Archive for May, 2005
I keep finding myself returning to Tux Racer for a bit of mindless penguin guiding, seeing good old Tux reaching speeds of 190KM/H is quite fun, if you haven’t tried Tux Racer yet then I would reccomend that you do…it is great fun.
The even better news is that, like Firefox and Open Office, the open source goodness isn’t limited to the world of Linux, and does in fact work on Windows, Macintosh OS X & Macintosh OS 9 and earlier.
Tux Racer can be downloaded from http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
Samuel
May 18th, 2005 at 11:49pm
Tuesday: 6 Cups
3 x Standard Mug (1 point each) = 3 Cups
2 x 75%ish Travel Mug (1.5 points each) = 3 Cups
Total = 6 Cups
Samuel
May 18th, 2005 at 01:02am
666 ABC Canberra are advertising their breakfast program during prime time on commercial television….These people can get as much free advertising as they want on ABC TV, but they spend taxpayers money on this…I can’t see how it benefits them, it’s not as if ratings are important to them, after all they don’t have advertisers who crave ratings, and they aren’t funded on a per rating point basis, and The Friends Of The ABC certainly wouldn’t let the federal government close down an ABC radio station because of ratings.
Of course, not only are the ads appearing during expensive hours, but they also look fairly expensive…All this money going to the TV stations and not the hospitals…To quote Mr John Stanley “Oh Dear”.
I think I’ll give them a piece of my mind tomorrow morning, and time permitting, bring it up on the better breakfast program (2CC Mike Jefferys).
Samuel
May 17th, 2005 at 10:13pm
According to two bits of identical spam I received, my eBay account has been suspended….Oh well, never mind, it’s not as if I ever used it….I didn’t even know I had it!
The spammers did get one thing right though, my account was suspended because I omitted my name, address & phone number (including phone numbers which have been disconnected).
They didn’t think the email through though…They wanted me to verify a suspended account…In most cases the spammers try to hide the real URL to some extent, but not this one, I hovered on it and found that it would send me to bioclass.cs.ntou.edu.tw/chat/home/index.html (I’m not making a link out of it for obvious reasons).
Samuel
May 17th, 2005 at 10:07pm
Monday: 6 Cups
3 x Standard Mug (1 point each) = 3 Cups
2 x 75%ish Travel Mug (1.5 points each) = 3 Cups
Total = 6 Cups
Samuel
May 17th, 2005 at 12:00am
Those of you who have keen eyesight or subscribe to my atom feed will have noticed that I now have “Samuel’s Coffee-cup-o-meter”, this is a measurement of how much coffee I drink each day. For the purposes of this, a standard mug (no measurements, just what I consider standard) counts as one point, a shop coffee (Cappuccino is what I usually have) is one point, on the rare occasion that I have Iced Coffee, that is one point…and for those of you who are thinking “right, everything is one point, gotcha” well, you’re wrong. I usually have a thermos of coffee and a travel mug with me, a half full travel mug is about the same as one standard mug, and as such gets one point, a 75%ish full travel mug attracts 1.5 points, and a 90%+ full travel mug attracts 2 points. I usually carry enough coffee for two 75%ish coffee’s, but sometimes have more.
“Now you know”
Samuel
May 16th, 2005 at 06:56pm
This is just weird. I had a comment today from somebody suggesting that I “shouldn’t make that kind of comment” in relation to my Friday the 13th post, in particular, the “Idiot number three” section.
Isn’t it just wonderful that some people think that I shouldn’t be able to express my own opinion, I pointed out to this person that “It is my blog and my opinion” and that “I might consider them to be an idiot on one day and not another, that is my choice, and it is my right to say that.”
I didn’t point this out, but if the person is reading this then they can read it anyway. If you don’t like something I say, you have every right to call me an idiot, to reply with comments, and to dress in an orange tutu and dance down the street with signs saying “Samuel Is Wrong”…that is your choice…however, I have a right to express my opinion, and if you don’t agree, fine you don’t have to, but you don’t have the right to stop me from saying it.
Samuel
May 16th, 2005 at 06:44pm
It seems that blogger.com isn’t reading HTML emails properly any more, which forces me to use the blogger.com web interface. Not ideal, but I guess it will do the job for now. Don’t expect it to slow me down though 🙂
Samuel
May 16th, 2005 at 06:42pm
Sunday: 3 Cups
Samuel
May 15th, 2005 at 11:14pm
Just because Mozilla Firefox had a little security issue during the week, all these strange people have come out of their little boxes to enlighten us all to the benefits of Internet Explorer. So now I am going to settle the argument by saying this
“Every browser will have it’s own security issues from time to time, they will vary in severity, and in some cases, will be downright dreadful. However, the difference between browsers is the amount of issues, and the time it takes to fix them. Internet Explorer has a long track history of having many many security issues at any given time, and Microsoft tend to release updates once per month, on the other hand you have Mozilla, they usually have no issues, and occasionally have one or two, and in most cases, a fix is available within a few days. The other fact is that IE integrates into Windows very very closely, which effectively gives exploits access to your data if they so desire, Firefox (and just about every other browser on the face of the planet) has little to no integration with the OS, meaning that exploits have much less access to data…Now do you see why Firefox is better from a security point of view?”
Samuel
May 15th, 2005 at 07:00pm
Some say it is unlucky, but for me it just turned me into an idiot magnet…
Firstly, seeing as it was just after midnight when I was fiddling with Windows & CUPS, I can say that the first idiots I ran into were Microsoft, the lovely people who have a default setting in their CUPS server which wants Internet Explorer authentication. Considering that the whole point of CUPS is OS independent printer support, and that the ONLY OS which has Internet Explorer nowadays is Windows, this has to be one of the most ridiculous setting I have seen yet.
Next Idiots, ACTION (Yea, I know, I’m beating the ACTION Rant drum again), not the drivers, just the administrators. I was at my bus stop at 8:30, a whole 5 minutes before my bus was due, but did it turn up? Of course not…but I stayed at that bus stop anyway because a teacher lives nearby and drives past there in the morning, and would be happy to give me a lift…unfortunately she had already gone, but I didn’t know that, so I waited for her or the next “38” bus. The 38 is due before the 36, so there was no point walking down the street to the other bus stop where I could catch a 36 or a 38, because that would eliminate the “get a lift” possibility…but lo and behold, the 36 came nearly 10 minutes early, and I was left to watch it go around the corner. Eventually the next 38 came…but it was too late to get to Dickson College at 8:50 to do what I wanted to do, and I was late for my 9am class.
My day at Dickson College was filled with people stepping out in front of me, cutting me off, and in general, blocking my walking path…thanks, I really needed that
Idiot number three, Dinal (Yes Dinal, it is you!). I am hoping that, other than Microsoft employees, there aren’t more people like Dinal who think that Internet Explorer is better than Firefox…what kind of idiot thinks that a major-security-risk-integrated
-into-most-disk-access-and-other-system-functions-bloatware-browser is better than Firefox. Internet Explorer integrates with Windows Explorer far too much, which is half the reason why it has so many flaws (it is also badly written, but that’s another story for another day). Firefox doesn’t integrate with Windows Explorer, and doesn’t suffer the same problems, I’m not saying it doesn’t have some problems, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have compatibility issues with some websites, but in general it is the better browser. I’m sure somebody is going to point out the obvious similarity in Linux, KDE and Konqueror, so let me say this: Yes, Konqueror is the explorer type app in KDE, however it is a poor excuse for a web browser, and I avoid it with as many teeth as possible…I use firefox on Linux, and I’m not a fan of KDE…I much prefer GNOME.
I had a bit of a break from idiots, I spent two hours in the library (good thing I was working, that way I didn’t have to attend an assembly filled with idiots playing loud “music” and apparently “dancing”), then I had a class, and went into Civic to await a friend’s arrival. This waiting period proved interesting:
To start with, more people blocking my walking path for no good reason…it just so happens that I walk faster than most people, and stepping out in front of me is very annoying, but it doesn’t stop most people from doing it anyway.
I went to sit down on a seat to wait for the person’s arrival, but just before I could sit down, somebody jumped in the way and sat down instead, so I sat on a different seat. Incidentally, this “somebody” was only seated for 30 seconds…hardly seems worth the bother does it?
While I was sitting down, two people walked past and nearly sat on me….the day keeps getting better doesn’t it?
The person I was waiting for arrived on time, and I got on the bus with them, naturally, somebody had taken my favourite seat 20 seconds before me, so I sat down elsewhere and moved onto my favourite seat when it was vacated.
On the way back was no better, firstly I was treated as a bag rest by someone…they just plonked their bag right on top of me!! At an interchange, an old woman got on with a trolley overflowing with plastic bags…the bus was already crowded without that…and it seemed quite awkward for her to manoeuvre it…her trying to get off the bus with it was worse though. The other amazingly dumb idiot was just nuts. They had headphones, but they were wearing them around their neck, not on their ears, the headphones were also blaring…making it impossible to hear the driver’s radio, which is a pity because I missed some good bits, I think the driver had difficulty hearing the radio over these headphones at time as well.
After getting off the bus, I sat down and got out my thermos, poured my coffee into my linux.conf.au mug, and had my coffee. This was, however, interrupted by another idiot, this one happened to be from my college, and they recognised me, so they came over and started asking me strange questions. “How old are you?” “What year are you in?” “What year were you in during 1990?” etc…this lasted about two minutes, after which they just walked off. Why did I put up with this? Quite simply because I know that they are less mentally capable than most, and have a habit of doing this.
That was Friday the 13th.
Samuel
May 14th, 2005 at 12:13am
On Wednesday afternoon, I was listening to the drive show with Mike Welsh on talk radio 2cc very closely, however I misssed the first hour or so, and that just happened to be when winner number three was announced for the drive show dinner. As it turns out, the winner on that day was my bus driving friend (who for reasons I’ll let you think about, will remain nameless) and he is bringing me along. So if you’re attending, or you are going to be at La Scala on Thursday 26th, you might just see me…and I might just see you!
Maybe I should take the camera along and add the photos to my photo gallery.
Samuel
May 14th, 2005 at 12:09am
There was one minor problem with my Linux-to-Windows printing exercise, it was printing at 75%ish size and cutting off a little bit of the left side of the page. I did a google search for "mpc400 cups" (without the quotes) and quickly discovered that my printer works better with the drivers for the Canon S630, so I went to System–>Administration–>Printing, right clicked on my printer and chose properties, driver tab, and changed the printer type to S630, clicked "Print Test Page" and kablingo, I got a full page quality printout.
I’m Happy 🙂
Samuel
May 13th, 2005 at 11:08pm
Yay!!!!!
At long long last I have managed to get a Linux installation to print to a windows printer, amazingly the printer is a “windows only” printer.
I have a Canon MPC400 printer, which only has drivers for Windows, I have tried connecting to it from Linux with drivers as close as possible before, but it hasn’t worked…until now. Forget Samba printing, hooray for CUPS (Common Unix Printing System).
After a failed attempt at using SMB printing earlier tonight, I started thinking “Maybe I can download a program the intercepts print jobs sent to a certain compatible printer and redirects them to the windows-only printer.” This was fairly pointless, and lead me to a heap of $100+ shareware apps that didn’t do what I needed…then it struck me “I’ve seen CUPS in Windows before, but where?” I had a look throught the printer properties, nope, not there…hang on, it’s in Windows Setup…
So I went to Control Panel, Add Or Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components. I scrolled down to “Other Network File & Print Services”, had a look inside and found “Print Services For Unix”. Needless to say, I was getting excited by this stage, but the description once I clicked on it was even better “Enables UNIX clients to print to any printer available to this computer” (Linux, for those of you who don’t know, is a UNIX derivative). Naturally, I installed this instantly, I watched it install as well.
After the installation I went back to the printer properties, but there was no change, and I thought “OK…..how does this work then…..”, suddenly I remembered seeing it install IIS stuff (IIS being the built-in Windows web server), and I remembered that CUPS is an extension of HTTP. So, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, IIS, delve through the tree of servers, and I found printers at address http://server/printers/
So, back to my Linux machine, bring up firefox and go to http://192.168.0.5/printers/ (192.168.0.5 being the IP address of the computer with the printer), it asked me for a username and password, I entered numerous different ones, but that didn’t work, so I hit cancel and got an IIS message telling me that webserver ACL’s (Access Control List’s) required me to login. Back to the Windows machine, try accessing the printer site using Internet Explorer and hey presto, it worked…this probably means Micorsoft did some nasty “Nothing but Internet Explorer” trick, which would be silly considering that it is supposed to give UNIX access to printers. Check authentication settings and (suprise suprise) discover that it is waiting for Internet Explorer to provide encrypted Windows style login details…well that’s just stupid, Linux/Unix/The entire non-microsoft world (except for some old versions of Macintosh) don’t use rubbish like Internet Explorer, we use good stuff, like Mozilla Firefox. I quickly changed it to anonymous access, but before hitting OK I realised the security implications, the rest of the world can now use my printer….oh, hang on, no they can’t, I’m safe behind my firewall…hit OK.
Back to my Linux machine and Mozilla Firefox, yay, I can now access the printer site, but I need the printer address, click on the printer and I now see the address is http://192.168.0.5/printers/Printer/.printer tell Linux this and it asks me what sort of printer I have…Canon, naturally it didn’t have my MPC400, so I chose the closest thing, the MPC5000 (which happens to use bjc600 drivers). For the first time ever, I didn’t get a “can’t connect to server” message. I sent a test page to the printer…..the printer started making noise, my excitement shot through the roof, the printer was PRINTING FROM LINUX, yes, my windows-only printer was PRINTING FROM LINUX, I saw the test page emerge from the printer, I deliberately collapsed, got up, picked up the test page, danced around the room for a bit, put down the test page and, in excitement, started typing this…yes, I repeat, my windows-only printer was PRINTING FROM LINUX.
EDIT: Due to the number of people who are landing on my blog for information on Linux and the Canon MPC400, I have decided to add this note, as per the Linux Printing post I have discovered that the MPC400 works best with the Canon S630 drivers. END EDIT
In case you’re wondering, the reason I did all this is because I had two web pages to print, and was too lazy to walk to another computer and print them from there!!
I thought you might like to see my first ever Linux to Windows test page…no not particularly??? Well here it is anyway!!
Samuel
May 13th, 2005 at 12:42am
You draw pictures of course!! Which is exactly what I did…this one in fact.
Samuel
May 12th, 2005 at 10:13pm
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