Linuxlore

Me vs Windows: a printer installation

Friday, September 30th, 2005

Daft subject? Maybe, but one more reason why Windows is clearly not ready for the desktop yet! I’ve spent good chunk of today trying to install 3 Hewlett Packard network printers onto a Windows XP Professional installation. This is a clean install of the OS, so shouldn’t be far away from pristine condition.

It should be easy, especially with the Install Network Printer Wizard that HP provide. This scans the network to identify any printers available and will then configure and install all the necessary settings. Well it will if it doesn’t get to the last stage and then decide that it has an unknown error and back out the whole operation. This happens every single time it is used on all three network printers.

(more…)

Tags: HP, printers, Windows, XP
Posted in Windows | No Comments »

Incompetent Revenue

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

Yesterday I got a lovely letter through from the Inland Revenue regarding my PAYE and NIC contributions and talking about ways and means to avoid ‘recovery proceedings’. This worried me a little to say the least so I phoned them up to find out what was going on. The person at the other end of the phone started asking about how I filed my P35 and when, so it was on to the accountants next. This resulted in a bit of slightly frustrated explanation from the accountants.

(more…)

Tags: Inland Revenue
Posted in General | No Comments »

Firefox configuration URL

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

I’ve just had a bit of fun hunting around to remind my self of this very handy URL for working with the Firefox configuration, so thought I’d post it here so I can access it easily. – about:config – just type that into the location and off you go. I’d post it as a link, but it doesn’t work when I do that

Actually this gives me a good idea. I have a whole raft of text documents sitting around waiting for me to experiment with a Wiki for long enough to define a structure and migrate them into it for reference. Blosxom could actually act as either a very quick and handy stop-gap or possibly a excellent alternative to this! Since it basically works by turning a directory structure of .txt documents into a Blog all I need to do is categorise the .txt files into directories and add a first line matching a subject and Blosxom will handle the rest.

OK, just need about and hour spare an I can do that

Tags: Blosxom, Firefox, wiki
Posted in Computers | No Comments »

Which dot dot dot

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

OK, I succumbed and did the Which dot dot dot? quizes. Not sure about some of the results though!

(more…)

Tags: Linux, OS/2, Retro
Posted in Computers | No Comments »

Defining processes

Monday, September 26th, 2005

I’ve been clearing a few things out of the study over the past few days, well study may be a bit of a grand name for it, but I tend to use it rather than office. There’s two reasons for that, firstly there’s the fact that I can’t have a dedicated office for work at home otherwise it is liable for business taxes. Secondly there’s the practical reason that it hasn’t always been an office and isn’t really one now – there’s way too many non-work bits in there. Books of all sorts (sailing, photography, cetaceans, fiction, etc., not just computing), and lots of old retro computing bits (more magazines as well as the machines and software).

(more…)

Tags: office, process, reorganisation, time management
Posted in General | No Comments »

Where has the fun gone in computing?

Saturday, September 24th, 2005

My first ever computer was a ZX81 bought for me on my 13th birthday. I never upgraded it in any form and only ever had the tapes that came with the computer (so none of the dreaded ‘RAM pack wobbles’ for me!). I had that machine for about a year before selling it and having a painful time without a computer whilst waiting for my Spectrum to arrive. The only thing my ZX81 ever got used for was writing my own programs or typing in listings from magazines. While I was waiting for my Spectrum I wrote a Pacman style game for it, and since I didn’t have any manuals for it yet I used the list of commands on the back of the brochure and listings in Your Computer magazine to work out what the commands did and their syntax (needless to say it didn’t work right away!). All that programming was great fun and probably most of what I used my computers for. I did have a good number of games for my Spectrum too (obviously!), but programming was always more fun.

(more…)

Tags: Amiga, Amstrad, Commodore, CPC, Linux, OS/2, Protext, Retro, Sinclair, Spectrum, Windows, ZX81
Posted in Retro | No Comments »

Ouch!

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Last year while I was working on the sailing club work party to get the compound ready for the cruisers to lay-up ashore somebodies rudder managed to separate into two pieces as I was carrying it. Unfortunately the steel toe capped boots that I had been wearing had seriously leaky soles to them, and since it was raining and there were plenty of puddles around I had decided to swap them for my sailing boots in the interest of keeping my feet dry. Even more unfortunately my big toe was in the exact spot the heavy bit of the rudder had chosen to land.

Now, about a year on and the black area of my nail has just about gone, so in commemoration of the event I decided that it would be fitting to shut my thumb in the car door (OK, I didn’t decide, it just happened while I wasn’t concentrating!). Hopefully it won’t be another year before the black bit in my thumb goes. So long as I can tie up my shoe laces more easily pretty soon I will be happy – for now all I can say is ‘ouch’!

Tags: Tudor
Posted in Sailing | No Comments »

Blosxom hack

Thursday, September 22nd, 2005

Well after a bit of reading through the code for Blosxom I’ve tracked down the right place to put a temporary hack in to create the required entry into the RSS output. It lacks the seconds information on the time so I have manually set them to :00 (not a major issue, but untidy to my mind). There also doesn’t appear to be a suitable variable to use for the timezone information. For now I’ve done another nasty manual configuration of +0100, but clearly this isn’t going to work well once the clocks go back again! The question is will this hack actually work beyond a visual inspection of the output!

Here’s the diff from the original Blosxom code for anyone interested:

436c436
< rss story   <item>\n   <title>$title</title>\n   <link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn
</link>\n<description>$body</description>\n   </item>\n
---
> rss story   <item>\n   <title>$title</title>\n   <link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn
</link>\n<description>$body</description>\n   <pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $ti:00 +0
100</pubDate>\n   </item>\n

Tags: Blosxom, RSS
Posted in Web | No Comments »

Splitting the Atom

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

OK, a very quick update here to note that I’ve made a few modifications to my Blosxom install. First off I’ve added a calendar plugin (currently on the left hand side). Nothing fancy, but looks to do the job – and I’m hoping that the movement between months will present some live links once I’ve got some posts in more than just the single month!

The second one is the new Atom feed. This is partly a stop gap pending getting an RSS 2.0 feed working properly, but I’ll probably leave it there. This took a little bit of playing around with to get it working, but in the end all that was needed was installing XML/Parser.pm which came in the libxml-parser-perl Debian package. This brought a small selection of other packages with it, but I’ll investigate that later

Tags: Atom, Blosxom, Debian, RSS
Posted in Web | No Comments »