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For (impending) future reference…
Reconciling Leopard and the Brother 5070N Laser Printer
May 8th, 2008 by
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Once upon a time, I upgraded to Leopard on my Mac Pro, and, though I did not mention it at the time, something in upgrade land totally pissed off my Brother 5070N laser printer.
I’d bought the printer in the first place because it was one of the first to support Bonjour (née Rendezvous, née Zeroconf) networking. With good ol’ Tiger, it Just Worked
I never did get around to figuring out the problem at the time, and being a sleep-deprived and very busy new dad it unfortunately hasn’t been much of a priority. Somehow I’ve learned to live with six months (!!!) of not being able to print a damn thing. And worse, I’ve had to hold off on upgrading my wife’s machine, which has kept her from being able to enjoy the goodness of automated Time Machine backups.
I finally got fed up with it today and decided to finally sort things out once and for all. I even indulged my inner noob and followed Brother’s directions, even though it meant assigning a static IP to my printer and dropping it back from the awesomeness of Bonjour to the semi-awesomeness of old-school IP printing. It turns out that, even though no one says it anywhere, that was the key. So, here’s a bit of advice for future Googlers: the 5070N will not print correctly using Bonjour under 10.5. You want the CUPS driver and the “HP Jetdirect - Socket” protocol. Then poof! It’s all happy again.
Now to go about breaking upgrading Liz’s laptop…
Tags: computers geekery macintoshLeave a Comment Print This Post
links for 2008-05-07
May 7th, 2008 by
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A useful introduction to the subject…
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A great reference for top browsers’ event support on various elements. I think I’m in love.
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Worth a look; wonder what my SD700 is capable of?
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So much LOL, it’s scary.
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As a one-time LP-MUD programming freak (ca. 1991-1995), this might be a dream come true. *nostalgic sigh*
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I might have to pick this up…
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I was the biggest nerd for Babylon 5 back in the day… I can’t wait for the rest of this series of amazing behind-the-scenes goodness.
links for 2008-04-26
April 26th, 2008 by
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Nice introduction to the Dojo way of doing things.
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Which may help me wrap my head around making sIFR and Dojo 1.1 play nicely together… Maybe.
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Interesting tool for gauging the effects of document structure on page download time.
Hopefully Minimizing Wheel Reinvention
April 23rd, 2008 by
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Dear Lazyweb:
I have a number of programming itches that I’d like to scratch that are just slightly large enough that I’d really love to just use something that already exists (if available). I’d spend a while digging around, but, well… I’m lazy, and I’m busy. So hopefully some of you have suggestions. I am looking for:
- an MSN Messenger client library (preferably in Python)
- a Twitter client library (preferably in Python)
- a solution for cross-posting between LiveJournal and Wordpress (either direction) that supports (or could be made to support with a minimum of pain) multiple LJ blogs on one end and multiple WP users on a shared blog (not that my wife really posts that much any more) on the other
- a hosting provider that’s friendly to IM bots and is affordable (for some value of “affordable” that I have yet to precisely define, but which in all likelihood simply means that it won’t cause marital unrest)
I may award bonus points if the MSN and Twitter suggestions are both written against Twisted. I know Twisted’s got some MSN support, but I’ve not looked into it too closely and was a little disappointed by the state of the official docs and examples.
I currently host with WebFaction and though I’m normally entirely satisfied with them, I seem to recall that at one point they frowned on running IM bots on their shared hosting platforms, although I can’t immediately find anything expressly prohibiting it in their terms of service, AUP, knowledgebase, and support forums.
Thanks in advance!
Wait, How Old Is My Kid Again?
April 22nd, 2008 by
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The thing about being a relatively new parent is that life very quickly becomes a complete blur, and after a certain point you’ve no sense of what day it is, let alone how many weeks old your little bundle of joy is. This makes life tricky, since there are certain milestone weeks that are usually the harbingers of sudden shifts into higher levels of fussiness and sleep regression.
So what’s a frazzled dad to do?
Well, I do have Python, and I seem to have Google Reader open an awful lot, and cron jobs are a lot better at remembering to do things than I am… So here’s my fifteen-minute solution that I whipped up the other week in between putting Claire down for her morning nap and getting ready for work. (File names and URLs have been changed to protect the innocent.)
#!/usr/bin/env python import datetime from dateutil.rrule import rrule, DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY import PyRSS2Gen as RSS2 # You'll want to change all of these values, obviously... KID_NAME = u'Claire' BIRTHDAY = datetime.datetime(2007, 9, 10, 21, 57) FEED_URL = 'http://yoursite/kids_age.xml' FILENAME = 'your_path/kids_age.xml' def periods_between(freq, start_date, end_date): rr = rrule(freq, dtstart=start_date) periods = len(rr.between(start_date, end_date)) return periods def format_entry_body(months, weeks, days): body = """<h1>Today, %(kid_name)s Is...</h1> <ul> <li>%(months)s months</li> <li>%(weeks)s weeks</li> <li>%(days)s days</li>; </ul> <p>They grow up so fast!</p>""" kid_name = KID_NAME # so we can cheat with locals() return body % locals() def make_rss(body): now = datetime.datetime.now() # Add a hash component to the item link so that the RSS reader # will recognize this as today's new entry... item_url = FEED_URL+'#'+now.strftime('%Y%m%d') rss = RSS2.RSS2( title=u"How Old Is %s?" % KID_NAME, link=FEED_URL, description=u"How old is %s in months, weeks, and days" \ % KID_NAME, lastBuildDate=now, items = [ RSS2.RSSItem( title=u"How old is %s today?" % KID_NAME, link=item_url, description=body, guid=RSS2.Guid(item_url), pubDate=now, ) ] ) return rss def to_xml(rss): xml = rss.to_xml() # Make our xml at least a tiny bit human-readable xml = xml.replace('><', '>\n<') return xml def main(): now = datetime.datetime.now() months = periods_between(MONTHLY, BIRTHDAY, now) weeks = periods_between(WEEKLY, BIRTHDAY, now) days = periods_between(DAILY, BIRTHDAY, now) body = format_entry_body(months, weeks, days) rss = make_rss(body) xml = to_xml(rss) f = open(FILENAME, 'w') f.write(xml) f.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main()
You will, of course, have to install dateutil (via easy_install) and PyRSS2Gen (the old-school tarball way) so that they can do the heavy lifting for you.
Then all that’s left is to cron it to run daily, and point your favorite RSS reader at the feed. Voila! You’re on top of exactly how old your kid is, and quickly on your way to becoming Parent of the Year.
Tags: children claire geekery python6 Comments Print This Post
