I've put out a new version of the Printing HOWTO; it is of course at www.linuxprinting.org. Nascent sections on network printer administration and gui printing tools are included. I also finally fiddled my DocBook tools into doing vector pictures properly, so I added a simple illustration to the "How it works" section; they say pictures are worth a thousand words...

I finally got my free Palm V from work. Since I've already got one, I gave it to my wife as an upgrade. This was all well and good until it stubbornly refused to accept her old DatebookDB and ToDoDB databases. After a while of poking, I got pissed and wrote code to dump them into an ascii format and back again (four lines of code, thanks to Palm::Datebook and friends from coldsync). Turns out her old IIIxe had constructed a bewildering assortment of bogus appointments and todo items that had to be hand-fixed. I can't imagine how on earth a Windows/Palm Desktop user would ever have dealt with this. When you break with Unix tradition, you pay the price. Seemingly every time.

Things are really hopping on the cups-devel list; Till of Mandrake is planning to assemble the world's most wonderful printing system atop CUPS, KUPS, Ghostscript, Foomatic, and other projects. He's hobbled by not building atop Debian, of course, but the results should be nice just the same.

Robert's tidying up stp/gimp-print for a new release; besides his traditionally great Epson support, he's got his excellent dithering code running for Canons and HPs, all within Ghostscript now. This should shortly make most other canon and hp inkjet drivers obsolete...