Mum passed away at about 7AM on Wednesday.

I now have a rather direct understanding of what is meant by a “mercifully quick battle”: Throughout Saturday, Sunday and Monday she was increasingly tired (but in no particular pain) and having increasing difficulty communicating. We did manage to persuade the nurses to let us take her outside into fresh air for an hour or two on all three days and to ply her with Cornettos (despite her difficulty speaking, her eyes lit up immediately when one entered her field of view :-)). On Tuesday she was unresponsive and her care switched to purely palliative. I spent almost the entire day in her room: it was as though she was simply asleep with nurses visiting from time to time to move her a little on the bed or moisten her mouth or eyes. Apparently Tuesday night and Wednesday morning were no different and she passed peacefully at around 7AM.

A huge thanks (and some flowers, I’m thinking) is due to the nursing staff at Nepean Hospital; they were nothing short of amazing, both in caring for Mum and in dealing with us.

(The picture is of Mum in July at my brother’s place with two of her grand-daughters who have been the most important and enjoyable part of her life for several years.)

While I appreciate that airlines might wish to charge a substantial fee for a last-minute schedule change, 22 billion dollars seems a little steep. The airline itself is worth less than that…

(I should point out that the airline finally charged me nothing for the change.)

Mum has been quite unwell for some time and there’s been enormous difficulty in getting a diagnosis. She finally has a clear – if terribly sad – diagnosis: small-cell lung cancer, stage IV (terminal), metastasised into her bones and probably her liver. She’s just started on “palliative chemotherapy” which turns out not to be a contradiction in terms: it’s the use of chemotherapy drugs at a low dose to improve her quality of life for most of the time that she has left (the cancer will win eventually, but this treatment can often replace a long slow decline with a period of stability followed by a very rapid decline). It’s too soon to predict how long she has. After great distress on several evenings last week, discussions are becoming more philosophical: reflecting on what’s gone well in her life and on some of what hasn’t. This is also leaving all of us (my father, brother and myself) in a somewhat better state of mind.

I’ve been receiving a flood of well wishes and offers of support all week as friends and colleagues have become aware of the situation, most of which I’ve not yet managed to acknowledge but it has made the week’s burdens far more bearable: during one particularly difficult discussion with an oncology nurse she thought to ask whether I had any support, I suddenly realised that I had far more than I could possibly draw on. Thank you so much to everyone who has called or written, it’s made a huge difference, I really do appreciate it and will strive to acknowledge each note individually soon.

In the meantime, if reflecting on this situation is enough to inspire you to action then I’d like to offer two small but profoundly important things for you to think about (and, hopefully, act on!):

• Make sure you have arrangements in place to deal with the possibility of your loss of mental capacity (e.g. by injury or disease) while you are still alive. You really don’t want to inflict this stuff on your close relatives when you’re already in critical condition. The relevant instruments are frequently separated into two types – one medical and one financial – are called things like living wills, assignments of medical agents, enduring guardianships, lasting or enduring powers of attorney, etc. In NSW the two documents have forms defined by legislation and can be completed in a few minutes in front of a lawyer. They can be revoked or changed at any time and should probably be reviewed annually along with your will if you have one. I’ll be completing these for myself shortly and will be gently badgering my close relatives to do likewise over the next few weeks.
• Give serious thought to blood and organ donorship. You’ll never know whose life you improve, but you’ll make an enormous difference to someone. The change in Mum’s condition that a single unit of blood brought about was astonishing. When I held a NSW driver’s license I always ticked the “everything” box in the organ donor section and will be looking to complete the voluntary paperwork in Singapore shortly. I’ve never given blood, but this is something that I’ll also be reconsidering over the next few weeks.

These two things are relevant for essentially anyone who is over 18 years old, has any living relatives and isn’t suffering an incurable disease. While they can’t be completed today, they can probably be completed this month. I really hope that you will.

public static String join(String separator, Object... items)
  {
  StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer();

  for (Object item : items)
    {
    if (result.length() > 0)
      result.append(separator);

    result.append(item);
    }

  return result.toString();
  }

There is a theoretical performance improvement to be had in not repeatedly calling length() but without an actual bottleneck situation to solve, I’d err on the side of simplicity.

fusermount -zu ~/.gvfs
/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon ~/.gvfs

If it keeps happening then finding and fixing the underlying problem is probably warranted.

(thanks)

(( some_command | sed '-es/^/stdout: /' >&3 ) 2>&1 | sed '-es/^/stderr: /') 3>&1

So, for a trivial example:

$ ((( echo out ; echo err >&2; ) | sed '-es/^/stdout: /' >&3 ) 2>&1 | sed '-es/^/stderr: /') 3>&1
stderr: err
stdout: out
$

As the example shows, sequence between stdout and stderr may not be preserved.

date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ

UPDATE 12-Sep-2011: While I’m at it, in Java:

DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'");
format.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
System.out.println(format.format(new Date()));

Locating an original script is proving to be a little tricky, but at least one edition has the excised scene with Gribsby included as an appendix, an appendix which happens to be visible in Amazon’s preview. More of Wilde’s deliciously absurd prose:

GRIBSBY: I am merely a solicitor myself. I do not employ personal violence of any kind. The officer of the Court whose function it is to seize the person of the debtor is waiting in the fly outside. He has considerable experience in these matters. But no doubt you will prefer to pay the bill?

A more pleasant way to threaten someone is difficult to imagine.

Kudos to Oliver Parker (director of the film) for reviving this character.

A holder for the aircon remote controls at Hackerspace

Can the Makerbot be programmed to self-replicate?

To some extent, yes.

The underlying project is RepRap, whose objective is a machine capable of self-replication. In practice, building RepRap designs has been extremely time-consuming (typically it would take a year or so to make one), so Makerbot‘s objective was to build machines that could be packaged as kits which could be constructed in a weekend, even at the expense of reducing the extent to which it can self-replicate (e.g. the use of laser-cut timber for most of the chassis, rather than printed plastic).

RepRap has both substantially simplified its designs and increased the fraction of the design that is itself printed, but there’s still a long way to go. To get a sense of how large the gap is, have a look at the parts list for a RepRap Prusa Mendel.

Progress has been made on having a Makerbot Cupcake replicate itself but this is more of a stunt than a practical design because (a) it needs an absurd amount of plastic, (b) it’s less rigid (and therefore less accurate) than the original device and (c) it’s implementing a design that was optimised for timber.

So:

* RepRap’s objective remains making progress towards self-replicating machines
* Makerbot’s objective remains putting 3D printing into as many hands as possible

They do continue to share a great deal (essentially all of the software, the basic idea for printing with ABS, most of the electronics, …) and, of course, a Makerbot device can be used to print the printable parts of a RepRap; sets of printed parts even appear on eBay from time to time.