So I’m at the Virginia DMV, and it’s the most pathetic DMV I’ve ever been to. I’ve been to DMV’s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Texas, and Mississippi, and this has to be the absolute worst. I went to the Arlington service center yesterday, after checking the website to make sure that it wasn’t closed for the holiday. There was a page titled “Holiday closures”, but it contained only a message saying “No notices.” Of course, it was closed.

So I try again today, and it’s incrediblly crowded. By complete chance I get a parking space on the second trip through the lot. I blow past the line so I can just get the form I need, and they’re making announcements that wait is 2.5 hours and the office in Tyson’s Corner has only 30 people waiting. Like an idiot, I hop in the car and go to Tyson’s, where the line turns out to be around the building. I wait for an hour in line (queue) just to get in the building, and then I get a number and start to really wait.

Similarly stupidly, I didn’t have the sense to bring a novel, so I’m stuck writing on my PDA to pass the time. I’ve also managed to read the complete rules for Curling which were on my PDA for reasons that are obscure. (To say the least.)

After about 40 minutes, they took my documents, glanced at them and sent me back to my seat while they send them to the “document verifier”, which they claim will be only 10 minutes. Sigh.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. It’s not like this compares to soup lines in the depression or the bureaucracy of socialist countries. If we set our sights low, we’ll never achieve much.

Somehow I was amused by the Virginia state motto,”Sic semper tyrannis” on the flag outside the building. Can it be considered tyrannical to be incompetently bureaucratic? How pathetic do social services be before it’s worth revolution? Isn’t that basically what caused the American revolution; that the Brittish crown forced people to sail back to London to go to the DMV? I’m not sure.

20 minutes later, they called me back up to the counter to dicker some more. That took 10 minutes or so. Apparently I can only get a license for 1 year because none of the forms of ID prove I’m a US citizen… including my military ID card! My own stupid fault I suppose for not bringing my birth certificate or my passport, but also Virginia’s fault for criminal bureaucracy. After this parley, I get to sit again for ten minutes in the picture-taking line.

The wait for a picture really is 10 minutes. Then I get to wait while they make my card.

I got a really cool printer-scanner-copier-fax (HP Officejet 5110) for Christmas. I want to use this to build a personal document management system – to scan all my correspondence and make a searchable, OCR’d archive.

It also complements my wife’s xmas gift, which was a comparatively nice digital camera. Since the Officejet can print 4800×1200, it should produce some nice prints.

But the annoyance is that the Officejet didn’t come with the required USB cable. And it’s the one cable I don’t have. Zette had one for her old printer, but I don’t know where it is. She might have used it for her parents’ printer. Hmm.

Yesterday I migrated to the Linux kernel 2.6.0. I wanted to relate some of the hiccups that I faced in doing so.

I was motivated initially by the fact that my audio drivers skip regularly. I have a cheap C-Media soundcard, and the OSS drivers for it apparently suck. Moreover, I suddenly found that I had a use for the fact that the card has a rear-output jack. I built a small FM radio transmitter recently, and I’d like to be able to adjust the output (and output volume) for the transmitter separately from the regular speakers. Fortunately, the ALSA driver for this card doesn’t skip, and can handle the rear output somewhat. Unfortunately, at this time, it doesn’t do everything I want; I can play seperate audio on the rear output, with no volume control, or I can play the same audio on both front and rear with the volume the same, but I can’t play the same signal on both channels with independent volume.

So, I could have switched to ALSA without swtiching to 2.6.0, but the fact that ALSA is a stock feature of 2.6 was a motivating factor to switch, and get all the scheduler and IO improvements also.

Here were the issues I faced with the migration to Linux 2.6.0:

• ESD and ALSA

  I’d used ALSA before, but I always found it to be a pain in the butt, partly because it’s more complicated than OSS, but largely because it’s a pain to have to update external drivers everytime I update the kernel, and ALSA drivers have historically tracked the kernel closely; requiring new downloads for each kernel. Now that ALSA is included in the kernel, this is a non-issue.

  But I still wanted XMMS to work, including the volume control. It was easy enough with Debian to install the ALSA version of ESD, but the volume control still didn’t work. After some gnashing of teeth, I determined that loading the snd_mixer_oss kernel module did the trick.

  As noted above, I’ve done some wrestling with ALSA mixers and the CMIPCI driver already. It does some of what I want, but not eveything. Sigh. I can accept it, or fix it.

• HostAP drivers

  I needed to get fresh HostAP drivers which is one of the few things that I needed that isn’t included in the kernel by default. This turned out to be almost painless. Historically HostAP hasn’t needed to be updated; when I went through the 2.4 series kernel, I just needed to recompile HostAP, but the code was the same. Well, the 2.4 HostAP code doesn’t work with kernel 2.6, but it was still pretty painless to go get it.

• Devfs is now deprecated?!

  I just got done switching to devfs within the last month. Now I find that it’s deprecated in favor of udev. I spent the greater part of Saturday wringing my hands, reading about udev, and muttering under my breath. Apparently there aren’t released Debian packages for udev at this time. Eventually, I just sighed and enabled devfs, which is working for me.

  I might have considered udev harder if I wasn’t using LVM for everything but my boot partition, and I switched to devfs and LVM at the same time, so I don’t know how to set up the device files for LVM.

  Someday I’ll switch to udev. Not today.

• LVM version

  I needed to have LVM2 installed (as opposed to LVM1). I didn’t discover this until too late. Wasn’t too hard to fix; just rebooted back to 2.4.23, and installed via apt-get. I wasn’t too sure about LVM2 and LVM1 coexisting, but it’s no problem.

• Trouble with framebuffer devices

  This wasn’t a linux 2.6 problem probably. I hadn’t ever used framebuffer devices in 2.4 (or 2.3 or 2.2) on this machine either. I have used framebuffer devices on other machines (my wife’s laptop, of late), and liked it. So I thought I’d use framebuffer for the console. However I configured it, this didn’t work – nothing was displayed when lilo finished loading the kernel. Maybe it was loading and I couldn’t see anything, or maybe it locked up. I don’t know. Don’t care that much, either. I don’t really need Framebuffer devices, since I mainly use X.

Bottom line, it wasn’t very painful to switch. It does seem snappier. I read this comment in many other people’s migration stories, and I thought it was silly; are you really going to tell the difference on a dual 1.1 GHz system?

Well, as it turns out, yes. It’s noticable. (Or maybe that’s just placebo effect. I dunno; maybe I like my placebo.)

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a project to convert my wife’s old laptop into a digital picture frame as a Christmas gift for my grandparents. There was a hardware component and a software component to the project: the hardware part was demolishing the laptop and remounting it into a picture frame, and the software part was building a custom linux distribution to actually display the pictures and allow importing new ones.

It’s been a fun and educational experience, which I couldn’t write about in my blog for fear that Grandma would read about it and ruin the surprise. Now that the project is over, I’m embarking on a secondary project to document what I did, and what I learned.

PictureFrame Linux

Megan was born at 1215L on Sunday, 9 Nov 2003 at Georgetown Univeristy Medical Center. Since both she and Suzette were doing great, we left the hospital against medical advice – the obstetricians and pædiatricians all granted that everyone was fine, but they wanted to keep us for at least 24 hours for observation, just in case. Suzette insisted, and we left about 2030L.

Megan was an incredibly alert baby. She was wide awake and looking around pretty much until 0930 the next day, when she finally crashed and slept for three hours. She “latched on” and was a great feeder right at the start.

Monday she went in to the pædiatrician for an exam, and went to the laboratory for routine bloodwork.

Tuesday morning, 11 Nov 2003, she was very lethargic, wouldn’t eat, and was running a temperature. We took her back to the pædiatrician, who recommended that we go to Inova Fairfax Hospital. Apparently illnesses in newborns can become serious very rapidly.

The Emergency Department wanted to put her on an IV immediately, to get a blood sample, rehydrate her and to start antibiotics. A 48-hour old baby has very small veins, and when they’re dehydrated, this turns out to be significantly problematic. The nurse assigned to us tried twice to put in an IV and failed. She called the nurse on staff that day who was “the best”. She tried four times, and couldn’t get one to stay in, although she did get a line in long enough to collect a blood sample. Then they brought down a nurse from the Neonatal Intesive Care Unit (NICU), who brought a transdermal light used to help see the veins. She tried twice and gave up.

As a parent, this was heartrending. It was also infuriating. Why didn’t they have the sense to call the NICU before they bruised all the best sites?

Also during this process they catheterized her (briefly) to collect a urine sample, and did a spinal tap.

Ultimately, they started her on a course of antibiotics via intra-muscular injections in both thighs, and we started giving her formula in bottles to rehydrate her, which she drank. We were admitted to the pædiatric ward, and spent the next three days there while we waited for the spinal-fluid, urine, and blood cultures to develop. She continued to get antibiotics in both thighs every eight hours.

Initially, the attending physician from the ED told us that it would take 48 hours for her cultures to develop and that we should keep her there at least that long. The following morning we saw one of the doctors from our pædiatric practice, who also told us to wait for the 48 hour culture reading. Then on the morning of the second day, having been at the hospital 40 hours, they told us that blood cultures often don’t really develop until later, and that we needed to stay 72 hours. This was also infuriating. In addition to Megan’s health, Suzette was also recovering from the delivery, and if we had known how long the stay was going to be up front, we would have made different choices in terms of Zette’s health.

By Wednesday morning, however, Megan was doing fine. She was alert again, and eating both formula and colostrum from bottles. (We couldn’t get her to breastfeed.) She’s been doing great ever since. We’ll probably never know whether she had a log-grade viral infection, bacterial infection that the antibiotics cured but didn’t show up in the cultures or something else.

So we left the hospital Friday night. Saturday was a challenge for breast feeding, since she’d been on bottles pretty much the whole time in the hospital. We got an awesome woman named Lisa to come by from La Leche League, who really was a great help. Ultimately, Suzette figure out the big clue – that Megan just wasn’t that hungry. The books and doctors kept telling us that she should eat every two to three hours, and she was on more of a four-to-six schedule. She was still pooping and peeing like she should, and the feedings would be long (90 minutes sometimes). Since then, it seems to me like she’s gotten closer to a more “normal” schedule, but Suzette says I’m wrong. (She knows better than I.)

We all got to see another hospital today, when we visited “Mema” (Megan’s maternal grandmother) at the Arlington Hospital. I’m getting quite the tour of northern Virginia hospitals lately!

Tonight is her first “rock concert”, although it’s really a folk concert. David LaMotte is playing at Jammin’ Java. I’m a little leery of what it’ll be like to have a two-week old baby out at a performance, but we’ll see. David is apparently an old friend of Suzette’s.

As promised, I have posted new Megan pictures. I was in the process of doing this last Tuesday, when my wife Suzette asked me to come upstairs to help with the baby… Megan was unusually lethargic and wasn’t eating well.

When we took her temperature, it was high. Since she was only 45 hours old at that point, we didn’t want to fool around and we took her immediately to the pædiatrician, who examined her and recommended that we take her to the emergency department at INOVA Fairfax Hospital. Long-story-short, we ended up spending all week in the Pediatric ward, and so we only got home yesterday. It’s been a grueling week.

Megan Sophiah Risacher was born today. Pictures will be posted to her web site when I’m ready.

Zette’s gotten interested in having a home birth and we took a tour of the Alexandria Birth Center. It was pretty neat. I discovered yesterday that one of my co-workers’s wife delivered there just two weeks ago.

She and I both are pretty happy with the idea of a home birth as being better for her, although we aren’t opposed to a hospital birth. Suzette’s disabilities may make it more comfortable to deliver in some position other than the typical hospital pose. Of course, the normal concern is “What if something goes wrong?”, to which the answer is that you transfer to a hospital. Considering where we live there are plenty of those nearby. Little can go wrong that cannot wait for a 2-mile drive (or anbulance ride, if somehow that’s necessary). The nearest fire station (i.e. the nearest ambulance) is 0.3 miles away. There are some advantages to living in the city.

For Suzette’s birthday, I bought her a session at Baby Insight. Unfortunately, when we got home, we discovered that the video tape was damaged and blank. Fortunately, the folks at Baby Insight were sufficiently cool that they let us have an additional session.

I asked a friend to convert the video to DVD, which will allow me to post some video clips to the web. Stay tuned.

Zette and I took a trip to Boston a little while ago. She’s interested in taking instruction at the North Bennet Street School, and they had alumni/teachers demoing their work at two different craft fairs. I’m not so sure that I think this is a great fascination for her, partly because Boston is a bit of a hike from where we currently live, but also because I’m concerned that because of her disabilities, she’s either setting herself up for failure, pain, or both. Fortunately, they have shorter duration workshops that she’ll probably love without taking her away from home for long periods.

We also had a chance to revisit some of my old haunts, including MIT, Mary Chung’s (which IMHO is the finest Szechuan restaurant on the continent YMMV), 41st West (my undergraduate dormitory), the Union Oyster House and a handful of other Boston-touristy things. We spent some time at the MIT museum which was very cool but also somewhat disappointing, mainly because they had Kismet on display, but they didn’t have her turned on, which I think is a bummer. I can understand that it would be hard to keep Kismet maintained properly if she were still running, but it’s still a bummer.

As usual, I didn’t plan enough ahead to work in everything that I might have wanted. Apologies to Norm and Harris for not letting you guys know earlier that I was in town. Missed out on seeing Blue Man Group again, and I timed our departure wrong, so we weren’t hungry when we passed The Traveler restaurant (which everyone calls Food and Books).

Ah well, It is good to save some things for next time.