Defenestrated

Mac OS X printing problem plea!

This is way off-topic but I've been struggling with it for a while now!  I'd appreciate any help that anyone could offer.

I've set up a Brother MFC-6800 on Windows XP (SP2) so it's shared. My other Windows box prints to it, no problem. My Mac OS X 10.3 boxes are having a weird problem, though. Whenever they print to the printer, only 1/4 or 1/3 of the page is printed. The rest is blank.  I'm using the latest Brother drivers from their site; I've tried installing Gimp-Print but that didn't work.

Can anyone provide some help on this?  It's driving me nuts!

Update: Wouldn't you know it: after days of fiddling with this, I fix it right after I post a question about it!  The fix is to share the Windows printer that uses the native Microsoft drivers.  If you share the printer that uses the Brother driver, it doesn't work.  Bizarre.

The Personal MBA 40

The value of MBA's is highly questionable, in my opinion, but I firmly believe that a lot of benefits can result by investing time in reading good business books. This, combined with the prohibitive cost of most MBAs, was the genesis for The Personal MBA, "an entrepreneurial approach to business education." A key part of this fantastic idea is  The Personal MBA 40 which is a list of superior books about business, as compiled by Josh Kaufman with the help of many contributors. The usual suspects are here -- Peter Drucker, David Allen, etc. -- but one surprise is the absence of Jim Collins' Good To Great. Nonetheless, this is an excellent resource!

LG firmware update, er, update

A while ago I posted about the LG LGDVB418 DVD player that I've become very fond of, but which needed a firmware update from LG to fix an audio/video sync problem. The firmware update did seem to fix much of the problem but I've since noticed that certain DVD's ("Mean Girls" was the last one; it was the wife's choice, not mine...although I did end up watching it and being quite amused!) still exhibit some sync problems. It's still the best picture I've ever seen and, for the most part, it works phenomenally well, so I'd still recommend the player. Especially when compared to a $300 Denon!

GFXZone - the ultimate demo scene graphics site!

Way back when, I used to run a company called Cynostic which distributed "public domain" software to anyone who wanted it. This was all for the venerable Commodore Amiga which, to my mind, remains one of the tragic losses in home computer architecture. (The things that machine could do in 1997 are comparable to the PC platform in 2001, in my opinion.) Anyway, one of the great joys of the PD scene, which was the nascent open source community really, were the demo disks: pieces of art, made by demo crews around the world to show off their programming, music, and art skills and compete against other crews at massive demo parties, such as The Gathering and Assembly. GFXZone has taken a lot of the graphics produced by these really talented folks and collected them into galleries for your viewing pleasure. Chck out the 8-bit galleries in particular. It's amazing to see what was possible with such a limited palette and tools, even then. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the link to this!)

Forecastfox

I started using Forecastfox some time ago and absolutely love it. It's a little Firefox extension that shows the current and forecast weather conditions wherever you wish in the browser. Until the latest version, the weather data came from Weather.com but now -- oh joy of joys! -- it's being drawn from Accuweather.com which includes "RealFeel": what the temperature feels like rather than its empirical measure. The creators of Forecastfox made the switch because Accuweather opened up its system with a new API that allows almost endless mining of their weather data.

This is important because it shows that, as well as being cause for lots of nerding around on the desktop for tweak-freaks like me, when companies open up the gateway to their crown jewels, smart people will find interesting new ways to use the data and drive more business your way. The BBC's Backstage project recently did something similar in opening an API for all of the Beeb's TV listings. The idea is for anyone on Earth to take that data and create new applications and communities around it. This kind of innovation is rife right now (witness Flickr.com!) and Wired has a great article on it this month, too (though it's not online yet, though, ironically).

In the meantime, stay cool by knowing how hot it is outside: get Forecastfox! (Obviously you should install Firefox first...)

IBM acquiring PureEdge

Woah! Government Technology reports that IBM is buying PureEdge, the producer of the e-forms software that's used by Grants.gov, among many others. I think this has been in the works for a while now, given that PureEdge seems to have obtained quite a foothold in the government marketplace, with significant agreements with HHS and the Army. We're quite familiar with the technology, having used it in our work with Grants.gov. I've heard a number of complaints about that system's use of PureEdge, not least being "There's no Mac version," which is a major bone of contention among research scientists in particular. With IBM's money behind them now, maybe that long-awaited problem might be solved.

More eGov budget shenanigans

Yet more back-and-forth over money for e-government projects! While the Senate seems to have agreed on the value of e-gov initiatives, the House is all peeved because OMB has asked agencies to take money for some of those projects from their existing budgets. Why is the House getting involved in this? E-gov projects are operational issues, not programmatic. Does the House care how paper is bought for agencies? No? Well, in that case, why does it care about an agency's choice to use less of it? Maybe I'm being tempestuous but I can't help feeling like agencies are being stymied over political point-scoring between OMB and the House. (Like that's new...)

Disappointing: NSOPR down after 1 day

The National Sex Offender Public Registry was launched yesterday. And today it's down: "The National Sex Offender Public Registry Web site is currently unavailable due to heavy demand." I could just be flying off the handle here but it seems to me that if the government can't expect broader use of online tools like this until it can demonstrate that they're reliable, no matter the load.

Law enforcement IT standards

Another heads-up from Alice Marshall: DOJ is sponsoring an effort to develop law enforcement IT standards, called the LEITSC (Law Enforcement Information Technology Standards Council). With so much money at the levels of law enforcement closest to the feds, and so little closer to your neighborhood police officer, this is an excellent idea to develop economies of scale across all levels.

EmergingTechnology.gov

Via a newly-found friend, Alice Marshall of the Presto Vivace Blog, I see that NIST has launched a new site, ET.gov, to help increase adoption of reusable components. I was wondering when something like this would crop up. CORE.gov is limited to government participation, which seems like a very introverted approach to me, so it's about time that non-guvvie types can submit their components to a government-sponsored repository.