Following hanatos’ announcement of release 1.0 rc2, I’ve built a Solaris 11 IPS package containing it. You can grab a copy here. The dependencies which I supply are found here, and if you’re interested, my reallyreally lightened darktablerc (a larger default font and more light than dark grey) is here (it goes in $HOME/.config/darktable).

I’ve also included the “PRAGMA page_size = 32768″ which I mentioned here since it’s not yet in the trunk.

Please note: my ADSL connection is currently in a terrible state, so I apologise for any delays and restarts you might experience while trying to download these packages.

If you are testing these packages… please let me know!

I’ve been trying to figure out why on earth Darktable on Solaris 11 has been crawling unless I used a ramdisk to stash the library.db on. After conversing with our sqlite

Please don’t tell me that my wife and I shouldn’t try to have children, because we’re jointly infertile. Please don’t tell me that my wife and I should not be married, because we’re infertile and cannot have children without medical assistance. Please don’t tell me that medically assisted reproduction is an abomination. Please don’t tell me that it’s ok for a man to cheat on his wife, divorce her, marry the second woman, cheat on her, divorce her and marry the third. Please don’t tell me that the afore-mentioned cheating man’s marriages uphold the sanctity of marriage, but two men or two women who wish to marry each other will destroy everybody’s marriage. Please don’t tell me that Britney Spears’ or Kim Kardashian’s marriages uphold the sanctity of marriage, but two men or two women who wish to marry each other will destroy everybody’s marriage.

Please don’t tell me that “it’s God’s plan” for my aunt to die of leukaemia, for my wife to get a brain tumour, or for my mother to get breast cancer.

Please don’t tell me that it’s ok for people in positions of power to abuse the trust placed in them by parents and abuse children. Please don’t tell me that it’s ok for those powerful people to then tell the rest of society who may or may not be married, or to actively prevent investigation into and judging of their crimes.

Please don’t tell me that “national security” excuses human rights abuses.

Please don’t tell me that some people do not deserve a trial in open court with competent representation, with charges that are invented to keep those people locked up, and with evidence which the accused is not allowed to see.

Please do not tell me that “people like that” aren’t or shouldn’t be allowed to seek asylum. For that matter, please do not talk to me about “illegals” or “illegal asylum seekers.”

If you do try to tell me these things, you have lost whatever argument was going on.

Here are some of the principles I try to live by:

• Justice must be seen to be done, quickly, competently and fairly.

• Do not discriminate.

• Treat others as you yourself wish to be treated.

• Respect my right to not believe what you believe, and I’ll respect yours.

• Facts and the truth are appropriate. Do not try to promote opinion as fact. Do not present discredited research as “fact.”

• The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”

After reviewing my previous 40km stats following this morning’s 40k effort, I was pleased to see that despite having done 49k yesterday (the 40k route plus a loop up to Dornoch Tce and back via The Mater), I only dropped 12 seconds.

That said, I am utterly bamboozled by how inaccurate my Garmin Edge 705is for altitude. Just have a look at these numbers, remembering that I am actually riding the exact same course for each activity:

That’s with the elevation corrections enabled, too, so I would expect that Garmin Connect would be using accurate topographic information rather than some random stuff.

Anybody know why this might be?

I really need to extend myself with climbing, not least because Coottha is coming up in less than three weeks. Yesterday’s 49.2k was great (usual 40k route + an 8k loop of South Brisbane/West End including climbing Dornoch Tce), but I need more than that.

This morning I did my usual loop around the ‘burbs, but did a double of Mt Ommaney Dr:

As you can see, it’s a pretty pitiful “mountain”, but it’s the best I’ve got unless I go up Coottha. That’s what I’m planning on doing this weekend, following the way that the Challenge goes, so I should have a semi-reasonable idea of how slow I’ll be. As long as I can get up that short (2.4km) timed part in less than 20 minutes (my previous time for that section) I’ll be very happy.

I was pleased that by the time I got home I’d maintained at least 23km/h (I actually hit 23.00km at the 1 hour mark), and my average + max heart rates were down slightly on my previous ‘burbs ride. More work to do, of course, and I have to cement this early a.m. riding thing into a life habit, so it’s nice to be able to track my performance and see how I’m going so easily.

This evening J mentioned to me that Ada Nicodemou has announced that she’s pregnant. I normally avoid announcements about TV people, but this one is a bit different: Ada and her husband Chris are pregnant through IVF.

I am really glad that she’s included that information in her announcement, because our experience of trying to keep that info quiet was that it was utterly corrosive. The advice we received when we started on the IVF rollercoaster was that if we kept it quiet we’d avoid all those trite comments from people who had no freaking clue about infertility. However, after a few months of treatment it was just too much to hold in. We talked about it non-stop between ourselves, but feeling unable to share that information, the highs and lows, the swings and misses… that made us very sad and very stressed.

Having made the decision to talk about what we were doing with family and friends, it was as if massive weights had been lifted from our shoulders. Failed IVF cycles still hurt like hell, but sharing took the edge off.

Here then is my (possibly) trite and uninvited advice: If you have to go through IVF (for whatever reason), TALK ABOUT IT, and remember that having circles of confidence will help you keep control of your pain receptors.

After a few weeks not doing much on the bike (and once again missing a Saturday a.m. ride due to ESCREAMINGCHILD resulting in terrible sleep), I was determined that today I would do my regular 40km city ride, and do it no slower than the previous time of 1h47m48s. That previous time was one month ago, so I had a bit of work to do.

Starting earlier (0535 vs 0720) made a distinct difference to the temperature, and just trying to keep the same pace overall was a decent way to keep on track. At the 30 minute mark I’d done 11.6km, so I knew I was doing ok. A little disappointed to get to 20.1km (The Ship In) and find that I’d taken 48m18s, but resolved to make it up on the way home.

I managed to get home in 53m3s, for a total of 1h41m21s. The previous ride was 50m12s+57m30s, so I’m really really happy with this morning’s performance.

Here’s the comparison:

... for J’s radiosurgery. $15600. Which, by a weird coincidence, matches the Medicare Benefits Schedule item code.

We’ve got a credit card ready to hit it with, we’ll get a chunk back from Medicare afterwards.

Or we could just go and buy a small car/schmick carbon framed bike/a skiff with go-fast stripes...

Seventeen years ago today J and I decided that we should be a couple. We’ve been together ever since.

[obRant] The hype about Valentine’s Day annoys me greatly, because what I see in the media and popular culture is an emphasis on how you act on one day of the year towards a specific person who you love. Just like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, though slightly less of a Hallmark Holiday since it is an actual Saint’s Day.

Here’s what I try to do instead: every day I try to treat J the way the media and popular culture reckon you should on Valentine’s Day. Unfortunately I’m not very successful at doing so. The flip side of this approach is that (hopefully) I’m not behaving badly towards J most of the time and thinking that a nice Valentine’s Day card/stuffed toy/chocolates/dinner will make up for it. [/obRant]

Finally, some randomness: J and I have been a couple for about half her life, which is also the length of our marriage plus the ages of our kids.

At work we’re going to be transitioning to a new VPN solution pretty soon, one which has a rather obnoxious limitation around reuse of IP addresses. This has a specifically BAD effect on ssh sessions, in that we can’t keep them going when we reconnect.

I’ve been casting around for something that would let me get past this; the conventional solution is to run ‘screen’, which is all well and good except it has no gui capability as far as I can determine.

Enter, therefore, xpra – described by its inventor as screen for X. Just what I was looking for, really.

To build it you need Cython, I didn’t install Cython but just set PYTHONPATH to include it before running xpra’s setup.py:

$ PYTHONPATH=/path/to/cython/dir:$PYTHONPATH python setup.py install --prefix /path/where/I/want/xpra/installed

To run it you need to have Xvfb installed, too.

Once I’d figured out that I needed to add

import os
sys.path.insert(os.path.realpath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "../lib/python")))

AND add a symlink in lib from python to python2.6 (doofus!), I was able to run xpra from wherever, without setting PYTHONPATH first. [For reference, I've added this info to http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/79].

So .. all hail xpra! I startup a session on $usefulhost inside the VPN connection, export my DISPLAY and then whatever gui tools I need will use that X display. On my system at home, I attach to the host:display and then every utility I’ve got running with that display pops up on my local screen.

usefulhost $ ~/bin/xpra start :200
[...]
usefulhost $ DISPLAY=:200 ; export DISPLAY
usefulhost $ filemerge &
usefulhost $ /usr/bin/packagemanager &

mylocalhost $ ~/bin/xpra attach ssh:remotehost:200

Falling off a log isn’t as easy as this.