A while ago I mentioned that I had stumbled upon Xpra.

I’ve started building a Solaris 11 x86 package of Xpra, purely because it’s useful to me and I hope others might find it useful too. I’ll try to get the manifest and build script included in the Xpra svn repo, but in the meantime you may grab a copy Xpra_ips.tar at your leisure.

I haven’t included the vpx or x264 support options since they require codecs which I haven’t built and I’m not interested in having to worry about their legalities.

Apart from that, it’s a vanilla build.

The gzipped p5p is available here.

Please let me know if you have problems with it – especially any missing dependencies.

Yesterday afternoon C and I picked about one third of the cherries off the coffee plants out the front of thouse. Said coffee plants are growing into a very nice hedge, so my cunning plan to replace the mock orange is coming along nicely. I forgot to tare the scales before weighing, so the 401g you see here is actually 385g:

After extracting the beans (and remembering to tare the scales), we’re down to 215g, which is more than I expected:

I expect that after they’re roasted we’ll wind up with about 120-130gg from this pick; weighing at each stage is merely for my curiosity.

We’ve had a very relaxed day and enjoyed homemade pizza for dinner. It’s scary just how much muscle tone she’s lost after 17 days in hospital; I don’t know how long it’ll take to get that back but hopefully our stairs will help. The kids are very, very glad to have mum home. I’m pretty darned happy to have J home too.

While she’s going to be fatigued for quite a while, I think (and hope) she will improve faster than she was doing in hospital – being able to get fresh air and have home cooking should help.

She’ll go back to see the neurologist in a fortnight, and will get another MRI around then too. Medication-wise she’ll be carefully dropping down her doses over the next month. Reading through the radiologist’s report from the most recent scan, there was significant oedema around the tumour, it appears to have swollen somewhat (5-10% in volume, a bit difficult to determine), and also appears to have started pressing on one of her ventricles. No wonder she wasn’t feeling well

I’m just glad she’s well enough to get out of hospital and come home. The optic nerve inflammation appears to have gone though there’s still some nystagmus going on, and while she’s still a bit dizzy, it’s not close to the level it was at pre-admission. At least now she’s home we can establish some sort of normal-for-us and work on improving things like quality of life. I recall, too, that she finds baking therapeutic.

It’s been a few days since my last update on J’s state, I’ve been a little slack because she’s back online herself and been updating her blog.

She’s having alternating good days and bad days. Good days seem to occur when she’s had a good night’s sleep (even it that sleep came via a pill), and the bad days are after a rotten night, or too much boisterousness from the kids when we visit. I’m appreciating that the good days are genuinely good, but more importantly, the bad days are getting less bad.

I’m hopeful (with grounds, this time) that she might be home on Sunday. However as with all the other days when we got hopeful, we’re not making assumptions.

I was in the middle of composing this last night when C woke up crying after a bad dream. She’d possibly just overheated – new flanny PJs.

Sunday morning revealed a slightly better night – not only did I get to bed earlier, but A was only awake and unsettled for 1h30 (and only screaming for about an hour of that). I eventually brought him into bed and he fell asleep again. C’s been sleeping in our bed for the last few nights – seems to help provide some stability for her, and we all woke up around 8am.

When we eventually got to J’s room in the afternoon, the ENT surgeon was doing his rounds and showed her the test for BPV. It was pretty easy to tell that she doesn’t have it – for which I think I’m grateful, even though that means her doctors still don’t really know what the heck is going on with her. It appears that the MRI done nearly 2 weeks ago wasn’t quite fine-grained enough to show the detail that the specialists want, so she might need another one. There have also been some questions about whether an MRI can show if the tissue around the tumour is necrotic; she might need a PET scan for that. We don’t know just, we’ll have to wait and see. Ugh.

J’s mum arrived while we were looking at the fishes at the ward entrance; both A and C were really happy to see her and we had to shush them since it was still just before the ward’s visiting hours. Walking back to her room was tiring, again, and reinforced that she really isn’t well enough to come home yet. Then while J was recovering on her bed, YT turned up for a visit with her two kids (about C and A’s ages) – it was a very joyful and thus very, very loud. That tired J out even more.

Last night C had nightmares, A was awake for about an hour and a half; it took him close to that time before he calmed down enough to snuggle up into a ball on my chest/neck. Sigh.

This morning J sounded happier, she was able to shower herself without needing the anti-nausea drug first, and when I rang she was typing a blog post on her laptop. [She doesn't have an internet connection yet - too far from the wireless AP in the hospital, and only 1 bar of signal strength on the vodafail 3g dongle]. However, she still needs to be able to cope with moving her head quickly to track the kids’ movements, needs to be able to cope with their energy levels, and I just don’t see that happening until she’s had a few whole good days (ie, morning + afternoon + evening) strung together.

Since J won’t be home for another few days and she’s feeling disconnected, I popped into our local JB Hifi today and picked up a Telstra ‘Elite’ prepaid mobile broadband usb stick with 3Gb of data included. I would have recharged my vodafail 3g stick, but when I turned that all on in her room yesterday, there was only 1 bar (out of 5) of signal. Not enough to load the recharge login webpage. The hospital’s wifi AP is massively attenuated, too, so there’s no point trying that connection. After our experiences with Optus mobiles we’re not going to use them again, so Telstra was the only option left.

Once I got it home, I tried to install and activate it on my laptop so that when I take it to her it’s all ready to go (modulo installing software on her laptop).

According to the documentation in the box, you should be able to just insert the usb connector and then install the software off the device. [Using the common theme of making it appear as a CD until you install the driver and app, then showing up as a modem].

Bzzzzt.

I’m running Windows 7 Pro in 64bit mode on the laptop (mutter mutter random Cisco software for work mutter mutter), so not only did no “cd” show up, but no devices showed up in the device manager either.

A quick trip off to google brought me to whirlpool, which lead me to the manufacturer’s site. Downloaded and installed ZTE’s version and lo, it didst all work!

Then I activated the stick (note that I had to use the stick’s internet connection, because using my internode ADSL2+ connection resulted in a “Corrupted Content Error”), and promptly got two SMSs saying I had a $0.00 balance.

WTF?

Ten minutes on hold before I got through to a CSR, who told me that the balance shows how much I’ve actually paid in a recharge (which, correctly, is $0.00), and at the moment I’m using “bonus data”. It’d be nice if this was made clearer.

Anyway, now it works and I’ll be taking it to J tomorrow.

UPDATED (see below)

It turns out that Jo was a little hasty (or perhaps overworked and underslept), so the 1.0.1 source wasn’t actually what should have been called 1.0.1.

We now have 1.0.3 in the “really, truly actually released” state, source for which you can find on sourceforge.net.

I’ve got the corresponding IPS package available at my usual location. Pre-requisite packages are still as noted here.

Enjoy (I certainly am!).

A few hours ago I noticed that Jo posted Darktable v1.0.1, so I’ve spun up a package to match.

You’ll recall from this post that you need some pre-requisite packages.

One thing I’ll note as now working (in the very limited test I tried) with Solaris 11 is the tethered shooting mode. I plugged my Canon EOS 400D in, and not only did darktable detect it, I was able to shoot with it directly. No need to futz around with /etc/driver_aliases at all!

NOTE: I’ve called this only a preliminary package because the authoritive Solaris 11 repos which I use are off the air this weekend – power maintenance work or somesuch happening on that campus. Running the bits directly is working fine. I’ll post an update on my Tuesday after everything is back up regarding whether I need to respin that package or not.

For now, please enjoy!

Then you’ll find it here.

I was browsing my referrer links and came across the one in this post’s topic. It took me a while to work out what it might be, especially since I haven’t migrated all my links from roller across to wordpress. After checking out what that post might be via google I went oldskule and had a poke around in my old roller entries db. Now you know – the link was about opening up a PRM. Good times.

J had a less good day today; dizziness was more evident, needed the anti-nausea drug to get out of bed, and just felt generally flat. It was really really good to see her this arvo, and it reinforced for me that she will have to get significantly better before we can expect the neurologist to release her. I think it might be another week before she’s home.

On the positive side, however, she did feel good enough with her eyesight to ask me to bring in her laptop. Club Wes does have wifi in the rooms, but of course her room is too far from the AP to get an signal, and our vodafail 3g dongle couldn’t get any signal either. She might compose some blog posts for later.

I, on the hand, had a horrendous day. After getting some flow timehacking on a proof of concept with Darktable, I slept until 1am when A decided that he should be awake and screaming. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, including panadol, but he didn’t stop screaming until about 0420 and was asleep enough for me to put him back in his cot 5 minutes later. Then we all woke up at about 0720. After getting the kids some breakfast I rang E+T; T came over shortly thereafter so I could crash. The next thing I knew it was 10am, T had given the kids morning tea, played with them, got them dressed and told me he was taking them back to their place for cousin H’s birthday party so I could have some more recovery time. I crashed out again, waking just before 12 and still feeling like I’d been thumped in the head a few times.

T and E: thankyou so very, very much. I’m not sure I could have lasted through this morning without your help.

After voting in the council elections, I went around to E+T’s place to collect the kids and have some chillout time. T had managed to get A to sleep, but only after driving him around in their car for about 30 minutes first. C had a grand time, playing really well with her cousins and the other kids at the party, then just enjoying herself playing with her cousins and some different toys for a while. A, having woken up, was back to his grizzly self and wasn’t happy until he was able to munch on an arrowroot bikkie and my bowl of 2minute noodles. He reached for my coffee, too, and was a bit disappointed to be told no.

A note about yesterday: C again had a great time at daycare; she’s got the same carer as the last time she was there, and while the center has had serious staff turnover in the last 12 months the staff who she interacted with are the same. A… well, he was bitterly disappointed at the rain and having to stay inside all day. They did manage to get him to sleep a bit longer (45-50 minutes) than Thursday, though when I came to collect them (3ish) they’d popped in an emergency dummy and I could hear him screaming from the door to the toddler room. I know he’s got to get used to going to daycare, but it’d be a darned sight easier if he knew mum was at home at the end of the day.

E mentioned to me that A really hadn’t wanted to play inside at all, but wanted to be outside on their deck. I noticed a week or so ago that if I go to the front or back doors to unlock and go outside (plant watering, or coffee cherry picking mostly), he has this shiver of delight – his face lights up and he races over to the door. I see a pattern forming!

After leaving E+T’s we went to KMart at Mt Ommaney to get some winter clothes since we discovered almost all the winter kit we had from last year (or handmedowns from friends) didn’t fit. Then it was off to Club Wes to see J. When we walked into her room, A squealed with delight (and probably a bit of relief) and immediately started struggling to get out of the stroller. Pretty clear what’s happening in his mind right now.

I’m still knackered from this morning’s screaminess, and I’m hoping that he’ll sleep through. Heck, we both need him to do that. I’ve rugged him up, he’s got a full tummy, had a nice warm bath with C and I’ve got my fingers crossed.