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Michael Still
mikal@stillhq.com
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Wed, 25 Jan 2012



Shadow of a Dark Queen

posted at: 22:26 | path: /book/Raymond_E_Feist | permanent link to this entry


Tue, 24 Jan 2012



Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?

posted at: 22:24 | path: /conference/lca2013 | permanent link to this entry


Sat, 21 Jan 2012



linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013

posted at: 03:10 | path: /conference/lca2013 | permanent link to this entry


Fri, 06 Jan 2012



It hasn't been a very good week

    This week has presented me with a few learning opportunities. Catherine and I are expecting to get a fair few questions about the week, so we thought we'd try and write it up here. That way we can tell people something that's consistent and complete, without having to type the same thing out 200 times. I also think that this topic deserves more space than twitter will allow.

    On Wednesday Catherine was told she probably has a brain tumor, and to get an MRI immediately. This was obviously pretty upsetting, and if I've been irritable at you this week that's why and I apologize. Neither of us are medical professionals, and we didn't really know what this meant. Catherine was told that the tumor was "almost certainly" benign, but that wasn't all that reassuring.

    Catherine had her MRI the next day. It sounds like a pretty unpleasant process -- your head is clamped into position and an IV fitted, and then you're left in a room which makes the surgical metal in your lower spine feel hot for 40 minutes. Did I mention they clamp your head so you can't escape? Another irritation is that Medicare doesn't cover this MRI at all. So, you take people who have been told they have a brain tumor, and then you tell them that the government doesn't care enough about them to pay for what is considered the best diagnostic for their condition. Better than that, we rang our private insurer, and they told us that Medicare also forbids them to cover it. So, you're out of pocket at least $400.

    The MRI report says this: On the right side of the anterior pituitary, there is a hyperintense lesion measuring 9 x 9 x 10mm (T x CC x AP). There is a fluid/fluid level with no definite enhancement of the lesion following contrast injection. The pituitary stalk is minimally bowed to the left. These appearances are in keeping with haemorrhage into a pituitary adenoma.

    The first piece of information we had was this paragraph from the MRI company. The GP gets this information about 12 hours before the patient, but our GP was so busy she hadn't read it by the time we did. We saw this about 8pm on Wednesday night, and of course immediately started web searching for the terms in the description. "Hyperintense" for example means "bright white on the MRI", which I believe to be a measure of density of the tumor.

    Other learning includes that the pituitary is the gland which moderates the behavior of various elements of the endocrine system, including reproductive hormones. Technically, the pituitary is not part of the brain, but is attached very closely to it.

    We saw the GP the next morning (yesterday), and it was mostly reassuring. The tumor is almost certainly not cancer -- I didn't even know there were non-cancerous tumors before yesterday. However, the tumor is affecting Catherine's reproductive hormones, and she is probably sterile for the period the tumor is present. The tumor might also get larger, and if it does it could impact on her optic nerves (which run to either side of the tumor) and that might result in varying levels of vision problems right up to blindness.

    It sounds like there are a few courses of action available -- regular MRIs to monitor the state of the tumor. Surgery is an option to have it removed, which is more of an issue if you care about having more children or are suffering from vision disturbances. There are also radio therapy and drug options, but we haven't really had those explained to us yet.

    The next steps are for Catherine to see an endocrinologist to see what he thinks about the MRI. Apparently there is a huge waiting list for those in Canberra, so it will mean a trip to Sydney at the end of the month. She also needs to have her vision tested. There's also a huge waiting list for that in Canberra but the specialist she is referred to does waiting list triage, so there is some hope that it wont be too long. We'll know more about that next month.

    On a personal note, one of the other things that the last six months has taught me is that I'm not very good at talking about things which are really upsetting me -- our builder going bankrupt leaving us with an unfinished house, my mother in law's ailing health, getting made redundant by Google and this tumor incident being four examples from the last six months. I find I cope much better with these things if I have a chance to internalize them first before I talk to heaps of people about them. So, if I appear standoffish, that's why.

    I think its fair for people to have questions about this post, but please remember that we're not experts and we've tried to include everything we know in this post already.

    Tags for this post: health catherine brain tumor pituitary adenoma mri
    Related posts: JJJ's hack

posted at: 16:59 | path: /health/catherine | permanent link to this entry


Tue, 03 Jan 2012



Blathering for Wednesday, 04 January 2012

    18:07: Mikal shared: TVs are all awful
      How motivational. A funny read if you care about video.



    Tags for this post: blather

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Its a good sign that they're already making fun of me, right?

    So, today on IRC...

      16:07 <mikal> So, breakfast catering at the student accommodation... Will there be bacon?
      16:07 <ctudball> mikal: You have my permission to riot if there is no bacon.
      16:07 <mikal> Yay!
      16:07 <mikal> Real coffee?
      16:08 <ctudball> mikal: No.
      16:08 <mikal> !
      ...
      16:10 <mikal> I can still add breakfast to my rego, right?
      16:10 <mikal> I'll just fill a sock with $18 worth of bacon each morning
      16:11 <ctudball> mikal: You can! 
      16:11 <mikal> Ok, that's official authorization for Operation Bacon Sock
      ...
      16:11 <mikal> If anyone complains, I am showing them a lightly edited version of this IRC log
      


    Which somehow became this.

    Tags for this post: conference lca2012 bacon irc
    Related posts: The greatest IRC chat evar!; What do you do on days as a bachelor in a strange country?

posted at: 02:32 | path: /conference/lca2012 | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 02 Jan 2012



Further adventures with base images in OpenStack

posted at: 23:13 | path: /openstack | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 29 Dec 2011



Blathering for Friday, 30 December 2011

    11:01: Mikal shared: Shouldn't There Be Significant Punishment For Bogus Copyright Claims That Kill Companies?
      I'd like to think that this could be handled by the costs process. As well as awarding the innocent party their legal costs, it would also be reasonable to compensate the innocent party for any loss in market value they experienced as a result of the law suit. So, for example if the markets valued Veoh at $50 million before the suit and their now dead, then the costs awarded should be legal costs + $50 million. This would also act as an incentive for plaintiffs to not file bogus suits.



    Tags for this post: blather

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


The Ghost Brigades (2)

posted at: 00:57 | path: /book/John_Scalzi | permanent link to this entry


Fri, 23 Dec 2011



Old Man's War (2)

posted at: 15:48 | path: /book/John_Scalzi | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 19 Dec 2011



Red Mars

posted at: 23:41 | path: /book/Kim_Stanley_Robinson | permanent link to this entry


Openstack compute node cleanup

posted at: 00:59 | path: /openstack | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 15 Dec 2011



On syncing with Google Contacts

posted at: 02:32 | path: /google | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 01 Dec 2011



Blathering for Friday, 02 December 2011

    19:31: Mikal shared: Explosions, but no bomb
      I knew that handing out handgrenades to kids over Halloween was going to be a mistake...



    Tags for this post: blather

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 14 Nov 2011



Blathering for Tuesday, 15 November 2011

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Sat, 12 Nov 2011



Blathering for Sunday, 13 November 2011

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Thu, 10 Nov 2011



Setting up Cisco 7961 IP phones with asterisk



    This blog post is just my notes on the installation process I followed. There is lots of documentation out there, but a lot of it is contradictory or incomplete. These notes are mostly about the configuration in my house, and might not work for you. Sorry about that.

    The first step is that you need to be running your own DHCP server. Running a simple embedded one in something like your DSL modem wont cut it, as you need to hand out non-standard options in your responses in order for the Cisco firmware on the phone to find the TFTP server you'll set up in a bit. I'm not going to document installing DHCP here, as the Ubuntu packages are reasonable. In fact, the only annoying bit about the packages is that all the config et cetera is in a directory named /etc/dhcp, but for some reason I can't explain the init script is /etc/init.d/isc-dhcp-server. That throws me every time.

    You also need to know the MAC address of the phone. This is probably on a sticker on the bottom, failing that it is on the screen during the phone boot process. Absolute worst case, it is in the DHCP logs once the phone starts to boot. The DHCP config for my phones looks like this:

      option domain-name "home.stillhq.com";
      option domain-search "home.stillhq.com", "stillhq.com";
      option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.14;
      
      option routers 192.168.1.254;
      option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
      
      option ntp-servers 192.168.1.14;
      option smtp-server 192.168.1.14;
      option time-servers 192.168.1.14;
      
      default-lease-time 600;
      max-lease-time 7200;
      
      option cisco-etherboot-server code 150 = ip-address;
      
      ...
      
      # IP Phones
      group {
        option tftp-server-name "192.168.1.14";
        option cisco-etherboot-server 192.168.1.14;
        option arp-cache-timeout 600;
      
        host cisco-7961-1 {
          hardware ethernet 00:1a:a1:ca:04:5b;
          fixed-address 192.168.1.50;
          option host-name "cisco-7961-1";
        }
      }
      


    I also added the phone to DNS with a reverse entry, but I don't think that is actually required for the phone to work. Next I needed a TFTP server, which is something I haven't bothered to run for years. I used HPA's TFTP server, which again has reasonable-ish packages. One gotcha is that you need to install xinetd as well, and then disable the init script for the HPA TFTP server. As best as I could tell the default non-xinetd configuration simply didn't work, so I don't know why they package it like that.

    Now for the really hard bit. You need to find the right firmware for the phone. I have my suspicions this is a lot easier for the modern Cisco phones, which have a web server by default and can be configured without TFTP. I say this as someone who doesn't actually have one of these phones, but who has read some stuff online about them. These older phones are really TFTP happy, and seem to be constantly chatting to the TFTP server, even if they're healthy. That might be an issue if you're deploying thousands of these phones -- you'd have to monitor TFTP server load and be aware of the extra IO during global phone firmware updates.

    There are two ways to get the firmware for the phones. You can buy a support contract from Cisco for not very much money (around $20 a year), or you can find dodgy copies cached on the internet. If you choose to go the dodgy route, this this Whirlpool thread has some useful advice.

    Next we need to do a factory reset on the phone. This might not be needed in absolutely all cases, but its just safer. To reset the phone, hold down the # key and power cycle the phone. The lights at the side of the screen will start flashing in sequence after a while (nearly a minute). You now press 123456789*0# within 60 seconds of releasing the # key you were holding down. Note as well that the Cisco documentation for what lights flash is wrong, but it didn't seem to affect the outcome.

    The phone is really slow to boot up (several minutes). Once it has booted, it grabs network configuration for DHCP as shown above, and then starts requesting files from the TFTP server. Here's a log of all the requests from my phone booting when its happy:

      $ tail -f syslog | grep RRQ
      Nov 11 06:24:53 molokai in.tftpd[8221]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename term61.default.loads
      Nov 11 06:24:54 molokai in.tftpd[8222]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename Jar41sip.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:24:57 molokai in.tftpd[8223]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename cnu41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:25:00 molokai in.tftpd[8224]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename apps41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:25:11 molokai in.tftpd[8235]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename dsp41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:25:15 molokai in.tftpd[8236]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename cvm41sip.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:26:33 molokai in.tftpd[8242]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename CTLSEP001AA1CA045B.tlv
      Nov 11 06:26:33 molokai in.tftpd[8243]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename SEP001AA1CA045B.cnf.xml
      Nov 11 06:26:41 molokai in.tftpd[8244]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename SIP41.8-3-1S.loads
      Nov 11 06:26:42 molokai in.tftpd[8245]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename Jar41sip.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:26:44 molokai in.tftpd[8246]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename cnu41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:26:47 molokai in.tftpd[8247]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename apps41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:26:59 molokai in.tftpd[8249]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename dsp41.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:27:02 molokai in.tftpd[8253]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename cvm41sip.8-3-0-50.sbn
      Nov 11 06:27:59 molokai in.tftpd[8256]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename CTLSEP001AA1CA045B.tlv
      Nov 11 06:27:59 molokai in.tftpd[8257]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename SEP001AA1CA045B.cnf.xml
      Nov 11 06:28:14 molokai in.tftpd[8261]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename /mk-sip.jar
      Nov 11 06:28:15 molokai in.tftpd[8262]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename US/g3-tones.xml
      Nov 11 06:28:18 molokai in.tftpd[8263]: RRQ from 192.168.1.50 filename dialplan.xml
      


    No, I don't know why it requests those files at the start twice either, but it does it across multiple test factory resets. There are two files there which embed the MAC address of the phone into the filename, so you'll have different names for those files in your setup. Note that the file CTLSEP001AA1CA045B doesn't exist in my configuration, and that doesn't seem to have caused anything bad to have happened. Filenames are also case sensitive, so that might make things more exciting for you. Almost all of the other files are firmware.

    I recall creating a file named XMLDefault.cnf.xml which has a bunch of stuff in it, but I can't see any evidence that it is used during the book process, so I think that might have been a dead end that I didn't need to go down.

    The format for SEP001AA1CA045B.cnf.xml is well documented in the links below, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Feel free to ask questions in the comments to this post, and I'll do my best to be helpful, bearing in mind that I am absolutely not an expert at this stuff.

    Here's a list of the web pages I thought were most helpful during my adventure:

    Tags for this post: blog asterisk voip sip cisco 7961 tftp dhcp system_admin
    Related posts: Configuring Asterisk; Using an Intel PCI modem as a FXO card; Worst timing evar!; Building an answering machine using a $10 winmodem

posted at: 23:36 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry


Tue, 08 Nov 2011



Blathering for Wednesday, 09 November 2011

    10:20: Mikal shared: 7961G SIP Upgrade
      A really nice summary thread about how to setup Cisco 7961 IP phones.



    Tags for this post: blather

posted at: 05:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry


Mon, 07 Nov 2011



Leaving Google

posted at: 14:04 | path: /resume | permanent link to this entry


Sat, 05 Nov 2011



Blathering for Sunday, 06 November 2011

posted at: 06:00 | path: /blather | permanent link to this entry