As blogged, on Tuesday I took Oliver to the vet for his cat-flu and for his arthritis Vetacortyl injection. He didn’t seem too bad then, but on Thursday he was staggering, by Thursday night he kept collapsing. He spent Friday at the vet where they put him on a drip and did blood tests. (He now has shaved and bruised patches on his throat and forearms.)

The results are he was in hyperglycemic shock (i.e. he has diabetes) and his kidneys are much worse. His glucose levels were extremely high, and his creatine levels at 400something were almost double what they were when he had his last test in March.

He is now home and has to have insulin shots morning and evening with regular meal times. He is still staggering and has spent most of his time sleeping. The hope is as his glucose levels come down his kidneys will improve. I have to take him in to the vet again tomorrow morning and we’ll hear how he is doing then.

Side notes:

I had a look at a house for sale. Seemed nice, but I was distracted because of Oliver. If Oliver dies it brings up apartment and travel questions again.

My beer finally stopped bubbling, so I’ve bottled it now.

Gold is the new Gnu linker from Ian Lance Taylor of Google. It is a drop in replacement for  binutils‘ default  ld and is reported up to five times faster.

I tried it though and didn’t see such great performance, probably because our executable just isn’t that big and doesn’t have too many templates. Most of the time of the build is not in linking, it’s in make doing its recursion and dependency management, and in GCC compiling.

Rebuilding the whole tree actually seemed slower when I built with Gold, than when I rebuilt later with Gnu ld, but I’m going to discount that result saying it was probably due to files being cached the second time round.

To relink the top level executable took 12.3s with ld vs 9.3s with gold. Not much in it, especially when a clean build takes 4-6mins.

Still Gold is something I’m going to keep in mind in case I ever do need to optimise my link times.

Ian’s blog posts give very interesting insights into the world of linking too.

Oliver has had a flemy chest and snotty nose the last few days. His arthritis also isn’t good and he was due for another shot of Vetacortyl to keep him going. He’s gone off his food and if you know Oliver you know that’s serious. He’s still drinking heaps though. He’s lost about 0.5kg. He got scratched on the nose a couple of weeks back and the vet says that’s when he will have caught the cold off another cat.

The vet plied me with drugs. In addition to the Vetacorty there’s Fortekor for his kidneys, Vibravet (antibotics) for his cold, Bisolvon which should clear his nose, and more k/d biscuits. He also suggested putting Oliver under a blanket in his cage with steaming Vix cold vapours. If Oliver continues to loose weight there’s another steroid he’d like him on to turn protein into muscle mass. Ollie has lost quit a bit of muscle from his legs with the arthritis.

Have to go back next week to see how Oliver is going.

The Auckland Linux Users’ Group meets monthly on a Monday night (normally 7.30pm on the first Monday of the month). The last meeting was Monday 9th June with Martin Kealey talking on advanced BASH.

Dropped in at the library after work and had a beer or three with Simon at the London Bar before heading up. At the old Delphi Users’ Group, Borland used to ply us with beer and pizza, but the LUG is a BYO biscuits and coke event – maybe IBM or Novell would like to sponsor refreshments?

Turned out our room in AuckUni’s new Business School was double booked. But Colin had a room available in Engineering, and then when Martin couldn’t get through the firewall to his server Vince volunteered his laptop to demonstrate BASH. Shows the Linux community spirit.

A few things I noted down as new to me were:

• Bash arrays: A = (1 2 3 4); echo ${A[0]}
• xargs with find is more efficient (so faster) than using -exec
• keyboard bindings
• double square braces [[ are built in operators which can be used instead of the test [ command, e.g. if [[ built && in ]]