it ticket.

He told me I had until I think some time in February to fix the problem, then I had to get a police officer to sign off that it had been fixed. I thought that was the end of it, and continued on my way home.

The other day, I got this official looking letter in the mail the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. My initial thought was, "ha, the fools have issued me a jury summons like they did for Sarah. Can't they tell I'm an alien? Nanoo Nanoo."

So I open the letter and start scanning it. It's a courtesy notice. The first actual sentences I run into start with "Failure to respond to this notice by the due date may result in your bail being increased...". Huh? Bail? What?

It turns out that there's a bit more to the fix-it ticket story. Not only do I have to get a police officer to sign off that I've had the tail light fixed, to avoid going to court, I have to pay a $25 "dismissal fee" (also known as California is broke and needs every dollar it can get).

Today was the first day that either of us have had any time to scratch ourselves, so we trekked off to Toyota. The guy yanked off the cover inside the boot, and was poking around to show us where to change the bulb, when lo and behold, it started working again. So it was just a loose connector. Dammit.

So now I have to track down a police officer. Preferably under the cover of darkness, as we've tinted the front windows of the Prius, which is apparently cause for another fix-it ticket. Although I'm struggling to find the wording that specifically says that.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is.

We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded.

Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well.

Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend.

The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there.

Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're now trying to come up with a name.

There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain.

Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for when they're checking everything out.

Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also.

So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled off home.

To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the 2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self: always use the free valet parking service from now on.

Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that might be.

One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark. Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks, we'd have to go to LA to do it.

Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't think we'll be aborting.

From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way, you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn out to be nothing.

An anxious two weeks will now follow.

There was a minor hiccup yesterday. Our mortgage broker called me up towards the end of the day in a flap because something had gone wrong on the seller's side of things, and their bank hadn't accepted the transaction or something. I still don't know the full story. Something about them missing a mortgage payment possibly.

Anyway, she was able to arrange for funding and closing today, instead of funding yesterday and closing today, so the outcome was still the same.

Now the real fun starts.

The first thing I did tonight was program the garage door opener into the Prius' HomeLink thingy built into the rear vision mirror. It's always nice to be able to use a feature, even if it's taken 4 years.

Yesterday morning we went to the title company to do all of the paperwork for the condo purchase. I'm still not entirely clear on the whole process, but basically we signed a ton of disclosures and the loan documents, and the whole lot got notarised.

I found the thumbprint requirement rather amusing.

So the loan should fund today, and the title change will register with the county on Wednesday, and by tomorrow afternoon, we should have the keys.

We then had to do a walk through to sign off that the property hadn't turned into a pumpkin since we put the offer in. It was only the second time I've been able to see the place, so it was good to take another look. Sarah's been doing lots of running around to organise quotes for the kitchen renovation and measure the windows for curtains, so she's seen it many more times.

There's going to be a few little odd jobs that need doing around the place. There's a few lights that aren't working (presumably just bulb replacements. There's an outside cupboard that's falling apart. There's a little water feature that I think we'll just get rid of, as the pump is a waste of electricity and it'll just breed mosquitoes otherwise. It's going to be home.

Well that all happened rather quickly.

This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like:

The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too.

A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm.

I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd.

Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago.

So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires.

Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

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.

The first episode of Trauma that Sarah was an extra in aired on Monday night.

I'd seen a news story about how they were looking for extras for it with medical experience, and Sarah had just completed her Certified Nurse Assistant course. I mentioned the news story to her, and she signed up.

Ironically, for the three episodes they've called her up for so far, the closest to using her medical experience is being a patient, and if you're lucky, you'll see her ankle.

Marc was kind enough to rip out some stills from his recording of the episode.

Sarah told me a while ago that she was planning an early birthday present for me, but it was going to be a surprise.

Last night, I found out what it was: tickets to see Kylie Minogue in concert at the Fox Theatre in Oakland.

I had no idea that Kylie hadn't done a US tour before. Last night's concert was her second one ever, and was only put on by popular demand (the night before was her first ever).

I've never seen Kylie live before and it was a great show. There was a DJ on stage for about 45 minutes prior to her starting. There were awesome lasers and lights, a live band, and excellent choreography. My only complaint was that the music tended to drown out her vocals a bit, but other than that, an excellent and totally unexpected night out.

We nearly saw her when we were in Prague last year and she happened to be performing at the same time we were there, but I think this was a much better deal: a smaller venue and cheaper tickets. The general admission area was all of the standing areas on three levels. We could have elbowed our way right to the edge of the stage if we'd wanted to.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good review of her opening night.