Older blog entries for gtaylor (starting at number 27)

I've been playing with KDE 2 a bit, and it's pretty slick. Konqueror is actually quite nice, although there's some quirk in the way it interacts with two site I frequently use: my own, and Advogato. Doh!

Things are getting underway at work; I'm examining the choices for our embedded OS. Everyone sort of wants to use Linux, but we have to check that there isn't something out there which is overall better, somehow, for our purposes.

LinuxPrinting.org

I gave my Linux presentation at the Multifunction Peripheral/Integrated Office conference in Boston earlier this week. My session was moderately well attended; about 20-30 vendor types came. In the conference as a whole, the suit concentration was nearly 50%, so I guess they were mostly engineering managers and project lead types. Anyway, the audience was remarkably unresponsive, although some questions did pop up at the end. The questions mainly centered around technical capabilities; ie "is there this", where "this" was EPP support, some network protocol-du-jour, or what have you. Later in the hall, though, various people discussed with me the sort of documentation they would need to provide for good free software support; that was a good sign. And I chatted a bit with various engineering directors and the like from Ricoh, Okidata, etc. The one guy I really wanted to chat with was the VP of PandI from HP; alas he only stopped in to give his keynote, and vanished afterwards. Oh, well.

More interesting, perhaps, were the keynotes. The upshot of them is that none of these printer vendors quite knows what the next big printing thing will be. They're all excited about color fax, and they've got some vague notion that they ought to attach themselves to the Internet growth trend in some way, but they're feeling about as doomed as the network operators; everyone sells eggs, and eggs will soon be basically free. It's clear that they can't be like Cisco even if the current ink pricing were sustainable.

rlk proudly announced gimp-print 4.0; this is really good news all around. Now hopefully some distributions will get their act together and ship inkjet drivers that don't suck.

Oidata sent me an OkiPage 8z to play with. They'd helped Marcin Dalecki fix up the oki4linux driver package for this host-based laser back in August. So I went out to find this new driver version, and discovered that it isn't on the net. I'm not sure what good it did for them to arrange for a new free driver when they're only going to sit on it for two months. In any case, I got the Okidata guy to mail me a copy, and put it up on my own website where people will be able to find it properly. The printer itself works OK, but the driver goes on about how dangerous it is to run as a filter, so it doesn't fit in well with normal Unix printing styles like LPD. Hmm.

Richard Wisenoecker has begun porting his Lexmark Z52 driver into gimp-print; he's the first substantive response to my developer invitation. This is good; clearly version 4.1 will have at least some Lexmark support.

I composed and sent off a press release to LWN about the forums on my site. Really the goal is to get some generic publicity; people are still asking the same old questions like "does this printer work with Linux?", whereas I should have eliminated that as a question by now.

A nontrivial share of traffic to linuxprinting.org is still pointing at the old picante.com location. I redirect it all seamlessly, but this involves lots of people trekking through my house for no good reason. I can't figure out a good way of "forcing" all the old links out there to get updated without inconveniencing the actual users of those links in some way. For the moment, I'm sending emails by hand to dozens of webmasters, but this is only partly effective.

So I've done a week here at the new job. We've got 10 people sharing a modem, which made my Debian install take forever, but all else being equal, things are looking good here.

There's a disturbing Windows-ness to the place; people don't want to think about it, so they default to pushing two buttons on a Windows 2000 box and moving on to more important things like what we're going to build and such. I've got to arrange for veto power over the IT guy when we hire one. Never solve by elbow grease what you can solve with politics...

LinuxPrinting.org

Some fellow posted an open letter to raph containing the same "don't require GNOME for Ghostscript" thought the rest of us all got over weeks ago. My take: the Ghostscript X11 driver sucks. Raph's libart has the code needed to fix it; end of story. The equivalent code in KDE is part of the Qt library, which would be even less politically feasible to link in, and which is or will soon be not as good as libart and the other GNOME canvas things. Politics aside, Ghostscript will continue to run fine sans GNOME and KDE forever. All this agitation is wasted.

Also on LinuxToday was a sort of HP sux/OfficeJet's don't work rant. Many OfficeJets do work, although truth be told I would be uncomfortable saying "HP doesn't suck". My Multifunction Peripheral Association convention presentation on Linux and multifunctions is next Tuesday in Boston; comments are welcome. A suitable free software developer would also be welcome as a partner-in-evangelism.

No sooner do I post than someone publishes a book. O'Reilly has put out Network Printing. I read the sample LPRng chapter, and examined the toc/index. The LPRng chapter is short but a useful beginning, although any serious use will involve reading the extensive and excellent LPRng documentation to fill in the missing pieces. The book as a whole is broad, rather than deep, and appears to be a good fit for people in heterogeneous environments. It does not, however, appear to be broad enough to fit free Unix housen well; CUPS, PDQ, PPR, magicfilter, libppd, yast, printtool, or GNOME and KDE tools are not mentioned at all. My database does show in the index as the "PHT Support Database", which is good, although I have no idea what they said about it.

The leaves are all changing, but I'm unable to take the pictures I promised folks because I can't find my camera. Doh!

LinuxPrinting.org

I've installed the colocated server and migrated all the data. Now it's just a question of waiting for the DNS change to complete, and getting people to correct all references to www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/ in the world so that everyone won't still go through my house...

Alter.net in Chelmsford appears to suck horribly; the new location has been unreachable for nearly two hours this weekend because the Alter.net 'customer' router my ISP is on is fscked. Hmm.

I set up a forum/group/list thing for discussion of foomatic and the LinuxPrinting.org data. Hopefully over the next few weeks enough interested people will participate that my impending state of employment won't matter.

David Paschal pointed out some hpoj project URLs that I'd missed; while I was at it I reexamined that project's success list and found that a good number of HP multifunction devices do now work. This has an obvious impact on my MFP Association presentation, although since the bulk of my presentation deals with how to work with us free software types, the impact is less than I'd originally thought. I went through my database and updated all the OfficeJets.

My wife is sick again; evidently from the cold snap we're having. We just saw my father-in-law off; he was visiting from Rome, where he now works.

I finally got the tape drive from VA Linux all plugged in and running; tomorrow I'll establish a sensible backup regimen and that will be that. Thanks, VA! Now if only they would send my the check they owe me...

LinuxPrinting.org

So I've decided to move the site out of my house and off my cable modem. To that end, I've found an inexpensive colocation place halfway between home and office, and ordered a 1U rackmount box. I was unable to find one with Debian preinstalled, so I'll have to wipe it when it comes and do an fresh install to get rid of Red Hat. Hmm. We've made progress, and yet the end result is the same...

I've run my LinuxPrinting.org-branded certification idea past two printer vendors now, and gotten about 0.75 interested vendors between them. This number is non-zero, but it'll be tricky to work it up into an operable program by the end of the week (!) as was my original goal. The program, in a nutshell, was to certify printers as supported by free software through straightforward experimentation and in accordance with the "perfection" criteria already in force in my compatibility listings. The output for vendors would be a logo to stamp on the box, a whitepaper detailing software and configuration methods for the printer, and some sort of highlighting on the website. The intent is for this process to be lightweight enough to offer quick turnaround, and for it to bring in enough money and printers to pay for itself and fund free software developers.

Among the things mentioned by one vendor was the fact that all the big-name Linux distributions are now happy to include proprietary driver software (this vendor has specifically asked each distributor multiple times, and while last year it wasn't so, this year it is). Printer vendors may therefore view traditional Windows-grade driver support as sufficient, since that will ship with the Red Hats of the world.

I find this situation most unsatisfying.

I added a flock of discussion web and nntp forums to the website. Initially I added one per printer, plus one per vendor, and a few others, but that made for over 1000 groups, which was silly. So I toned it down to linuxprinting.general plus one general group per printer manufacturer. There's even an actual thread underway in the Epson one.

Now I need to get mailing lists working, and connect them to the news server. I'm thinking mailman, although it has a lot of baggage I don't need, and only minimal scriptability. Really just a bounce processor would be quite enough.

Michael suggests a LaTeX style repository like themes.org. I agree, although that repository already exists in CTAN. What's needed is more people who prefer LaTeX for certain tasks (I know I do) and grok TeX (I don't) enough to write useful styles compatible with the standard ones.

I see rlk has joined us. Hi Robert!

As of Friday, I will no longer be a 3Com employee. Apparently I'm leaving at about the same time as Eric, so news of my departure has been eclipsed in the media. ;)

I spent a little time identifying suitable mid-range lasers for the suggested printers page and, while I was at it, added a price display thing so people can know what the things cost.

With the possible exception of amazon, affiliate marketing programs suck horribly - not in conceptually, but rather from an implementation standpoint. They're constructed in such a way as to make it impossible to programatically compute a URL from a vendor's website (from a part number or whatever); instead you have to use a mind-bogglingly crappy search engine by hand. It's like they want anyone who might actually be in a position to sensible recommend products to run screaming. I'm thinking that this experiment may be futile. Pity.

There certainly seem to be a lot of brusque responses to Raph's letter on LinuxToday; mostly centered around a mention of using a library from Gnome to spruce up the X11 driver. This seems odd to me; I had rather thought that the lack of forward progress on properly free licensing was far more contoversial. And controversy or no, Raph represents new blood of exactly the sort necessary to have Ghostscript survive in the future. Cursing him and his children and his children's children for mentioning Gnome hardly seems useful.

It looks like Foomatic suffers from the usual Ghostscript buglet; the interpreter's stdout goes to the Unix process's stdout, which is inconvenient if you're trying to pipe. Doh! In the good news department, Foomatic was implicitly mentioned in a review of Mandrake 7.2b; the review spoke of his Canon inkjet just up and working automagically. Good.

There's now a section on Slackware in the Printing HOWTO. It's a bit spartan; someone who actually uses it should read and contribute some more details.

I formalized the job hunt on my website just in time to receive a fairly interesting offer from a neat startup I've been talking to. Doh! I'd still rather go to an open source related job, rather than one which will merely use free software to build things with or from, but really this offer is from an exceptionally well-pedigreed company, and it is an interesting project and good people, so I just can't refuse. We'll see how it turns out.

Speaking of turning, I'd typed the wrong class of SKUs into my database, so the experimental project in making my website pay for itself ran aground. I've corrected this and we'll start a new trial period. (ObPlug: if anyone wants to buy a printer, buy one of my suggested printers).

Yesterday I had a moderately interesting idea for the implementation of a distributed search system. The original intent was to replace dejanews, which has dropped the proverbial ball as de facto keeper of the world's archives, but as it turns out my envisioned implementation has wider applicability than that: in fact it could help correct the "silo" characteristic of web discussion forums and the non-spiderable character of many database-driven websites. So forget the homemade Tivo; I've reserved a week between jobs to implement a proof of concept of this search system.

I created a suggested printers page on LinuxPrinting.org. It's gotten about 400 visitors in two days; obviously this was way overdue. Thanks go to Robert for helping identify the best inkjets in the low and mid range categories.

Lpdomatic should now handle ASCII jobs as well as Postscript, barring any embarassing silly bugs.

Cupsomatic should now handle options in all the usual CUPS and PPD ways, be they defaults in the PPD file, embedded in the job, or specified as CUPS job attributes. Various other minor bugixes happened as well.

I really must find a free software job. Many seemingly good nonfree prospects keep saying things like "we mostly use Word" and "we do Windows work, but are branching out into Linux". Urgh.

How to build a tivo

I've thought through how to construct a device with tivo-like functionality in my house, all for only four times what a tivo costs, albeit with better functionality, flexibility, and freedom. The end goal is a TV in the bedroom operated in normal remote-control style, that can watch live TV or anything from an assortment of automagically prerecorded stuff. There should be no computers etc in the bedroom; they're all in the basement or machine room, accesed via Ethernet or serial.

The key is that the second such TV I add to the system must then operate jointly with the first, so that it's one recording backend with two TVs seamlessly sharing data. The real fun comes in distributing backends across the net so that my freinds and family can share shows. But I digress...

The parts: a DC10-style MJPEG video card ($150?), a 30+ gig disk ($200?), my ratty old cyrix-based computer, a video overlay box ($100, run via rs232; it gives you esentially a 20x10ish text screen overlaid on the video, for control display), an Irman consumer IR input dongle ($30), an analagous consumer IR output dongle ($100! anyone got a cheaper source?), my existing cable box, my VCR (to demodulate the cable box's channel 3), and an RF modulator ($50-150).

The plan: cable-to-cablebox-to-VCR-to-DC10. Then DC10-to-overlay-to-RFmod-to-housecable. The computer itself is essentially headless. Control of all TV watching happens via IR input over cat5 to the computer in the basement; a w3m or similar web browserish interface displays on the overlay terminal to select the recorded show or live pass-through channel to watch, and whatever it is gets sent on channel 3 to that TV. The computer selects shows to record based on TV guide info parsed from yahoo, and records them by setting the channel on the cable box via IR out and writing mjpeg to disk.

It has the disadvantage of constructing mjpeg files, which aren't nearly as well-compressed as modern mpeg; my understanding is that mjpegs are essentially jpeg-encoded frames in sequence. Without the deltas, the compression is not ideal, although the hardware is much easier to build. This all stems from the DC10 card; I wasn't able to find a full-hardware mpeg implementation with linux drivers. If one exists, do tell...

Audio is also a bit uncertain. Apparently one often does the audio separately with a sound card and software encoding. I don't see how sync gets maintained, so a video editing-style card with integrated audio support would be the best deal.

I reimplemented my gimp-print-to-foomatic data importer, so it now runs in sensible time and produces properly correct results. If Robert ever stops changing the arguments around this'll eliminate all manual work for me.

I fixed the pdq part of Foomatic to handle ascii print jobs; similar changes in lpdomatic are overdue, although first I ought to make it work under SuSE's LPD.

Speaking of sensible time, I'm going to have to do timestamps and a cache thing; the foomatic getdat call now takes ages to compute. Since this is hit with every driver page just to get the documentation, not to mention daily as part of the cron builds, something really needs to be done. Perhaps someone should just send me a bigger computer...

There's something funky with my yahoo tv parser; every third invokation it fails. Hmm...

It took me 30 minutes to get sound working again on Kelley's machine after a kernel-package upgrade, what with all the compiling and all. I don't understand why they don't throw out the old oss drivers and just put the alsa stuff into the mainstream kernel. The oss ones appear to be a rather small subset of alsa functionality...

Sometime in the past week, Yahoo changed their tv guide web page format, so the tv guide in my palm has been broken ever since. Today I finally got around to fixing up my tv guide building script. Someday I ought to make it less horribly embarassing and distribute it for use with hacked Tivos or something.

This was a nice little diversion. I'm getting a bit burnt out, since I keep staying up until 4. Serves me right.

Chema sent me a note; apparently the gnome-print-admin project is doing the same sort of thing as Foomatic. I have yet to look at their system, but I'm sure it will contain some interesting ideas. Hopefully it will be straightforward to write an exporter to convert my database's printer/driver data structure into their schema; it ought to be, since we seem to have the same goal and same basic ideas. The biggest thing I might expect to find there that I don't handle in Foomatic would be sensible font or color support, plus of course a pretty installer. If anyone is interested in wetting their feet in Perl XML space, writing the Foomatic-to-gnome-print-admin data conversion code would be a nice little well-defined project.