Tag Archives: Technical Notes

Whoo hoo! I found a printer driver for the dye sublimation printer! It actually makes the Kodak 8670 PS printer useful under Mac OS X!

And now that I’ve got the keywords in my text for the search engines to find, it’s only fair for me to post a link to the site where you can download the driver. It’s kind of buried in their technical support pages, so some people may find this a useful shortcut.
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There are two words you almost never want to hear from someone who is working on a computer, a car, or a cardiac bypass:

“That’s strange…”
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Some serious geeking-out in this entry. You have been warned.

My folks were in town over the weekend, and my dad brought down his old dual-processor PowerMac 9600 for a bit of troubleshooting. It’s a seven year old computer, and it’s having an interesting assortment of afflictions. The main symptom is a reluctance to start up. When you hit the power key, the front light comes on, the fan starts, and nothing else happens…
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Right now, I’m using four separate Macs…

One of them is rendering a series of Final Cut Pro video filters to color correct and sharpen a heart surgery that was filmed in the 70’s and transferred to VHS tape some time in the 80’s. When it’s done rendering I’m going to put it on a DVD, and in about 20 years or so someone will probably transfer it to optical crystal or whatever they’re using then.

Another Mac is burning a DVD of a different video project. The third is busy compiling Apache 2.0.50, Berkeley DB and Subversion for our web developers. I’m writing this on the fourth while simultaneously using it to monitor the other three.

So, yeah… I haven’t updated for a bit. It’s been busy.

The comment spammers have started hitting my Wife’s blog as well as mine recently… I’ve gotten her set up with MT-Blacklist and such too, which has helped some, but there are still some comments lurking in the background that she’d like to get rid of. Fortunately, there’s a really cool hack over at TheGirlieMatters which describes how to have your Movable Type main menu show more than the five most recent entries.
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Well, I hate to break it to the people out there who use Hotmail as an actual valid e-mail address (yes, both of you!), but the spammers have ruined it for everybody. I let things quiet down here for a couple of days and what happens when I come back? Half a dozen spam comments, all with Hotmail.com e-mail addresses. Nothing for it but to add it to the blacklist filter…

Just a couple tools and links for people who are having problems with creeps in their comments. I got the idea from Wil Wheaton over at wilwheaton.net (yes, that Wil Wheaton). He’s been having some problems with creeps posting crap in his comments… It’s gotten bad enough that he’s offered a $1000 bounty, and I figured I’d share some of the tools I use here.
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Did a bit of site cleanup on the image front, adding a little “Image by Quirk” bug to the upper left corner of a bunch of pictures. I’d considered just adding the logo to images that people had been linking to, but it was easier to just do a batch process to everything. I’ve kept a copy of the files without the modification, just in case it’s too obtrusive. It was starting to bother me to see my stuff on other people’s sites without them crediting me. I don’t mind them using it – that’s why I’ve got the “Creative Commons License” after all – but I would like some credit.

After playing around for most of the last two days, I’ve got a new appreciation for just how horribly broken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is. I’ve been trying to get a page to work the way I expect it to using cascading style sheets, and I’ve got it down to a good, consistent layout. It’s nothing too complex: just a title banner across the top of the page, a block of text beneath that, and a navitaion bar down the right side of the screen.
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Well, after a day’s study of CSS and PHP, I think I’ve come up with some really handy stuff for work. Using CSS for site-wide stylistic changes is pretty cool, but the biggest time saver is the use of the PHP include function for things like menu bars. That means that we only need to code something once and we can use it on dozens of pages… Take a look over at the remake of the ArsMagica Moderna pages for an example.