leerssen.com

Polymorphism

scott — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:13:21 +0000

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.

Bah, XP won’t talk to my Mac

scott — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:32:37 +0000

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!

Fun with CUPS

scott — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:20:22 +0000

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

Thanksgiving at the Leerssens

scott — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 20:22:19 +0000

Grandpa and Grandma Leerssen arrirved with sister Andrea and her husband Eric for our Thanksgiving feast this year. We all had a great visit. Andrea and Eric were our first guests to use our brand new bathroom downstairs. Check out all the fun in the gallery

OpenBiblio

scott — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:39:59 +0000

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).

Welcome Hannah!

scott — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:22:35 +0000

On Saturday, March 11 at 1:11 pm, we welcomed Hannah Rowan Leerssen into the world. Hannah was 8lb 3 oz and 20.5 inches at birth. Be sure to check out the Gallery for pictures of her first days.

So long Cotton Kitty

scott — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:51:44 +0000

On Tuesday of this week, we said good-bye to my furry little friend of 17 years. Cotton was an old kitty, slowly declining due to chronic kidney disease. She will be missed.