Nevada Sage

I saw the image below at the The Daily WTF and almost fell off of my chair. Apparently I am easily amused…

I have four computers in the house (five if I connect my work laptop) running three different OS’s.

Wife’s notebook: Mac OS X (10.2.28)

My Linux: Gentoo (my primary box)

Other Two: Windows XP (three boxes if counting my work laptop)

I have a single printer – a 10 year old HP LaserJet 6L.

I never took the time to set up printing on all of the boxes, so anything I had to print on my old LaserJet6L was done on my upstairs Windows box. I decided that I should get off my duff and get printing going from any box on my home network.

I did some digging around, and found a version of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) for about $95USD, and ordered/installed it to upgrade my Wife’s system to an IPP enabled version of the OS.

I then googled/rtfm’d low cost print servers. I ended up buying a Zonet print server. It has one Parallel and two USB ports. The docs stated that it supports IPP and multiple OS’s so I took a chance and ordered it from NewEgg. There were zero reviews for this model, but it appeared to have the features I needed at a price I was willing to pay (about $60 USD).

Lo and behold. Once I figured out a few small configuration issues it worked great. While I was not able to use IPP for printing under Linux or OS X, the device included a driver CD for IPP under Windows.

The final outcome:

Windows boxes: Installed manufacturer IPP client software, and easily configured printing to the server.

OS X: Was unable to use IPP, but the device supports AppleTalk. Easily configured printing to the server.

Gentoo: Via CUPS 1.2.6, I could not configure printing using the IPP. I configured CUPS to print using the LP Daemon and it works flawlessly.

It was nice to be able to continue using my old LJ6, since I see no reason to get rid of a fully functional printer. Once I was able to configure the print server/systems I ordered a roller replacement kit for the printer. I installed the kit, and my old printer is still marching on.

I got a Wild hair (what else could I have – I crack me up sometimes)….

I’ve been so busy at work the last 18 months I had little time to use my Linux box (Gentoo), which was so troublesome to build as I built it from scratch as my first ever Linux exposure.

Last weekend I blew out the old Gentoo and installed fresh. I remembered quite a bit, but many things changed and it still took about five days to build the system (one full day was spent installing KDE). It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to working exclusively on my Linux box from now on – excepting cases where I have to run Windows specific programs (which is not to say that I will not investigate WINe).

Just for kicks, I dragged an old Athlon 900 box out of the closet and connected a KVM. I installed Kubuntu on the old slower box, and now I have two Linux boxes running. The Kubuntu box is primarily to check out a Debian based system as I have zero exposure to Debian. Based on my limited interactions with both, it appears to me that Debian’s apt-get and Gentoo’s emerge package managers are very similar.

Now I’ll install php, apache, my Zend IDE and get to work (and probably CVS as well).

Anyone out there know how to resolve the audio/video (out of) sync problem with DVD movies in Kaffeine?

It’s been a very long time since my last post, due to my being so busy with my new work duties. In the coming few months I hope to accomplish a few things.

I plan on a return to Nevada to accompany my friend on his Bighorn Sheep hunt. I have two weeks of vacation scheduled in November for the event. Although I was unable to attend, the crew has already been on two scouting trips. The outlook is promising. You can view some pics of the second scouting trip here (smugmug is pretty slick stuff).

I would also like to finish reading PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra. I just started this book, and so far it is very good. This may be the material that pushes my thinking through the old procedural mindset barrier. I have, however, found that it’s quite difficult for me to ‘sharpen the saw’ relative to OOP when I don’t get time to bury myself in the reading then put the concepts to work in the form of code.

When I started my new job, I built a new website for my department. It works, but it is an excellent example of a code base that would benefit from refactoring. Given (or taking if I don’t sleep) adequate time to read through Matt’s book, I expect I can greatly improve my OOP knowledge as well as the code base in question.

I have been reading Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire. The book is about Bernhard Riemann, who is father of what is regarded as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics, The Riemann Hypothesis, which states “All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half”. This relates to his proposed formula to count the number of prime numbers less than a given quantity. The book covers Riemann’s life in general, as well as providing in-depth coverage of his hypothesis.

I find this book to be a good read. It is not too technical in terms of the math used to describe the background requisites as well as the Hypothesis itself. Anyone who is comfortable with basic math, algebra, and elementary calculus will find the content tractable – at least to the point I have thus far read. The calculus used is quite basic, and was fun to see again (I have not done any calculus in many years). Note that I have not yet finished the book, and I’m sure the math will soon leave me behind.

In any case I have found the first two thirds of the book enjoyable and thought to comment.