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Polymorphism

In my field of computer science, we use the term polymorphism to describe an attribute of object oriented design. One of my coworkers gave me today what is probably the funniest description I have ever heard: “If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, and all you care about is quacking and walking, then it’s a duck.” Yup, that’s polymorphism in its simplest form.

Add comment September 3rd, 2008

Bah, XP won’t talk to my Mac

After my upgrade from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger), I lost my ability to print to my Windows XP shared HP 2410xi. One problem was that the old gimp-print 4.x series printer drivers appeared to be missing an application or shared library; when I attempted to print, I’d get an error telling me that there was some problem starting ‘rastertoprinter’ with error 2 (ENOENT to us UNIX folk). I found gimp-print had updated to a new version (as well as new name, gutenprint), so I updated, and that got rid of the ‘rastertoprinter’ problem, but now I had a new one. It seems that my XP box no longer accepted the login from my Mac to talk to the printer. I tried a number of things including:

• reset my printer configuration (which blows away ALL your printer set up, by the way… be sure you want to do this).
• removed all my smb keys from the Key Chain Manager
• re-added the printer, including finding it in the Print Browser -> More Printers ->Windows Printing, selected Network Neighborhood, then browsed through the default XP workgroup of Mshome, my computer and finally found my printer, just as I’d suspect. I selected it, and appropriate gutenprint driver, and saved.
• rinse, repeat.

After about two hours of smb nonsense, I discovered from another post here that Windows XP actually has an LPD service that isn’t enabled by default. I enabled that, changed my printer to an IP Printer, and wheee… I can print again!

1 comment March 8th, 2007

Fun with CUPS

I recently discovered that you can access much more of your printer functionality of the CUPS drivers via its web interface. Point your browser to 127.0.0.1:631, and a whole new world of printer magic will unfold in your browser. In my case, I was able to set up duplex printing to my HP 2410xi.

Specifics: OS X (Tiger), gutenprint 5.0.0

Add comment March 8th, 2007

OpenBiblio

While looking for free, internet based library software, I came across OpenBiblio. It’s a PHP application that drops nicely into an Apache server on Fedora Core. I also found a nice lookup engine which searches the Library of Congress by ISBN and creates a new catalog entry based on what it finds. The lookup is not exatly plug-and-play. It requires YAZ (includng libyaz and libyaz-devel) and it also requires yaz-php, which is available via PEAR (e.g. pear install yaz).

Add comment March 27th, 2006