Mike Pirnat

Once upon a time, I upgraded to Leopard on my Mac Pro, and, though I did not mention it at the time, something in upgrade land totally pissed off my Brother 5070N laser printer.

I’d bought the printer in the first place because it was one of the first to support Bonjour (née Rendezvous, née Zeroconf) networking. With good ol’ Tiger, it Just WorkedTM, and all was milk and honey as far as printing went in my home. But noooo, it didn’t like the hoity-toity, super-duper-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread Leopard attitude, and just spat out endless reams of cryptic stack dumps instead of, say, directions to wherever I was in a hurry to leave for. I poked around a little, checking for new drivers and all that sort of common sense stuff, and found that even Brother’s website claimed that the drivers were bundled with Leopard and that there was nothing for me to download.

I never did get around to figuring out the problem at the time, and being a sleep-deprived and very busy new dad it unfortunately hasn’t been much of a priority. Somehow I’ve learned to live with six months (!!!) of not being able to print a damn thing. And worse, I’ve had to hold off on upgrading my wife’s machine, which has kept her from being able to enjoy the goodness of automated Time Machine backups.

I finally got fed up with it today and decided to finally sort things out once and for all. I even indulged my inner noob and followed Brother’s directions, even though it meant assigning a static IP to my printer and dropping it back from the awesomeness of Bonjour to the semi-awesomeness of old-school IP printing. It turns out that, even though no one says it anywhere, that was the key. So, here’s a bit of advice for future Googlers: the 5070N will not print correctly using Bonjour under 10.5. You want the CUPS driver and the “HP Jetdirect – Socket” protocol. Then poof! It’s all happy again.

Now to go about breaking upgrading Liz’s laptop…

computers, geekery, macintosh

So now that things have calmed down a little bit, I finally had time to install Leopard on the Mac Pro this weekend. I know I’m a bit late to the party, but here are a few quick thoughts so far…

The Good:

• Time Machine — syncs happily to the 500GB internal drive I installed last weekend (amusingly, with the words “honk if you love internal hard drives” printed on the inside of the box). Finally, something is doing at least some level of backup in our house!
• Safari — holy crap, fast fast fast! Feels like driving a zippy little sports car compared to the increasingly SUV-like Firefox (which has similar problems on tight corners).
• Searching for text — I love the visual emphasis on the search hits that “pops” the search result. It’s subtle, but really helps quickly identify where the result is, which is not always easy when looking at a wall of text.
• Searchable Help highlights menu options — freaking brilliant. No more wondering where your favorite menu options got moved to (*cough* Adobe *cough*).
• The Downloads folder. Yes, I already had my own that worked fine, but it’s nice that it’s earned an official special place, and it works well with the new Stacks feature for getting quickly to whatever I’ve just downloaded.
• Hot diggety, Python’s really nice out of the box!
• Quick Look is pretty nice; got a feeling I’ll be using it a lot soon.
• Grammar checker is now just as widely available as the spell-checker. Nice touch.
• Okay, the eye candy factor is nice too. I do like me some shiny things.

The Indifferent:

• The new 3D-ified Dock — not as horrible as all that. I’m slightly amused by how it picks up reflections from the windows above it. I could use nicer “here’s what’s running” indicators, but I’m just not seeing a justification for all the controversy.
• The new menu bar — square corners and semi-transparent… It’ll take a little getting used to, but it’s not going to upset me.
• Stacks — I kind of like these, but I’m not 100% in love with them yet.
• The new folder icons. Not doing it for me.
• I wonder how long I’ll want to live in the “deep space” look.

The Really Annoying:

• I have to upgrade Photoshop and friends. Granted, I was still running Photoshop 7, so I’m a bit behind the times on that, but it still sucks that what was working like a champ for me under Tiger completely craps out in Leopard. Boo, hiss.
• XJournal, my LiveJournal client of choice on the Mac, crashes upon log-in to LJ. No Leopard-friendly upgrade is available yet. Again, boo, hiss.
• Startup disk? What startup disk? Immediately after my first boot into Leopard, there was a software update that wanted to be dealt with promptly. So I took care of that, rebooted, and was greeted with the blinking file folder of doom, signifying that no startup disk could be found. Not the most rewarding experience after all of the anticipation and the lengthy upgrade.

And now back to actually doing stuff with the computer instead of poking it to see what it does…

apple, computers, geekery, macintosh

Dang, it’s suddenly turning out to be a great week! In brief:

• After a couple miserable days of near-100-degree temperatures, the weather has cooled off and is now downright awesome.
• Got my monitor back from Apple (no thanks to DHL, who apparently don’t even believe in leaving slips at the door when they ignore the “no one will be home between X and Y, please deliver when it will actually make sense to do so” instructions). It’s all fixed and happy, and now the cats have a new box to play with. It really is amazing how much better the ACD is than the old 19″ monitor I’d been using in its stead…
• I totally aced the infant CPR course we did last night. Plus, since everyone else was either too timid or too cool to do the “say stuff out loud along with the script” part of the training, my long-dormant inner theater geek had an excellent opportunity to ham it up loudly, to the amusement of all. Thought for today: “The scene is safe!“
• This is the week that I finally have cleared enough off of my plate at work to dig into fixing the crapton of problems on our new site that are Safari-specific. It was an uphill battle for a few days, but this afternoon I finally had the “eureka!” moment of complete enlightenment and discovered the one bug in the JavaScript framework we’re using that seems to be the lynchpin holding everything up. With what’s literally a one-line change, close to twenty really horribly broken things on our site suddenly and miraculously work. Huzzah! I’ll probably have something more on this once I get the legal OK from work to the disclose details of that portion of my brain…
• We had a major project launch and data conversion that started last night at midnight… and for the first time in forever, I didn’t have to do anything to support it. No being online from home, no camping out in the office, no having to monkey with it in the morning, nothing. After seven years of driving in at two or three in the morning, I can’t describe how great that feels to just not have to worry about it.
• Liz kicked ass on her most recent papers! You go, girl!
• The window’s open, the sunset was lovely, the breeze is delightful, good music on the ol’ MP3 player, and a cold beer. Ahhh, bliss.

I’m not entirely sure whether recent events are karma’s equivalent of the cash-back bonus, or if I’ve just taken out a karma-equity loan that’ll eventually catch up to me, but for now I’m just going to enjoy feeling happy.

apple, computers, life, liz, macintosh, weather, work

This Little Piggy
Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

After a long day of fighting with Safari issues and worrying about shipping my monitor off for repair, I was rewarded with a lovely dinner with my wife, a surprise early result from the frame shop, a little bit of work in the baby room (hung pictures, hooked up the old iMac), and then… photo opportunities!

First, Valentine got a turn in the baby chair, which she has so far been uninterested in. But after a brief but non-violent dispute, she reneged and Julia tucked in to play and relax.

I think I’m starting to get the hang of my new 50mm prime lens, though I think it might be just about time for a flash to try to balance out the harsh light of the CFLs that we’ve been switching to. This is also probably just about the point where Liz will begin to regret encouraging me to get a hobby.

cats, computers, photos

Naturally, right at the height of the iPhone hooplah, the USB ports on the back of my 23″ Apple Cinema Display would decide to die a sad and lonely death.

I woke up this morning to find that neither my keyboard nor mouse (the USB devices attached to the back of the ACD) would wake Serenity from its slumber. I gently caressed the power button on the front to trigger it to wake, and found that mouse and keyboard had left the building; it was totally unresponsive. I tried both ports on the back of the ACD and had the same result. So, like a good little geek trained in the scientific method, I started isolating variables, testing each of the USB ports on the Mac Pro itself (all good), testing other USB gizmos in the display (no joy), testing the display against each USB port on the Mac Pro (also no joy), testing a different keyboard and mouse against the display (nothing) and each of the ports on the box itself (all fine), and finally testing the display plugged into an entirely different Mac (still no luck).

My super-awesome wife has volunteered to call Apple tomorrow since I missed the cut-off time for the Apple Care hotline. I strongly suspect that Saturday or Sunday will involve another trip out to the Genius Bar, which I’m sure will be a delightful place to visit among the throngs of prospective iPhone buyers… Snarf. Hopefully they can just swap it out with a new display since it’s still under warranty (just barely six months old!); I’d really hate to be without a display for days or weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that there is great wisdom in never throwing out extra cables. (Hooray for USB extenders!)

apple, computers, macintosh

Three cheers for my amazing wife, who this morning kicked my ass, made me go work out, and called Apple while I was taking out my frustration on the elliptical machine. She is a saint for putting up with me when I’m being a whiny little bitch (fairly infrequent these days, but still happens now and then).

After going through all of the standard stuff with Liz (to no avail), Apple scheduled an appointment for us, so this afternoon gets a surprise road trip with the MacPro. Let’s just hope my precious doesn’t have to be at the shop for too long… Either way, my computer-related plans for the weekend are pretty much shot.

computers, liz, macintosh

This evening, my MacPro decided that “restart” was an important and necessary part of “wake from sleep.” It starts to wake normally, but hiccups and suddenly it’s booting again. I’ve done just about everything I can do to it over the past three hours, including a complete restore from the install media, and it still persists in its little delusion. I may try shifting it to another circuit or swap in different UPSes or surge protectors or something (maybe my UPS got pissed and can’t cope with the power dip needed to wake the machine?).

It’s safe to say that I am not very happy about this turn of events.

computers, geekery, macintosh

So I discovered the other day that my new Mac came bundled with Plasq’s nifty Comic Life, a program that lets you easily drop your photos and other images into comic book layouts, add effects and word balloons, and generally cause you to lose track of time.

I started putting together a simple page last night to see what it could do, and show Liz how cool it was, and it kind of got out of hand after that–becoming a three-page mini story of going to our friends’ wedding in October:

It has a few little quirks that annoy (trying to get the right thing selected can be tricky once it’s been dropped into place, and the fancy lettering really doesn’t like to export to PDF without a fight), but it’s probably one of the most fun and imaginative apps I’ve played with in a long, long time.

comic-books, computers, friends, geekery, macintosh, photos, san-francisco, weddings

Bleah. Totally run down. Stressed out, burned out, and all-around fried. But still clinging desperately to life in the hopes that it might all settle down at some point. (It has to settle down, right?)

Thanks to a bumper crop of ragweed, I have spent the last two weeks wanting to claw my eyes out. Puffy. Sore. Goopy. Crusted over when I wake up. I feel like someone has scraped sandpaper over my corneas. I feel like I haven’t slept since the allergies really kicked in.

Work is a super giant happy fun ball of stress as I attempt to coordinate a lot of last-minute things, deal with incomprehensible bug reports, and generally attempt to save the world. So far… meh… I think the world’s still in trouble. It’s taken me until today to start working on the things I was supposed to be doing on Monday. I guess it would help if I could get more than five minutes of uninterrupted time, but apparently that’s out of the question at this point. *sigh*

I’m way behind on dealing with some vaguely important email for Clepy. I have had a tiff with DirecTV over their habit of failing to send me a bill and then charging me lots of late fees. (Surprisingly, not the first time they’ve done that to me…)

And it doesn’t help that I’ve had things to do every night this week: Clepy (and post-Clepy festivities) on Monday, wine group Tuesday, German class Wednesday, and an appointment tonight. Tomorrow, I expect I’ll probably just stay late at work, except that the parts for the new closet organizer system thing have arrived and I want to get started on that too.

Good lord, it’s Thursday, and I still haven’t picked up the new Star Wars DVD’s, with the Han-shoots-first-thank-you-very-much original cut. For those that know me, that should give you an indication of what a general shitstorm it’s been lately.

On the plus side, I finished The Confusion over Labor Day weekend. On the minus side, I still have about a thousand pages (hardback!) of The System of the World still to go… by which point I suspect that I will need to re-read Cryptonomicon since it has enough bits that tie in with the other books. It’d be easier if my eyes didn’t feel like they were about to explode out of my head (see above).

…And I think I might have finally hit the point where Gentoo in particular, and Linux in general, is dead to me, the way someone who crosses Tony Soprano ends up in the deli slicer, or taken out to the Pine Barrens and disappeared. Midway through my third (fourth?) day of trying to get the emerge -eav world step of the upgrade to gcc-4.1, I am just about at the end of my geek rope. I fell in love with Gentoo because its packaging and update system “just worked”, freeing me up to waste my time configuring and tweaking everything else to be just so. But this update is just insultingly murderous, as all kinds of supposedly stable things just won’t fucking build right–because, y’know, that would be too easy. So, even if I have to turn in my geek badge and live life as a lesser mortal, beholden to the software update whims of Apple, I think that’d be okay with me, because this kind of time-waste is something I simply cannot allow in my life any longer.

Grr. Argh!

books, clepy, computers, geekery, gentoo, health, house, life, linux, naughty-words, rants, work

Now that I’ve gotten caught up on my huge backlog of email, it’s time to close some tabs and share some links, because it’s more fun than doing anything productive. Submitted for your approval:

Chunk Norris Facts will teach you all sorts of interesting things about Chuck Norris; for example, “the chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.” Not to be missed.

Learn all about sushi with the Sushi Eating HOWTO. (Kind of self-explanatory.)

Can’t get enough “Firefly?” I certainly can’t. Check out Escape Key’s “Mal’s Song”, an expanded version of the “Firefly” theme. It’s a bit filkier than my tastes usually run, but I’ve gotten it stuck in my head anyway. Plus, if you didn’t fill your belly with sushi (see above), you probably have room for a tasty Fruity Oaty Bar!

When you’re done watching the Fruity Oaty Bar video (and putting the MP3 on a loop for a few hours; don’t be embarrassed, it’s perfectly normal), some of you might be amused by IBM’s Linux cartoons. While I was entertained, my inner shareholder wonders how much they paid for those.

Transformer di Roboter present “Stranger in Moscow”, a musical gem that uses the Macintosh startup chord as its bassline. No, seriously!

Retrievr lets you search Flickr by sketching. It’s wickedly mind-blowing!

I hooked up my new keyboard (a Christmas present) today to see how effective I’d be at typing without any labels on any of the keys. It turns out, with the exception of well-formed (aka tricky) passwords, I’m quite good with it. I also really like how different regions of the keyboard have different resistance to touch, so your hands get a good feel for what keys are what as they are being struck. The only thing that kind of pisses me off is that the Scroll Lock and Caps Lock lights don’t seem to light at all (the Caps Lock would probably be helpful, don’t you think?), and the Num Lock light seems to be flaking out–typing causes this LED to flash and sometimes go completely dark. I guess I wouldn’t particularly miss these if they went away, but they are kind of annoying and really detract from the overall quality of the keyboard. Alas, I think my search for a new “perfect keyboard” must press any key to continue… (Time to find someone who makes a USB equivalent of the old Apple Saratoga keyboard.)

Finally, Minifesto is a cute tool for making animated icons out of your favorite snippet of text, suitable for generating excellent customized LiveJournal icons.

computers, firefly, food, geekery, humor, links, linux, livejournal, macintosh, music, serenity