Month: January 2004

major annoyance in Panther

I just discovered a major annoyance in how OS X.3 Panther handles wireless networking and sleep. I have been trying to figure out why I could no longer print over my wireless connection, and it turns out that if I let my iBook go to sleep for more than a minute or so, it loses the ability to locate printers hosted by cups servers.

If I connect to a wired network, I see the shared printer as Shared Printers in the Printer Setup Utility.

shared_printers

And if I examine the contents of /etc/printcap, that looks OK:
# This file was automatically generated by cupsd(8) from the
 /private/etc/cups/printers.conf file. All changes to this file
 will be lost.
lp@red.paulbeard.org|kludgy non-PS HP1100:rm=127.0.0.1:rp=lp@red.paulbeard.org:

But if I drop off the network, I can’t re-establish connections with the same services. I have tried restarting the airport network, powering the card on and off, nothing doing. The only solution I have found so far is to connect to a wired network.

And if I create a static printer that points to the same device, it doesn’t work. That may be a workaround I try next: the printers.conf file is empty right now, so the warning header in the printcap is actually an untruth. The printcap is actually populated by whatever the cups daemon sees on the network. If I create a working printer in the printers.conf file that will survive network outages, that might work.

Very annoying. What the &^*&^(* is it with OS X and printing, anyway?

[Posted with ecto]
Continue reading “major annoyance in Panther”

are we less connected or more?

Steve Johnson on conventional wisdom: I think he makes a good argument. We do have many more options of where and when we get our information, and the barrier to entry is sufficiently low as to allow the likes of the Drudge Report and yours truly an equal presence . . .

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Our Fragmented Web:

“Slow down and work through the logic here: spam filters are invoked as yet another indication of the echo-chamber effect. Now, who is winning right now: the spam or the filters? Obviously, the spam is winning — nobody’s walking around complaining that they miss the days when they’d get a completely spontaneous penis-enlargement ad in their inbox, despite the fact that they’re opposed to penis-enlargement in general. The filters are there because there are so many voices flooding our inboxes and our browsers that we need tools to fight back. You don’t have filters on television or old-fashioned newspapers because you don’t need them — there’s not enough diversity and chaos to justify them. But the web — and particularly the blogosphere — is far more eclectic and cross-pollinating than any of those older media. That’s the real story. Writing about the rise of filters as a sign of web insularity is like writing about the heat wave we’re having here in New York right now because everyone’s bundled up in parkas.”

OK, the last analogy doesn’t register for me, but I think I see his point otherwise. The argument that we’re all typing into the darkness and losing touch with our physical human selves — our need to connect with others — may have been true in 1997 or so, but the technology has come far enough to lower the barrier to entry and motivate people to create MeetUp and similar ideas. What is Howard Dean’s internet presence about but the use of these technologies to link up like minds and get their physical owners together for a shared purpose?

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airports as natural place for WiFi

Delta gives a little R &38; R:

“Bizarre missing feature: Any sort of networking, so I’m blogging and uploading via my cell phone, through T-Mobile’s GPRS service.”

Frank’s not the first to note this (even this weekend). Wendy Seltzer had much the same comment about Hartsfield in a post yesterday.

Transit stations — bus, plane, rail, or ferry — seem like obvious places to install WiFi access points, especially when the authorities expect people to queue up hours before departure time. Why not make the wait as productive, or at least less painful, as possible?

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what we like about where we live

Jon Stahl’s Journal: New poll shows concern for environment in Puget Sound; dissatisfaction with current state of affairs:

“In an opinion column in this weekend’s Seattle Times, James Vesley previews a forthcoming pollconducted by the Puget Sound Regional Council. This poll presents a great media/outreach opportunity for local/regional enviros.”

The first point he notes makes me want to make sure I get that paper, in case they don’t put that stuff online:

People love it here. Fully 80 percent of respondents thought their town is a good or excellent place to live; 52 percent thought the natural environment and beauty are what they liked best. That only fortifies the larger notion that people are deeply committed to natural stewardship in a congested metropolis.

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so being socially progressive and having a robust economy aren’t mutually exclusive?

A Fistful of Euros:

“Or, to summarise, social spending is good for personal productivity, and democracy is effective in ensuring that real-world governments avoid the costly mistakes that anti-welfare theorists assume. Apart from illustrating the dangers of hand-waving economic arguments, this tells us that the choice between a European-style high-welfare state, and a US-style low-welfare state, has nothing to do with promoting economic growth and is simply a matter of which kind of society we find more pleasant to live in.”

Which would you prefer?

See more here and here.

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two great tastes that go great together: coffee and chocolate

Leigh-Anne’s AR Recipes: Six-Minute Chocolate Cake:

(actually, she uses the same recipe I do, from one of the Moosewood collective books: I have made a few ingredient and process changes.)

  • 1-1/2 cups unbleached white flour
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup cold water or brewed coffee (espresso makes this sublime: use 2 shots)
  • 2 tsps pure vanilla extract
  • 2 tbsp (cider) vinegar

0. Preheat the oven to 375-degrees.

1. Grease/oil a 9 inch round or 8 inch square cake pan: dredge lightly with flour and cocoa powder.

2. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt and sugar into an ungreased 8-inch square or 9-inch round baking pan (preferrably non-stick) a mixing bowl.

3. In a 2-cup measuring cup, measure and mix the oil, water (or coffee), and vanilla. Slowly and gently pour the liquid ingredients into the baking pan bowl and mix the batter with a fork or a small whisk.

4. When the batter is smooth, add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls (and some bubbling) in the batter where the baking soda and vinegar are reacting.

5. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed throughout the batter (the color becomes more consistent throughout).

6. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes — testing with a toothpick. Remove to a cooling rack and make frosting.

Frosting is optional: I have used 10x sugar but the cake is so moist, it ends up soaking in. The latest Moosewood book has some more refined suggestions (speading a thin coating of fruit glaze or thinned fruit preserves to seal the cake, for example): sadly, the cake is too good to let it sit around long enough.

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know thyself

Mind Media Brain Persuasion Test:

Your Brain Usage Profile
Auditory : 62%
Visual : 37%
Left : 47%
Right : 52%

I suppose it should say something about low mileage . . . .

The balance between left and right is interesting. And I don’t know how they differentiate between visual and auditory if it’s solely a visual test (perhaps if your answers make no sense, they assume you’re an auditory person? That would explain the low visual score . . . )

Don Nunn’s breakdown was very different from mine.

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why we fight blog

EmptyBottle.org: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Wonderchicken:

“Punk (with a large P for marketing –ed) got co-opted and marketed and corporatized, and it damn near died, as all Big Ideas do. That’s not to say that small-p punk is not still alive. It is, down in the ditches, where the spirit that drove the rage has morphed and moved on and dropped back under the monkeymass radar. Music and community is being made now that might not fit so easily into the same easy label, but there are folks out there making stuff that builds on and extends the best of the punk alt-rock scene from 20 years ago and more. Some of ’em are more relevant than others, sure, but the passion’s still out there. The anger, the love, the frustration, the woohoo. The party rolls on, even though the faces have changed.”

(Please read the whole thing: it’s worth it. And the Dave Eggers essay he mentions is a must read: I have it as a bookmark and dearly wish I had come to the realizations he describes much earlier. )

The whole ethic of DIY is compelling stuff, even 25 years after the Sex Pistols and Ramones mooned the industry. The punks were building on an ethos of free expression without commercial considerations.

Weblogging is coming up on 10 years, and you need even less talent and equipment than a punk band did. Enabling people to become producers as well as consumers is a radical idea today, though it had been SOP since time immemorial a couple of centuries back.

So, yes, it’s a party, it’s an art exhibition, it’s a jungle telegraph, it’s whatever the person pressing the Post button wants it to be. You write for yourself and if people read it, comment on it, link with a trackback, that’s gravy. I had never given much thought to subscribers, as opposed to individual pages being read, til this past week. Forty-some people: I couldn’t name 40 friends, and to be realistic, I would have to attribute those 40 as friends of the writing they find here. But it’s gratifying, nonetheless. I have never written as much or as well in old school paper journals. And that’s been worth it. Thanks for reading.

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the bad guys don’t need any help

Wendy’s Blog: Legal Tags: Inexplicable airport “security”:

“But if the foot-tester device is accurate (and it’ll cause more frustration than help if it’s not), then it serves as an oracle, letting good guys and bad guys alike determine whether they’re likely to be picked up. I stepped on and off several times without being questioned. A would-be shoe bomber could probably use a more sinister variation: If the machine beeps, walk away; try again later with cooler shoes; repeat until the machine stays silent. The tester makes it easier for bad guys to see the detection devices’ limit and tailor their implements of destruction just below that cutoff.”

Could we make it any easier to calibrate a payload?

I first heard about Wendy Seltzer from one of the Learned Professors I worked with last year. She runs the Chilling Effects website, a must read for anyone interested in how the law can be used to bully or intimidate — and what your rights are.

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U.S. arms hunter says no Iraq WMD

The following are excerpts of excerpts of . . . .

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The following are excerpts of a telephone interview conducted with David Kay, after he stepped down as the chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq:
Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage:
[ . . . ]
“Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?

A: “That is correct.”

Q. Is that from the interviews and documentation?

A. “Well the interviews, the documentation, and the physical evidence of looking at, as hard as it was because they were dealing with looted sites, but you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program.”

Q: Do you think they destroyed it?

A: “No, I don’t think they existed.”

So much for clear and present danger . . . .

Seen on Crooked Timber.

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