Well, we're in for a busy phase in the printing world again. HP hired Bruce Perens, and those members of the Slashdot crowd that can spell took the opportunity to point out that HP is mostly uncooperative and has poorly supported printers. Hopefully Bruce can change that. As is, they're actually up front about it on their website, which si more than can be said for the inconsistent stories you get from the human support.

Meanwhile, I've made a dozen or so touch-ups to the website, most notably version branching support, and revamped the downloadable foomatic kit to be useful. Now you can install a local copy of the whole printer/driver metadata library, and run backends and tools against that data. This made it easy to add in support for LPRng/magicfilter; hopefully soon this will be debugged.

I also thought up a simple scheme for mapping the database to and from ascii files; this might help various driver developers and foomatic maintainers do things easier.

Meanwhile Raph's put out gs 6.5. Good deal!

Personal

Last weekend, Kelley and I went out and, against my better judgement, bought a DVD player. Gads! All the poor press the RIAA gets is deserved; I've never seen such a klunky bunch of junk wrapped around such a straightforward thing as mpeg-2 video files. Between macrovision and whatever scripty thing they've got turning off features when you stick in disks, it's just ridiculous. If it weren't for NetFlix I'd probably march the thing back to the store...