Printing, IPP, OS X & Defeat


Sometimes you just have to know when to give up. I've been trying to figure out how to get my wife's Linux box to print on the printer I've hooked up to my OS X box. I configured the printer. I set up printer sharing. I connected to the CUPS server locally without problem. Then I tried to connect remotely. No luck. I edited /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to add the IP address of the linux box. No luck. At some point you just have to know when to give up. I give up. If there is a way to get printer sharing over IPP working with an OS X box as server and a Linux box as client I can't figure it out.

Mac and Me

In a classic example of 'too stupid for my own good' I tried something very dangerous during my upgrade to Mandrake 10, the Linux distribution I run, and managed to fry my partition table. Even though the damage was my fault I was sick of driving a car with no seatbelt. I had enough of figuring out how to run Java, or print pictures or deal with install quirks or never figuring out how to get flash running or living in fear of installing non-RPM software lest it toast my system. I really just had enough. So I decided to buy a Macintosh G5.

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WebDAV, DASL, XQUERY and XPATH 2.0

The Web's slow but inexorable movement from a read only to a collaborative environment is increasing WebDAV's success. But WebDAV still has a serious functional outage – search. The DASL community has been keeping hope alive by continuing to work on a search grammar for WebDAV. But much as WebDAV adopted XML both to solve real problems and to ride on the coat tails of XML's success, so DASL could solve a number of serious technical issues and increase its own visibility and leverage the excitement and investment in the XPATH/XQUERY community if it adopted a profile of XPATH 2.0 as its basic search grammar. In the article below I discuss some of the details of how DASL could use XPATH.
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Why LinkedIn is a better fit for me than Orkut

This article compares LinkedIn and Orkut. These are websites that allow you to enter in people you know and then those people can enter in people they know which then lets you perform searches over your entire social 'network'. Orkut focuses primarily on personal relationships while LinkedIn focuses on business relationship. I prefer LinkedIn because it provides tools and features that are extremely useful to me both in hiring people and in putting myself in a better position to be hired if I should need a new job.
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Orkut

Support VerifiedVoting.Org

Electronic voting has been promised as the solution to the 'hanging chad' problems seen in the last presidential election. Of course, anyone who reads Greg Palast's work knows that 'hanging chad' was irrelevant but it made for good head lines. A much more serious threat to the integrity of our voting system are new electronic voting systems that do not include a paper trail. These systems, known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), take one's vote, usually through a touch screen and then record the result in their memory. If that memory or the software that processes it is tampered with or if the software has a bug, there is almost no way to detect it.
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My Experiences Installing Mandrake 9.2

It took one day and a few hassles but upgrading from Mandrake 9.1 to Mandrake 9.2 was worth all the effort. Better yet, the amount of effort required was much less then with either Windows (3.1, 95, 98, 2000) or other versions of Linux I have installed. Not only was I able to get access to the latest versions of Open Office, Mozilla & GnuCash but the new Mandrake 9.2 fonts are just outstanding. The increased clarity makes reading the screen pleasurable and by letting me keep my windows smaller it gives me extra screen real estate. It's like getting a new monitor.

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The Book I Want To Read on Web Services

I just finished reviewing a chapter in an upcoming computer science textbook on Web Services. The authors made a heroic effort to give the reader a solid grounding in Web Services including HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, WS-TX, WS-CO, UDDI, etc. all in 60 or so pages. In terms of information density, the result was the book equivalent of depleted uranium. To make matters worse many of the specifications they were describing had already changed since the time they wrote the chapter and will surely change even more before they publish. Which got me to thinking about the book I would want to read about Web Services Protocols.
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