Kang's Thoughts

At this point in time, all of our family members have our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and we are awaiting our second dose. As the Delta variant of the Covid-19 vaccine makes its way around the world, numerous reports are indicating that those who only have their first dose are only 33% protected from this variant.

Of course knowing this fact creates an a certain anxiety and urgency to get our second dose. Although we all have our second dose already scheduled when we got our first dose, those original schedules are weeks away. York Region today from 8am started taking appointments for rebooking second doses. This is of course very welcoming.

Unfortunately, as expected the scheduling web site experience leave very little to be desired.

I visited the site at around 7:50am, and it told me that I was in line and I had a 10 minutes wait. At this point, it is very reasonable, since it officially starts at 8am. I took the screen shot above, and as you can see the waiting time hasn’t really gone down and we have already passed our initial 10 minutes. To make matters worse, at around the 5 minutes mark, it immediately presented the booking form.

My sons who visited the site at 8am sharp got a waiting period of 1 hour. You can see how discouraging for some can be. Never mind vaccine hesitancy, it is these types of frictional booking experience that probably also discourages people from getting their doses. I really don’t understand why it is taking the organization so long to get there act together. Perhaps I’m being too harsh.

On the plus side, I did finally manage to book all members of my family for our second dose, because the site did allow me to make multiple bookings without having to virtually re-queue.

I have the following Unifi networking setup:

• Unifi Secure Gateway (USG-3P) running 4.4.55.5377096 firmware
• 3 Unifi Access Points AP-AC-PRO running 4.3.28.11361 firmware
• 3 Unifi AP-AC-M running 4.3.28.11361 firmware
• Unifi Controller (6.2.25) running on Ubuntu
• The AP’s are connected to Unifi Switches running 5.43.36.12724 firmware

The AP’s are separated into two AP Groups. One of the AP Groups contains the 3 AP-AC-PRO and one of the AP-AC-M. This latter group was the problematic group. The other AP Group which contains the remain 2 AP-AC-M continue to work flawlessly throughout incident. From here on when I reference an AP Group, it is the problematic group that contains the 3 AP-AC-PRO and 1 AP-AC-M.

It all started yesterday when I noticed that my WiFi was a bit slow in the backyard and I wanted to change my radio configurations on one of the AP-AC-PRO and one AP-AC-M in the same AP Group. After the provision, the AP went disconnected as shown by the controller.

I ssh into the problematic AP-AC-PRO and discovered in /var/log/messages that there were many instances of the following log entry:

syswrapper: [state is locked] waiting for lock

I attempted to reboot the device but the device remained in the same “locked” state.

Since it is inconvenient for me to physically reset the AP, I attempted to reset the device via ssh using the command:

syswrapper.sh restore-default

Unfortunately, this did not always work because it immediately just shows the same locking message:

syswrapper: [state is locked] waiting for lock

I had to reboot the device via the command line reboot. As soon as I can ssh into the device after reboot, I immediately execute the restore command as above. This took a lot of trial and error because my timing is often off. When I miss the window, I will get the lock message again. I find that my chances are higher if I first forget the device on the controller first.

A quick suggestion to the Unifi team. It would be nice that the restore-default command if not able to restore immediately due to the lock, would at least set a flag in persistent flash memory of the device so that on the next reboot it will perform the restore then. This feature will safe me A LOT OF TIME!

Once the device is reset to factory default I proceeded to reconfigure it to the WiFi networks that I had. Unfortunately, when I try to provision the changes (adding the re-adopted device back into its original AP Group that is associated with the WiFi networks), it went into the disconnected state again. To make matters worse, the other AP’s in the same AP Group started to misbehave. Some would go into a provisioning state and followed by a disconnected state, while others go into an adopting state. This is of course very unnerving and frustrating. However, this observation lead me to remember a previous episode that I experienced a few weeks ago.

When I updated the controller to 6.2 and upgraded the AP’s firmware, the AP exhibited a similar locking issue. The solution that I employed was to restore to factory default and re-adopt the device. However after readopting, I assigned the AP to a brand new AP Group which I associated with the original WiFi networks. Simply adding the device to the original AP Group did not solve the issue.

When I tried this solution yesterday, it did not work. The device continues to go into a disconnected state immediately after provisioning when I added to the new AP Group. After many hours and much experimentation, I decided to erase all the WiFi networks and the problematic AP Group. I recreated the WiFi networks, and created a new AP Group and proceeded to add each AP one by one (after a reset to factory default). In summary here are the final steps that got me out of this pickle:

1. Forget all AP’s in the affected AP Group.
2. Remove all WiFi networks from the AP Group.
3. Delete the AP Group.
4. Delete all the WiFi networks that was associated with the above AP Group.
5. Re-create all the WiFi networks and associate with a brand new AP Group.
6. For each AP, use ssh to reset to factory default, adopt, and add them one at a time to the AP Group using the controller web UI.
7. Since there were four AP’s (3 AC-Pro and 1 AC-M), I waited until the AP is fully connected and can service WiFi clients before I continue with the next one.

I am documenting this so that I can share with Unifi support. This has happened twice now, and each time I spent multiple hours to try to get my WiFi network working. In these pandemic times, WiFi is as important as electricity and plumbing. Since Tier-1 support was unable to resolve this issue, waiting for Tier-2 support (around 24 hours) is a bit “hard to swallow”.

Any ways I am glad that I was able to resolve this and brought my WiFi networks back up and running with the 4 affected AP’s, FOR NOW. However I must admit, these two episodes have made me apprehensive of making configurations to these AP’s, thinking that the next provisions will result in many more lost hours.

I hope the Unifi team can use this information and see if there is an issue relating to AP Group provisioning, since this seem to have triggered the issue in both cases.

Today my wife and I got our first dose of Pfizer BioNTech Covid 19 Vaccine after probably more than 14 months since the first lock down notice from 2020. Of course it is still too soon to declare victory, as our second dose is still scheduled 3 months from now.

On a related note, the Ontario government has also declared the AstraZeneca vaccine will no longer be available as a first dose: “the decision was made out of an abundance of caution.”

I can’t help but think that this sounds a bit contradictory to what the government was peddling a few weeks ago. It kind of makes you think whether their 3 months guidance between the two doses of mRNA based vaccines is warranted and backed up by facts or not.

Regardless, this is another case of inconsistent information provided by our institutions. It certainly will continue to chip away at the credibility of the same institutions.

I hope we learn something from episodes such as this. In the meantime, both of our sons, who are age 17 and 16 should also be eligible for Pfizer or Moderna soon. We are now just monitoring our local clinic schedules to see when they can be booked. Fingers crossed, and three months cannot come soon enough.

The story continues in the media:

On the Wednesday morning of April the 14th, right after I took out the garbage, I noticed that I experienced some tightness when I was bending my left knee going up the stairs. As time goes by the knee begins to swell. By lunch time, it was swollen to the point that I can no longer bend my knee and I can feel a continuous throbbing pain around my left knee. I can also feel that the temperature around my knee has also been elevated. When I took some measurements with a touchless temperature sensor for measuring fevers, my left knee is like 2ºC more than my right knee. This is not my first gout attack, but it has been very long since my last one that I couldn’t even remember when I had it.

I decided to document my current experience, so that next time, I personally have something to recount. Therefore, this blog entry is more for myself than you the reader if you are reading this already.

I have had swollen joints due to gout in my ankle and my knee, always on my left side for some reasons. I wasn’t sure whether I should take Allopurinol or wait until the attack subsides. I seem to recall that in the past that I should not take any Allopurinol during an attack, but the recollection was pretty murky, and doctors are hard to come by these days, so I read the following article: Allopurinol Doesn’t Worsen Acute Gout Attacks, and decided to take Allopurinol in my medicine cabinet. Later on I found out from my family doctor and my local pharmacist that I may have been better off not taking it. What I can tell you is that it started to heal even with the taking of Allopurinol during the attack, so there is some truth to the above article.

I also decided to take Ibuprofen which is available over the counter to reduce the inflammation. The Ibuprofen worked within a couple of hours and really helped with the throbbing. In the end, there is not much to do but to wait and drink lots of water and let my system dissolve and eat away at the uric crystals in my knee.

I got some diclofenac sodium topical cream, which I applied on the affected area overnight. Unfortunately, I felt some skin irritation, and an over tightening or stretching of the skin situation. I had to wash it out in the morning and stuck to Ibuprofen. A single does of 400mg Ibuprofen didn’t do the trick. I had to double the dosage to 800mg.

My hope of the swelling going away in a few days was dashed on the first weekend when I knew that it was getting worse and not better. It was not until the second weekend (approx. 10 days into the ordeal) when I can finally begin to bend my knee. At this point I stopped taking the Ibuprofen and let it naturally take its course.

By the third week, I can bend my knee for most daily activities but going down the stairs and simple things like putting on my pants still created a sharp pain sensation.

This has been the longest gout attack that I have experienced. This time around, I noticed significant muscle atrophy in my left thigh and calf. I also noticed pull tendon or cramping sensations when going down the stairs. Fortunately these sensations went away as I started to do more walking in the latter part of the third week.

On day 22, I still have minor pain on my knee cap but I was able to walk so I did a 3.5 km walk with my wife in the evening of May 6th. Since there were no additional swelling the following day, I decided to do an indoor bike ride of 20km. Yesterday was another 3.5 km of walking and today another indoor ride.

As you can see from the Strava statistics, I am improving, so back in the saddle and back on the climb. Slowly but surely.

It looks like York Region is beginning to ramp up our vaccine schedules. We are now awaiting our postal code to be eligible so that my wife and I can make an appointment. At the time of writing this post, unfortunately, our postal code is still not eligible.

We know some of our neighbours are checking the website, https://york.ca/covid19vaccine on a regular basis. Obviously, this is very tedious and frustrating. I decided to embark on a small project to detect our postal code from the web site. My goal is to write a script that can be executed from my NAS server every 30 minutes to see if it can find our postal code on the website. My first attempt was to use Python and Selenium. The API was a bit clunky and I found it to be somewhat unreliable and fraught with timing issues. I gave up on this approach.

I thought I give it another shot, but this time using Puppeteer. This was much more simpler to use, and I found it to be more friendly especially if you’ve worked with Browser based Javascript to begin with.

I wrote this simple node script called scrape.js:

#!/usr/bin/env node

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const targetPostalCode = process.argv[2] || 'A2B';

console.log ('scraping for ' + targetPostalCode + '...\n');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('http://york.ca/covid19vaccine');

  const anchorSelector = 'div#Y_accor div.new h3.Y_accordion span.trigger a';
  await page.waitForSelector(anchorSelector);

  console.log ('received...\n');

  const result = await page.evaluate((anchorSelector) => {
    let res = [];
    document.querySelectorAll(anchorSelector).forEach(function(elem){
      if (elem.textContent.match(/.*50 Years of Age and Older.*/i) != null) {
        elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelectorAll("p").forEach(function(elem){
          if (elem.textContent.match(/.*postal codes.*/i) != null) { 
            const postalCodes = elem.parentElement.querySelector("strong").textContent;
            postalCodes.split(", ").forEach(function(pc) {
              res.push(pc.trim());
            });
          }
        });
      }
    });
    return res;
  }, anchorSelector);

  console.log(result);

  let found = false;
  let regex = new RegExp(targetPostalCode, "i");
  result.forEach(function(postalCode) {
    if (postalCode.match(regex) != null) {
        // Postal Code Found!
        console.log("We found: " + targetPostalCode);
        found = true;
    }
  });

  console.log('closing...');

  await browser.close();
})();

I placed this script in the directory /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor. Note that I targeted “50 years of Age and Older“, because this is the age group that I am personally interested in. The A2B is also not my real postal code. It is used instead of my own private postal code.

Before I run the program, I had to install puppeteer in my working directory.

cd /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor
sudo npm i puppeteer

Running the above scrape.js produces the following:

scraping for A2B...

received...

[ 'L0J',
  'L4B',
  'L4E',
  'L4H',
  'L4J',
  'L4K',
  'L4L',
  'L6A',
  'L3S',
  'L3T',
  'L6B',
  'L6C',
  'L6E' ]
closing. 

Of course A2B is not in the list. If it was, another line like:

We found: A2B

will be in the output.

I supplemented the above with a shell script program which I can later use to configure cron to be executed every 30 minutes. The shell script’s job is to monitor the website using scrape.js and if the postal code is found, then send a notification email.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

cd /home/xxxxx/gitwork/covidMonitor

if [ $(./scrape.js | tee /home/xxxxx/log/covidPostalCodes.log | grep "found" | wc -l) -ge 1 ]
then

sendmail xxxxx@gmail.com <<@
Subject: Covid Vaccine Can Be Scheduled

Goto the following site to schedule your vaccine:

https://york.ca/covid19vaccine

@

fi

I could have included the email notification logic in the node script as well, but I figure I may want to check manually on an infrequent basis, in which case I simply run the scrape.js script on the command line.

Now all there is to be done is relax and wait, a thing that we have been doing a lot lately during the pandemic.

I recently received a YouTube video from one of my uncles on the topic of the migration of Hakka (客家) Chinese from Mexian, China to Mauritius.

My maternal heritage is from Mauritius and I have made previous postings in this regard. You can simply do a quick search in this blog on the term, Mauritius, and you’ll see other related postings.

For keep sake, I’ve gathered the videos here for easy reference to share this knowledge with other relatives. It is also pretty amazing what you will find when searching for “Chinese in Mauritius” on YouTube.

Below are four videos which I personally found interesting. The first three videos are from Jeanette Lan’s YouTube Channel, kudos to her for sharing these videos. They are listed in chronological order of production.