Handsome Blogsome

I reworked the main site of this domain, which serves as a memo board for my family members. Previously, the site was generated on a local copy of Postnuke, from which I generated static html pages. There was a time in the past that I enjoyed created websites from bare HTML, but that time is long ago. It revived shortly when I discovered the joy of CSS, but I still hate digging into HTML and Javascript code, and besides, getting IE to render code 'correctly' is such a drag anyway.

Unfortunately, I cleaned up my old computer a bit too thoroughly, when I removed the Postnuke database. So I tried to set up a recent Postnuke version on my new PC, but apparently Postnuke doesn't play well in a modern LAMP enviroment (Apache2, PHP5, ...). Postnuke seems a dead rotten corpse too, if you're searching for some decent themes, so I knew I had to abandon this crapware. I tried Blosxom, but that hasn't decent theming support, and I still didn't want to create a new theme myself, as it meant diving into HTML again.

So I decided to give up serving webpages myself, and to create a weblog on a blog provider. Skynetblogs seems to be sunken in a pool of advertisements, so I created the whole bunch on Blogsome, which uses Wordpress to serve content. Looks good, albeit a bit slow. I had to debug the 'Happy Birthday' calculator, as it seemed that it was ridden with Y2K bugs in Internet Explorer. (or IE would be stricter in processing Javascript code, which wouldn't surprise me).

Movie quotes

Mr. Brown : I'm talking morning, noon, and night. Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.
Mr. Blue: How many dicks is that?
Mr. White : A lot.

This gem, along others, can be found on the movie quotes database.

Machiavelli

At Christmas' Eve, my sister had an interesting game with her : Machiavelli. It's a card game a bit like a crossing between The Colonists of Catan and Magic, The Gathering. The goal of the game is to build the largest city. In game terms, this translates to playing 8 district cards. Every cycle, a player selects one character from the 8 character cards, every one with it's own abilities.

The replay value seems tremendous, and the game has different add-on packs, each introducing new characters, new buildings, and hours of fun.

The printer curse

I don't know what I have with printers, or better : what printers have against me. All the deskjet printers I had, never kept up longer than two years. So the last printer I got, was a second-hand HP laser printer, which would last longer, I hoped than its predecessors. Vain hope, it seemed : after two years, this one also died.
So now I decided to buy a new laser printer, a Samsung ML-1610. I wonder how long I will be able to use this baby...

Installing a printer under Linux has become a breeze - relatively spoken - with CUPS : the printer wasn't available in the default CUPS list, but a search on linuxprinting.org revealed a ML-1710 driver, which I copied to /usr/share/cups/model/. Works great.

JanC Wed, 12/28/2005 - 00:03

I bought the same printer recently, and the driver CD-ROM that comes with it includes linux (CUPS) drivers. AFAIK the "GDI" driver for CUPS, like you used, works fine with almost any Samsung LED printer.

BTW: I bought a laser printer for the first time because my previous experiences with inkjet printers were not exactly good (i.e. output quality degrading severely after about 1 year).

kristof Wed, 12/28/2005 - 20:01

In reply to by JanC

Well, the laser printer came with a CDROM with even a Linux installer (!), but that seemed to be a dynamically linked glibc2.1 binary with drivers for (don't panic) Caldera 3, Redhat 6 and some SuSE version. But these refused to start from CDROM, and when I copied the directory to /tmp, and ran it from there, the binary segfaulted...