So far so good (part xxii)

I had a quick call from the urologist’s medical secretary just before Christmas. Apparently he has changed his mind about the test, and now wants to run a MAG3 Renogram. On the surface there appears to be no great difference to the IVU test, but it seems that there are advantages in terms of the amount of fine detail that can be determined.

In common with the IVU test, the urologist can determine problems with blood flow through each kidney, as well as problems with the drainage from each kidney to the bladder, showing the location of any blockage or restriction. However, in addition it is possible to measure the relative and absolute efficiency of each kidney, which can be useful in determining whether or not kidney function is impacted to the point where intervention is required or not.

If I get to the point where it is required, the question will be what level of intervention I can cope with. Options involving stents are only temporary, and require a general anaesthetic each 6 months to renew them. Not good. Options with balloons to “stretch” the tissues around a restriction to open up the ureter tend to be limited in effectiveness. I’m told that the gold standard is normally to “replumb” the ureter, but that’s going to be a massively difficult undertaking in my pelvis thanks to all my previous surgery. Not ideal.

But if the kidney function is sufficiently degraded for long enough then the kidney will eventually shut down. At that point it’s normal to remove the kidney. Apparently you can get by on less than half a kidney, so losing one isn’t the end of the world. But again, removing one of my kidneys is going to be a lot harder than normal.

So right now I’m hoping for a test result that shows my kidney function is good enough to not require any action at all.

RIP, old friend

My second ever laptop, my old Thinkpad 600, has finally died.

It replaced my original 760CD, and like that machine, I carried it with me on numerous business trips all over the world. It survived being dropped, splashed with coffee, slung into bags, and then crammed into overhead luggage racks or under seats where it invariably got stood on. Despite all this abuse it still worked faultlessly in temperatures as varied as -20c in the Scandinavian winter, through to +40c in the humid summers of the US Deep South.

When IBM supplied me with an upgrade I bought my 600 off the company. For a time it was my personal system. Then it ran my home network, 24×7 until I could afford the parts to build a proper server. It was my wife’s main machine for a time, and lately my youngest daughter has been doing all her homework on it. Even in retirement it worked hard for it’s living.

I figure it must be 12 years old, and when it finally failed it was still running Ubuntu 11.04, which is a sophisticated and current operating system. Ok, the bizarre hybrid sound card wasn’t recognised (the 600 used a custom DSP to implement the modem and the sound system – a great idea, badly executed) and it wasn’t the fastest system on the block, but the overall experience was still pretty good.

At the end of the day it’s just a pile of electronics attached to a magnesium alloy chassis with some rather drab composite plastic covers, that no longer works. I should just recycle it. But there is an emotional attachment; I can’t bring myself to just take it to the recycling centre and dump it. But given that the motherboard has failed, the best I can offer it is the chance to donate some spare parts to new projects. So for now it’s going into my spare parts box; hopefully the screen, memory, disk and perhaps keyboard will show up in some future projects.

It may yet live again!

So far so good (part xxi)

As I mentioned in this post, an appointment with the Urologist was going to figure in my near future, with a view to having him understand how well (or not) the function has been restored to my left kidney.

The MRI scans showed that the kidney was still a little distended, which generally indicates problems with the drainage from the kidney to the bladder, via the ureter. In my case, although the kidney is looking much better, my consultant suspects there is still a problem where my left ureter crosses my pelvic inlet, and that there is some constriction there causing the slow drainage to my bladder.

To prove this, my Urologist is going to run an intravenous urogram or IVU. The good news is it’s basically nothing I’ve not been through already, several times over. The bad news? Another cannula, and some of that “hot flush” iodine contrast agent. Still, it should take no more than an hour or so, and if it helps them resolve the problem, then fine. At a minimum it will be good to understand exactly what the problem is, and what they can do to fix it.

Because from what the consultants have told me so far, they are all happy with my progress, so hopefully this is just one more step closer to finally getting that clean bill of health.

Still having ileostomy problems

Way back here I mentioned some of the problems I’ve been dealing with while living with my ilestomy. I got some really useful comments providing some suggestions, particularly for some better barrier products, which helped quite a lot with the problems with blistering.

The hernia seems to have stabilised, which is positive, but it’s still a real nuisance to live with, and isn’t going to get better any time soon. Ups and downs and guess.

The problem however, is the physical trauma to the stoma, which has continued to get slowly worse. So at the start of this week I booked an appointment with the Stoma Nurses, to see if they can offer some help. They tell me that all the problems I’m seeing are common, so hopefully they will have some solutions for them.

I’ll find out when I see them on Wednesday morning.

Man Flu. Or worse?

One of the problems with being in my situation is that whenever I feel less than 100% well, I start worrying. The nasty little voice in the back of my head starts whispering “It’s back … It’s back …” over and over again. Any and all minor symptoms are a cause for close examination, concern and worry.

Of course, I get the odd cold, run a bit of a temperature, pull the odd muscle, get headaches, and have unexplained aches and pains just like anyone else of my age.

And I understand that – I’m not a hypochondriac. But my reaction to these things is not very logical. Frankly it’s anything but – which is difficult to explain to people. And then I saw this cartoon, which explains everything. Enjoy.

The search for a new desktop still continues

Back in my last post I described how I attempted to customise the Unity desktop environment to better suit my needs within my admittedly commercial setting. The results weren’t too bad, but exposed a series of issues, some of which were purely personal and subjective, and some I felt to be genuine bugs, which I raised against the Unity interface.

This post is all about the same attempt, but this time with the Gnome 3 Shell.

So, having freshly installed Ubuntu 11.10, we need to install Gnome Shell. It’s in the repositories, so it’s a simple matter of opening a terminal and issuing the command:
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

The steps I then followed were:

1. Getting to a shell prompt with Alt + F2 has been disabled by default in Gnome Shell under Ubuntu 11.10. This is annoying, as it means you can’t (trivially) restart or debug the desktop environment without it. To fix it, open “System Settings” and under the Keyboard settings, go to Shortcuts, then System, and then click the “Disabled” next to “Show the run command prompt” and press Alt + F2 to re-enable the command prompt.
2. Next I added some Gnome Shell customisations from http://extensions.gnome.org, which make Gnome Shell look a lot more like Gnome 2. Heretical? Perhaps. So shoot me.
   1. Frippery Applications Menu – puts an old-school applications menu on the left side of the top menu
   2. Frippery Bottom Panel – adds a taskbar to the bottom of every workspace
   3. Frippery Move Clock – moves the clock back to where it used to be in Gnome 2.xx
   4. Frippery Panel Favorite – adds a copy of the launcher into the top panel
3. Next, I wanted to remove the accessibility icon from the top panel. Last time I looked, I didn’t need any of those settings, so I certainly don’t need the icon there all the time. To get rid of it, I downloaded an extension from the website of the author of all the previous extensions:
   http://www.fpmurphy.com/gnome-shell-extensions/noa11y-2.0.tar.gz

   This needs to be unpacked into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ by cd’ing to that directory and running something like:
   tar xvf ~/Downloads/noa11y-2.0.tar.gz.

   You then need to install Gnome Tweak to be able to enable the extension:
   sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
   and then run it with gnome-tweak-tool and choose to enable or disable whatever extensions you have loaded.

4. As with Unity, I wanted to disable the overlay scrollbars:
   sudo su
echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars


   Sadly the scrollbars still don’t have scroll buttons on them – which reinforces my thought that this is simply an issue with themes, and hence can probably be resolved once I’ve learned how themes work.

5. Next, move my preferred set of three window buttons back to the top right of each window titlebar by running the command:
   
gconftool-2 --set --type str /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout ":minimize,maximize,close"

6. Around now it’s probably worthwhile to logout and back in again, or even reboot.

7. Next I configured the general settings:

   1. Screen:
      Turn off at “30 minutes”
      Set screen lock “on” after “screen turns off”
   2. Power:
      Do nothing when lid closed (battery or AC)
      Don’t suspend when inactive (battery or AC)
      Shutdown if power critical on battery
   3. Time and Date:
      Panel clock to show 12hour format
   4. Removable Media:
      Tick “Never prompt or start programs on media insertion”

8. Next I added the date to the clock:
   gsettings set org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true


9. As with Unity, I configured the terminal by opening terminal preferences, and set the font to “Monospace 9″, the default terminal size to 100×40, and the scrollback to 10000 lines.

10. As with Unity, I changed the default fonts throughout:
    
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Sans 10'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Ubuntu 9'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Ubuntu Mono 10'
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.desktop font 'Ubuntu 10'
gconftool --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font 'Ubuntu Bold 9' --type STRING


11. I also removed the guest account:
    
sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

    Make it read:
    
[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=unity-greeter
user-session=ubuntu
allow-guest=false


12. At this point I found I had a desktop that had almost all the features of my current Gnome 2 setup, plus access to the new metaphor of the Gnome Shell when I wanted it. The only problem is that when mousing to the newly added Applications menu, it’s far too easy to hit the “hot spot”, triggering the Overview Mode.

    There are extensions to move that hotspot elsewhere, but I’d prefer to change the way it works, so it takes a more conscious effort to engage it. Unfortunately there is no configuration for this, so for this exercise I took a quick hack at the base code, which is a real cludge. I’m hopeful that it may be possible to do something cleaner with Monkey patching, but for now my change proves the concept, and makes it necessary to click on the hotspot to engage it, or use the super key (as now). To do this, edit:
    /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/layout.js, and change the _onCornerEntered method so it reads:

    
_onCornerEntered : function() {
// if (!this._entered) {
// Patched this to prevent the hot corner from engaging on cursor entering zone.
if (this._entered) {
this._entered = true;
if (!Main.overview.animationInProgress) {
this._activationTime = Date.now() / 1000;

    this.rippleAnimation();
Main.overview.toggle();
}
}
return false;
},


    Now just entering the hotspot will not trigger the Overview Mode – but you can still click on the hotspot (which is the top left pixel), or just use the Super key.

13. Since I was messing around in the source code I also decided to get rid of the “currently running application name” in the top panel, which again cannot be configured away. Quite why I’d need to be reminded of the name of the application I’m using is beyond me, and it takes up precious menubar space. This time, edit:

    /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/panel.js, and find the AppMenuButton function prototype. Then scroll down to the “_sync” method, and make the first few lines read:
    
_sync: function() {
let tracker = Shell.WindowTracker.get_default();
let lastStartedApp = null;
let workspace = global.screen.get_active_workspace();
// Add the following line to never show the button (application name)
return;
for (let i = 0; i < this._startingApps.length; i++)
if (this._startingApps[i].is_on_workspace(workspace))
lastStartedApp = this._startingApps[i];


    This works perfectly, but like the previous code change, the problem is that whenever Gnome Shell gets updated, I would need to re-hack these changes manually. Which is not good. But as I mentioned before, I’m hopeful that Monkey Patching will come to the rescue and allow me to create a proper extension for this.

And the conclusion? Well, since it’s all written in Javascript and CSS, Gnome Shell is much easier to customise, and its extension system allows (in theory) for a robust and user-friendly mechanism to change anything that one wishes. I now have a DE that has all the features I like from an “old” Gnome 2 desktop, as well as access to all the new features of Gnome Shell. See below:

There are still rough edges, some of which are probably bugs too, but overall I can get closer to what I want (which may not be what you, or the Gnome Shell developers want) with Gnome Shell than Unity.

So when I upgrade my work “production” laptop over Christmas, it will be to a Gnome Shell based desktop.