1 Oct 2000 gtaylor   » (Master)

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.

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