It’s all about scalability…

As I’ve told friends and colleagues about my diagnosis, I’ve been overwhelmed by their responses; busy people with heavy workloads have made time to stop and ask if there is anything they can do to help.

Many have asked me to keep them up to date with how I’m getting on as my treatment progresses. I’m delighted to do that, but at the same time I’m becoming alarmed at the size of the distribution list; I don’t want to start mail-bombing large portions of the IBM population with regular health updates. I also suspect I’ve lost track of exactly who wanted updates…

As a result, I’m going to send out one more email to everyone, and point them to this blog, so people can choose to either follow my progress or not, in their own time, as they see fit.

Marked for life

And so yesterday I did something that I always said I never would, and got not one, but three tattoos.

Of course, it’s not happened under normal circumstances. And I suppose that they are genuinely functional, rather than merely cosmetic. And they were positioned with x-rays and lasers and stuff – try asking for that down the local tattoo parlour – and they’re small enough that no-one will ever notice them. But still I find myself resenting them.

Which is weird.

Living on the bleeding edge

As detailed in an earlier post, my Acer Aspire One has been doing a sterling job, replacing my larger, more powerful, but MUCH less portable Thinkpad.

And it occurred to me that the One might well be the ideal machine to take into hospital with me so I can listen to my entire music collection. And then I thought how it would be nice to also be able to listen to the radio. Or watch TV. And I remembered that Hauppauge make really good USB digital TV tuners, which can also receive radio. It was too much for a geek to resist, so a day later I was the proud owner of a Hauppauge Nova-T USB2 stick.

Only to discover that the highly optimised pre-compiled custom kernel that I was running (to keep the performance high) on the One lacked any support for TV tuners. Ooops. So all I need to do is produce a new kernel thats as efficient as my current one, but includes support for the TV tuner.

The last time I tried to compile a linux kernel was back in the days of SUSE 7, and I failed. Big time. So big time that I managed to also destroy the machine I was trying to compile the kernel on. I’ve avoided compiling my own kernels ever since. But hey, time heals all wounds … I’m smarter now, and much more linux-savvy. How hard can it be?

And the answer is, it’s a complete breeze. I plugged in all my hardware, and ran autokernconf, which worked out what kernel options I needed for my current hardware. I then merged it with the kernel config from my pre-compiled kernel, and sorted and uniq’ed it. A little bit of tweaking, and some judicious use of “meld” to check my new config against the original, and then I then downloaded the latest 2.6.28-7 kernel source, imported my kernel config, brought it up to date with newer config options, and ran the compile. All in my own home directory, without the need for root, or messing about in /usr/src. And the output was a pair of .debs that could be easily installed on any machine with next to no effort.

The physical process is about 10 minutes for the minimal kernel I created. Of course, working out exactly which options to select/deselect can take longer. A lot longer. But overall, I am deeply impressed with the effort that has been put into making compiling the kernel both a simple, and more importantly, safe job, with little to no risk of damaging the existing installation.

Oh yes, and now my TV tuner works just fine under Kaffeine

Suddenly statistics are important

Yesterday I saw the clinical oncologist. This is the chap who will be in charge of my radiotherapy, and if necessary any post-operative chemotherapy. I really liked him. He was very approachable and open, and talked to me at my level, rather than trying to over-simplify, or using overly complex medical terms. Turns out that the chance of localised re-occurrence of the cancer is normally 15%. By having the radiotherapy before surgery the national statistics for re-occurrence drop to about 5%. However, “my” hospital is running at less than 1% chance of a localised re-occurrence of the cancer. I’ll take that deal

The radiotherapy sounds really interesting. It consists of a series of stages. First is the planning session. At this they lay a series of thin wires across me, in positions determined by some lasers attached to the CT scanner. They then take another CT scan (this time without contrast agents!) to produce a high resolution scan of my pelvis, overlaid by the wires. Then they tattoo a series of reference marks onto me where the wires were, so they can consistently orient me in the machines, using just the lasers. Then they use the CT scan results to create a 3D computer model of my cancer. From that model a computer calculates how to position me, aim the radiation source and what power to use, to deliver the optimum dose of radiation to the tumour, while limiting the dose to any surrounding tissues. Then I have a simulation run, where I get put into another machine which does a “dry run” to make sure that what they calculated in the computers will actually work in practice. If all is well, I then get my weeks radiotherapy sessions in a linear accelerator.

The surgery then takes place the week after that.

The planning session will take place on Tuesday. I asked if I could have some nice celtic design tattoos, but apparently they are just simple dots. Oh well. Maybe I’ll do something mad when I’m cured.

Transport

In addition to the health problems, we seem to be having a rather torrid time with our cars at the moment. As a family we have three cars. A small people-carrier that my wife primarily drives (which recently got damaged in a car park) a small 4-door run-about that I’m currently using, and my home-built sports car (which is loosely based on a Lotus 7, and which is currently off the road waiting for me to repair the rear suspension).

On Saturday I noticed that as I was driving “my” car up to junction, the rear brakes were making a strange noise. On checking them, it turns out that the pads have worn down to the rivets. Which have scored the discs. D’Oh. My bad for not checking them more regularly, but the upshot is that the rear discs and pads needed replacement.

This is a job I’ve carried out before on other cars without any issues, so I called into the local discount motor factors, and picked up a pair of discs and a set of pads, before calling into the more consumer-oriented place to pick up a workshop manual that would show me the details of how to actually do it. Only for me to discover they don’t do a workshop manual for this car. Oh well, I figure it can’t be *that* hard to change the discs and pads, even without detailed instructions.

How wrong could I be? 3 hours later, and I still haven’t managed to even get the callipers off, let alone the discs themselves. It’s basically impossible to get enough leverage on the bolts without having the car on a lift. At this point I realise that life is too short to be messing about with this, especially when I’m not making any progress, and so I put it all back together as it was. And today I’m trying to get hold of a friend who runs a small garage to get his guys to sort it out for me.

Etiquette and conventions

Yesterday I announced my illness to my wider community of friends and colleagues. Support from them has been amazing, both in terms of their direct responses, and the responses from people who I didn’t think I knew very well who have found out by word of mouth and have subsequently sent me their best wishes too. I spent 4 hours last night writing replies to them all.

However, as someone who has worked in this company for some 20-odd years now (how did that happen?) I know a vast number of people well enough to nod and say hello to as I walk around the various office corridors.

Often we’ll exchange a few pleasantries, ask after each others families etc.

But what on earth do you say when someone you only know slightly is walking the other way, and says “Hi, how are you?”. In most cases, they expect something along the lines of “Fine, yourself?” said with barely a break in step. Do I say, “Not great, I’ve got cancer”? Or not mention it? If I do pick the former approach, what kind of impact does that have on them & their day? They can’t keep on walking (well not without being obviously rude!) but then having stopped, what more can they say to me?

I think there should be a convention here. Lets call it office etiquette for employees with serious illnesses. I’m going to lie to all those people, and continue to say that I’m fine. I don’t want to ruin their day, and honestly, I’m not sure that I want to provoke all those awkward conversations where they don’t know what to say to me. Because actually there is nothing that they really can say anyway …

And the results are in …

Cancer is confirmed. The tumour is confined to the bowel, with no sign of secondary cancers anywhere else in my body. However, the nearby lymph nodes are showing some signs of inflammation; although that doesn’t necessarily indicate any spread of the cancer yet, it probably isn’t the best news either. The tumour is reasonably large, and poorly sited for surgery, so the operation is going to be pretty major, will carry some risk and the possibility of complications. I get the impression I can probably expect a couple of rough nights immediately after the surgery. Because of the lymph nodes, the consultant is also recommending short-course radiotherapy prior to the surgery. This will reduce my ability to heal (and may also result in some other side effects), so the current expectation is for me to require a temporary colostomy while my bowels heal.

I’m planning to undergo the radiotherapy privately, as that will gain me a couple of weeks. I’ll then do the actual surgery on the NHS, before switching back to private provision for the post-operative care. I see the clinical oncologist next week to plan the radiotherapy. Should be in surgery within 4 weeks. If everything goes to plan I should be back to normal life again about 3 months after that.

In the greater scheme of things, I think this is pretty positive. I celebrated by watching my linux system clock roll past “1234567890″, and had some sparkling wine. And now I’m going to bed.

Stressed out

Still no news from the consultants re confirming my diagnosis. Someone ran into my wifes car in the car park today and smashed up the back of it. Needless to say, they drove off without leaving a note, so we’ll have to pay for the repairs. It just keeps on coming

Smaller is better?

Work provide me with a laptop for business, changing them every three years or so. I’ve had a succession of IBM Thinkpads, which I have to say are truly the Rolls-Royce of laptops. Relatively compact and portable, stuffed with features and the kind of build quality that allows them to survive years of abuse (mine have travelled all over the world with me). My experiences with them have been exemplary … until the last few years, when IBM sold the Thinkpad business off to Lenovo. The last couple of machines have not been so great. My top of the range T40p needed 3 motherboards in as many years. My current T60p has already had 2 motherboards, a fan and a heatsink assembly in two years. And now the screen (a rather nice 15″ 1600×1200 job) is showing lines of dead pixels that probably indicate either the LVDS connector is failing, or I need yet another new motherboard. In addition Thinkpads seem to have been steadily growing. My last two machines have not fitted into my “old faithful” laptop bag, requiring a bigger heavier bag to carry them in.

So recently I found myself wondering why I needed a machine with 2 x 2.16GHz processors, 2GB of ram, and a 1600×1200 pixel 15″ screen. Fundamentally I do the same stuff on this machine that I did on my old Thinkpad 600 some 10 years ago. I do email. I browse the web. I use IM. I follow some (real NNTP!) newsgroups. I create documents and I read documents. I do presentations. I occasionally print stuff. So why do I now need the above monster specification, when I used to get by on a single 300Mhz processor, with 384MB of ram, and a 1024×768 13″ screen? And the more I thought about it, the less I could understand it. All I’ve done is adopt a much bigger and heavier machine, that runs a lot hotter, to do the same stuff. The bigger machine isn’t actually allowing me to do anything faster … I still think at the same speed. In fact, in one area my performance has actually decreased – I actually walk a lot slower with it because it weighs so much.

So at Christmas I decided to have my own personal “grand challenge” – to see how small a machine I could get away with to do my job. So I went out and bought my first ever laptop – an Acer Aspire One “netbook”. I got the one with 512MB of ram, and a 120GB hard drive. Cost me 200GBP here in the UK (I know, they’re a LOT cheaper in the USA – we get screwed on computer stuff here).

A day playing with the preloaded Linpus Lite linux (aka hacked Fedora 6) convinced me that while it was set up to be a foolproof computing appliance for the computer-illiterate, I needed something fuller-functioned. So after a little bit of fiddling with gparted, I now have the Aspire set up to triple boot any of (a) the original Linpus Lite, (b) Windows XP SP3 and (c) Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu will be my OS of choice, with Windows there purely for the odd work application that I have to use that isn’t supported under Linux. I kept Linpus purely to compare my performance tuning of Ubuntu to the stock preload.

To Ubuntu I added Thunderbird, Lotus Notes and Sametime (our corporate-standard groupware) and some VPN software. I then added OpenProj, Freemind and Dia, and upgraded the OpenOffice install to v3.0. And to my astonishment, in the last month I’ve needed nothing else.

There have been some teething problems though.

The first problem I experienced was that on Linux, Lotus Notes is implemented as an eclipse plugin, so unfortunately by the time it’s loaded there’s very little left of the 512MB of ram. I gave up after a couple of days, and sprang for another 1GB of ram, at another 13 GBP. Installing it required the complete disassembly of the Aspire … but in actual fact only took about 20 minutes with a set of jewellers screwdrivers. This maxes-out the memory on the Aspire One (at 1.5GB), but I now seem to have memory to burn, even when I have all my applications open at once.

The second problem is that as a long-term thinkpad user, I’m used to having a trackpoint (the little red “nipple” embedded in the keyboard) for moving the cursor. Compared to the control that that provides, a trackpad is a hopelessly painful experience. Fortunately I already had a Logitech bluetooth mouse (a V470), but unfortunately the Aspire One doesn’t come with internal bluetooth. So I had to add an external USB bluetooth adaptor. I imported a USB Bluetooth 2.0 EDR micro-stick from Hong Kong for 6 USD which resolved that problem, and is actually small enough to be left permanently attached, though longer term I’ll probably solder the internals of one to the motherboard somewhere.

Other than that, it’s proving a remarkably solid little performer. The keyboard is a little cramped, but just about big enough to almost-touch-type on. The screen is painfully small, but with multiple workspaces and compiz-fusion doing its thing, you can work around that. And I have external monitors at home and at the office, so it’s only really a problem while travelling anyway. If I have a lot of stuff going on then some applications can be a little sluggish, but even then it’s not problematic … just noticeable.

Boot times for standard Ubuntu were very slow compared to the preloaded Linpus lite, but a custom kernel tailored to the Aspire One has got that down to about 25 seconds, which is faster than standard Ubuntu boots on my T60p. Still not as fast as Linpus though – which is up in about 15 seconds. Battery life on the standard 3 cell battery is only about 2:20; a high capacity 6 cell 3rd party battery should take that to about 7 hours but for my working patterns that’s unnecessary, and would start to add to the weight and size again.

Which leads us to the question of do I declare the challenge beaten or not? I’d justified buying the Aspire One on the basis that if I couldn’t live with it, I’d simply give it to one of my daughters, as I figured it would be fine as a first machine for school-work etc. Well, at the moment I’m not prepared to give it up. It does everything that I need – just, and no more. In fact, these Aspire Ones would be great for my daughters, and the only thing holding me back from going out and buying them a pair is the faint hope that we may see some netbooks built around NVidias ION platform this year.

Replacing the Intel 945GSE chipset (which seems to be based on 3-4 year old designs) with the NVidia GeForce9400 chipset ought to result in a stupendous graphical performance hike for no increase in power consumption. The only question is, will anyone do it? The problem is that it makes low-end netbooks compete with mid-range laptops (problematic for the manufacturers), and Intel is sure to price the Atom/945 combination in such a way that its almost as cheap to take the pair as an Atom on its own – which would stuff any chance that Nvidia have. Will be interesting to see how it works out.

Silver linings

While waiting for the details on my cancer, I seem to have ended up with a lot of time on my hands. I’ve not much work on at the moment, what I do have I’m working through quite quickly, and no-one expects me to take on any new tasks given that I could be imminently off work for 3 months or more.

So I’ve found myself kicking my heels somewhat. Which is definitely a mixed blessing. It’s nice not to be under additional pressure from work, but it does leave me a lot of time to start imagining the types of scenario that frankly, its better not to think about. So I started looking at the honey-dew list for some things to do, until I realised that the reason stuff was on that list was because it all required lots of planning and effort to complete. Ie, no short-term tasks to speak of.

So I finally got around to one of the boring tasks that has been sat on my personal “todo” list for nearly a year now, and digitised my entire CD collection. It’s not as though I actually have that many CD’s – no more than a couple of hundred or so, but it’s still taken several days of almost continuous effort, feeding them into the CD drive, ripping and encoding them.

The original plan was to put them all onto my home server so I could then play them back through my Squeezebox “classic”, and never have to mess with the physical CDs again. Of course, since then time has passed, and I’ve realised I also need those same tracks on my laptop, on my phone (which I use as an mp3 player) and on my kids MP3 players & laptops. So, the question was, what format to rip to?

In theory my Squeezebox supports MP3, FLAC, OGG, WMA and PCM/WAV/AIFF audio natively (ie, without needing transcoding) plus a whole lot more via transcoding at the server. So FLAC was the original “obvious” choice, simply because it is whatever the CD was, and didn’t put any transcoding load on my server. However, compression isn’t as good as the lossy algorithms, and support on hardware devices is patchy. So despite being the biggest archive, I’d still need to maintain extra copies to allow all my playback devices to be supported.

So in the end I’ve ripped everything to MP3 using LAME’s “V1″ option, which gives me ~240kbps variable bitrate encoding. I know its not as good as FLAC, but when I compared the original CD’s to the squeezebox playing back the rip, I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. And I’m saving so much storage space that I can even afford to easily maintain a second copy of the music, transcoded down to a lower bitrate for the phones/mp3 players etc where storage really is at a premium, and the 240kbps rips are too large.

Interestingly, there were several of my CD’s that are starting to exhibit signs of failure … and this is not scratches … rather the actual disk seems to be perishing in some way. Fortunately cdparanoia managed to retrieve all the data (though in one case it took it over 6 hours to do so!) but the original claims for CDs of perfect music lasting forever are clearly not holding up in practice.

Anyway, I finally spent most of today fighting with “EasyTAG”, which whilst not in practice as easy as I hoped, did allow me to get the tagging sorted for all my music relatively quickly. And I’m amazed at the breadth of CD information contained within FreeDB … it knew every CD in my collection, including some short-run private pressings from very small niche artists. Amazing what a big enough cooperative effort can achieve I guess.

The nice thing about having done this, is that since it’s so easy to dip in and dip out of my music collection, I’m finding that I’m listening to stuff that I’d probably never have chosen if I’d had to go find the CD, put it in the player, etc.

Software:
Grip (front-ending LAME and CDParanoia) and EasyTAG under Ubuntu.