When we visited my parents for the holidays in early December, they told us that some shadows had appeared on a chest X-ray Mom had gotten during a routine physical. It was too early to confirm just yet, but the probable diagnosis was lung cancer. I flew to California from their house after that visit for a week of work there, and during that week, Mom and Dad confirmed inoperable non-small-cell (the “good” kind) cancer in the lungs, around the bronchi. They engaged a world-class oncologist to build a team to fight the disease, but things were still a little up in the air, and more thorough testing needed to be done. The following Thursday (I was back home), Mom and Dad called to let me know that the cancer had spread to her adrenal glands and one of her hips (she had been hobbled by a case of sciatica that it turns out is actually the cancer).

Friday morning at about 11:30, I was on the way home from Home Depot after buying a bunch of stuff to help spiff up our new house over the holiday break when they called again and suggested that I pull over. The cancer had also spread to Mom’s brain, and they were preparing to admit Mom for brain surgery the following morning to remove the tumor. From zero to brain surgery in two weeks is pretty fast accelleration. Mom and Dad have been dealing with this for just a few more weeks than I’ve been in the loop.

Naturally, I dropped everything and went to Charlotte for the weekend. Mom’s surgery was mostly successful, though the surgeon had to leave some cancer intact around a blood vessel he didn’t want to cut near. They’ll attack that with radiation, which was on the agenda anyway. I stayed through Christmas Eve to try to give Dad some support, and I drove back late in time to get home and spend Christmas with my nuclear family (funny how the nucleus of your family shifts when you partner up and have kids). Mom was able to go home Christmas afternoon, and they’ll kick off radiation and chemotherapy starting in the new year.

No need for commiseration or comment of any kind; I deal with this sort of thing in my own quiet, private way. I’m just posting this to capture the timeline for my future reference.

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When I reinstalled my operating system a week or so ago, I lost my spam adaptive filtering rules. This means that I’m having now to manually comb through spam periodically to make sure I catch any false-positives and mark them as not-spam. I think I’ve caught most important cases, but if you happen to email me something you’d expect a response to and I don’t respond within a week or so, please resend and put the string “bluehairbone” in the subject line. I’ve got a filter set up to mark as “not spam” any messages with that in the subject.

Dear the movie “Little Miss Sunshine“:

I fell in love with you the first hour and forty-two minutes I saw you. I’ll never forget the moment we met. Well, maybe I will, so I should record it for posterity. It was on the second leg of a three-leg trip home from a business trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t in the mood to read, and the seat next to me was unoccupied. I mention this latter fact only because we might not have met under other circumstances. You see, the headphone jack in my seat was missing, and I had to bogart the jack in the seat next to me. But enough about how we met. Let’s talk about why I’m so drawn to you.

First, there’s all the literary goodness that I know must be lurking just below your surface that I don’t quite get but know I should. Take for example all the Nietzche stuff and all the mentions of Steve Carell’s character as a Proust scholar. I can name a few works by both of these guys, and I know they’re both major literary figures, but that’s about all I can say about them. Nevertheless, I suspect there’s some complex relationship between their general philosophies that the movie itself probably exposes to those in the know, and the fact that I can even name a couple of works by each gentleman makes me feel as if I’m at the margins of some circle of privileged knowledge. Which makes me feel almost as good as not knowing anything else about these guys makes me feel bad. One feels cooler when he can nod and say “yes, I’ve heard of that” than when he can’t.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” you also showed me a different side of Steve Carell. I loved his deadpan work on “The Daily Show,” and I love his work on “The Office,” but a movie’s worth of those characters would be, well, an Adam Sandler or a Will Ferrell movie, which would have driven me screaming from the airplane. But the more understated character Carell plays in you is more palatable (with, however, darker echoes of his character in “The Office” that keep me in a comfort zone without overloading me with absurdity). Carell also happens to look a little bit like Marcel Proust.

Your grandfather character is charmingly irreverent. Your father character isn’t terribly believable, but caricature of a well-meaning but misguided (by which I mean guided more toward appeasing his own insecurities than his children’s well-being) father is forgivable. Your mother character is fine, generally unmemorable. Your teen character is generally believable (much more extreme but I think sort of kin to me as a teenager), and the little girl character is at once absurd and vaguely believable. My own daughter would probably, left to her own devices (as perhaps she should often be), trounce around the desert in an all red outfit with red cowboy boots. (She went to bed the other night wearing pink cowboy boots, at any rate.)

I love your bleating horn. Had my fellow passengers been awake at 3:00 a.m. in whatever timezone I was in when I watched you, they would have heard me stifling cackles. You got this absolutely right.

You made me think of Faulkner, “Little Miss Sunshine.” In particular, you made me think of “As I Lay Dying” and the quest that ensues therein: the self-interested father who behaves as if he’s interested in the proper care of others; the darkly comedic trek with (spoiler) a dead family member’s body. There may be other correspondences. I hope you’ll forgive me for not seeing them. I can blame only my poor inadequate memory and the decade it’s been since I read “As I Lay Dying.” My sense of failure at having such a poor memory is mitigated somewhat, I must confess, by my renewed sense of insider status at being able to bring up another literary name alongside Nietzche and Proust. That you make me want to learn more about these icons and find ways to tie them all together is a big part of why I like you so much.

Finally, dear movie, you conclude positively. You bring a misfit family together while sending up the whole bizarre Jon-Benet-type pageant scene. I like in you what I like about the story arc of “Napoleon Dynamite.” For all your darkness and weirdness, you’re ultimately validating and triumphant while appealing to the crass old codger in me. I can’t think of a better use of an hour and forty-two minutes of my time on a sleeping plane, and I thank you for your company. I’m sure we’ll meet again.

I’ve been running Fedora Core 4 on my laptop for a year and a half now, and I figured it was about time to update to something newer. I had tried Ubuntu briefly on the laptop at the very beginning but wasn’t impressed. I’ve also had Ubuntu running as the OS on my backup machine for a while, but I never use that machine manually, so I haven’t done much testing. Here go some miscellaneous notes after a couple of days of using Ubuntu (Edgy Eft). This is on my Sony Vaio VGN-FS550, which I absolutely love.

The install was fairly easy, and for the first time in the history of linux on laptops for me, the wireless just worked out of the box with no poking around to find drivers and just the right config. Setting up the widescreen was also pretty easy, if a little different from on FC4. On the latter, I had to google around until I learned about a tool called 915resolution that helps you set up widescreen displays, and then I added some config mumbo jumbo to my /etc/rc.local file to adjust the screen resolution on startup. Ubuntu, it turns out, has a nifty package for 915resolution (so no more hunting around — just do “apt-get install 915resolution”), but it doesn’t have /etc/rc.local, so I had to find out how to make it run on startup. Ubuntu does this through /etc/default. When you install a package that may run at startup, it gets a file added in here by the package installer, and you add config to that file. So voila, within a matter of minutes, I had my widescreen set up (compare to hours of clueless googling and trial and error to get it set up originally in FC4).

The Alps mouse was a little more difficult. To fix this, you have to google around and find an xorg.conf config that’s close to what you need and then tweak it until it works. To find out what device to use, you can cat /proc/bus/input/devices and look for the mouse. In my case, it looks like this:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7321
N: Name=”AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint”
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input6
H: Handlers=mouse1 event5 ts1
B: EV=f
B: KEY=420 0 70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3
B: ABS=1000003

The “Handlers” line in theory tells you what to plug into the InputDevice section in xorg.conf (which in my case looks like this):

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “ALPS”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “LeftEdge” “120″
Option “RightEdge” “830″
Option “TopEdge” “120″
Option “BottomEdge” “650″
Option “FingerLow” “14″
Option “FingerHigh” “15″
Option “MaxTapTime” “180″
Option “MaxTapMove” “110″
Option “ClickTime” “0″
Option “EmulateMidButtonTime” “75″
Option “VertScrollDelta” “10″
Option “HorizScrollDelta” “10″
Option “MinSpeed” “0.45″
Option “MaxSpeed” “0.75″
Option “AccelFactor” “0.020″
Option “EdgeMotionMinSpeed” “200″
Option “EdgeMotionMaxSpeed” “200″
Option “UpDownScrolling” “1″
Option “CircularScrolling” “0″
Option “CircScrollDelta” “0.1″
Option “CircScrollTrigger” “2″
Option “SHMConfig” “true”
EndSection

Googling around revealed to me that the “Device” line should use something like “/dev/input/event5″ where the event number matches what you found in /proc/bus/input/devices. The problem I encountered was that the event number varied from bootup to bootup. So one time, the hard-coded xorg.conf would work, and another it wouldn’t. I finally settled on using /dev/psaux, and it seems to work, though I haven’t rebooted since the last time it worked, and I’m not convinced that it’s not still a little flakey. The last time I started up, it wasn’t working, and then I did ctrl-alt-f1 to get to a different screen and then ctrl-alt-f7 to get back to the main screen, and I wonder if that isn’t what made it start working. It was after that switch that the touchpad started functioning fully. Who knows what’ll happen the next time I reboot?

I should note that most of the touchpad functionality was fine out of the box. It was simply the bit that lets you slide your finger down the right-hand side to scroll a window that was busted. I use that a whole lot, so it was pretty high priority to get it fixed. This did eat up a couple of hours of time over a couple of days, but it was the only frustrating part of the install.

The mouse is still a little flakey. Sometimes when I click something (a link or a taskbar item, for example), it just waits until there’s another click or a mouse movement to register the click. I suspect this is something I can tune in xorg.conf, but for the moment, it’s only a minor annoyance that hasn’t justified the further research yet.

Ubuntu comes with a nifty little program called Tomboy that lets you take notes easily. It’s basically a local wiki. If you want to add a note, you just hit alt-f12, and a little menu pops up from nowhere out of the task bar showing recent notes and letting you add one. You can easily link notes together, do some basic text formatting, etc. I’m not sure it’s something I’ll use a lot, but it does strike me as potentially useful.

I’ve had cause this morning to try to write an apache module in perl, and that meant compiling Apache::Constants against apache, which I had installed using apt-get. Which meant that there were no source files lying around that I could find. After some fruitless googling, I eventually checked the man page for apt-get and saw that you can get sources using “apt-get source [package]”. I did this but had troubles with the configure command (”error 77: C compiler cannot create executable”), which I resolved by doing “apt-get install g++”. So now I had apache sources ready to compile the perl module against, but it turned out that the module wants apache 1.3. Which meant that my labors were more or less a dead end, save that I learned how to get package sources in ubuntu. Someone in the ubuntu irc channel suggested as an alternative to downloading sources that I could just install the -dev package, though frankly, I’m not sure where ubuntu would put the sources for that either, so it may not be a valid alternative for my purposes. (While writing this paragraph, I learned that — duh — there’s Apache2::Const, which was already installed and does for apache2 what Apache::Constants does for apache.)

Bootup for this machine now takes about 14 years, and I read somewhere that they actually sped things up significantly in this release. Those who installed the previous releases I gather are still waiting for their systems to be ready for use. It also bugs me that I can’t see the status of the system as it boots up. I’ve always found it comforting to see what part of the bootup process the system was in. I suspect there’s a way to get to this view. Luckily for me on all counts, I shut down rarely.

The battery life is crappy now. Under FC4, I could get a solid hour or hour-and-a-half out of a fully charged battery. The other day, plugged in downstairs, I ran the computer upstairs on battery for a minute, and it almost immediately told me I had only 18 minutes of battery left. On the plus side, Ubuntu’s battery indicator seems to work at least marginally with this system, telling me at minimum whether I’m on AC power or battery. This feature alone would have saved me a number of accidental shutdowns in the past due to inadvertent lack of AC power.

Ubuntu’s UI in general feels just a little more sluggish and less polished than that of FC4, but in general, I’m satisfied with it so far.

The ubuntu online presence and community seem outstanding.

I’m working from California this week. When our employee who lives in Germany comes to town, he always brings some tasty tall German beers or candy or some other nifty locale-specific treat. I’ve never done so, and I was thinking that for this visit, it’d be cool to find something that represents my home in some way and bring it to share. Unfortunately, the only thing uniquely Tennessee that I could think of was Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which is sold all over the place and so isn’t something that’d be new to my coworkers. So I’ve got nothing.

We often joke about how I must be a redneck, how I must play a banjo and chew tobacco, how I’m married to my sister, etc., as surely all southern folk do and are. I play along good naturedly and am pleased enough to have perpetual fodder for ice-breaking. It amuses me to let these big city folk think I’m actually a little closer to the stereotype than I actually (think I) am.

This morning, I was thinking about the stereotype and about my inability to think of anything to bring, and chitlins (actually chitterlings, but whatever) came to mind. I must also have had my travel experience (which was unremarkable) in mind, and it occurred to me that I’d probably get a pretty good laugh if I said something like “I brought you guys some chitlins, but they were confiscated during the body cavity search at the airport.”

Of course, I thought about finding an opening to say it, but I figured it’d come out sounding overpracticed or the opening I found would be a stretch, and it’s a little lame to think highly enough about some dumb quip that’s probably not as funny as it seems in your sleep-deprived inner monologue that you’d bother to find an opening. So I inflict it on you, dear three readers, instead.

Also confiscated: three kilos of cocaine, a Russian bride, 342 straight pins, a bowling trophy and (thankfully) a bottle of opened tabasco sauce.

Using public keys to log in via ssh to servers is a wonderful thing if only because it prevents you from having to type your password each time you want to log in. I’ve been using this method happily for years. Today, I learned something new (to me) about using public keys to log in. In the authorized_keys file that lists accepted keys for a user, you can specify the “command” option along with some other things that allow you to limit what people can do when logging in.

Say for example you wanted to grant someone access to an svn repository with a real user account (because you have other privileged users already hitting the repository with user accounts and so can’t use svn’s authentication). But you don’t want this person to have a full shell or in fact to be able to do anything but use svn. The command option lets you dictate what operation is performed upon login. You prepend the default key output with the command information, as follows:

command=”program” ssh-dsa AAAABtce9euch… user@example.com

So in my example, I add the following:

command=”svnserve -t –tunnel-user=svn_username”

This makes it so that as soon as svn_username logs in, he gets a tunnel to the svnserve command. If he’s issuing svn commands at his command line and sending the appropriate output, this is great. If he’s trying to ssh directly, he gets some server status gobbledegook and is effectively locked out from actually logging into the server. Just what I needed.

To prevent further interactivity during the session, you can pass some other options, as follows:

command=”svnserve -t –tunnel-user=svn_username”,no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty

You can also have some other fun with the command, though. For example, just to play around, I created a user and added the command “ls /tmp”. Sure enough, when I ssh’d in as that user, I got the output from an ls command. I could see more practical applications, however. For example, you might add “ps -eaf” as a command and have a script try to log a user in periodically and parse the output to see if a given program is running. There are no doubt much better ways of handling this particular case, but you see my point.

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