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Dear everybody: your Mac drivers suck.

08-Feb-08

Two troubleshooting gems today:

HP’s driver installer is broken.

When I started a batch of prints today, the dialog for our Photosmart Pro was unhappy. The “Layout” pane appeared, but I couldn’t change the dropdown to “Paper Type/Quality”. I’d just get a blank pane. Much poking in preferences and logs revealed this error in system.log:

Adobe Photoshop CS3[239]: unable to load nib data: /Library/Printers/hp/cups/Inkjet.driver/Contents/PlugIns/PDE.plugin/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/TabView.nib

So, why would this happen out of the blue, after months of happy printing? What had changed? Two things.

  • I installed HP’s updated driver last week.
  • The new SuperDuper came out yesterday, and backup ran last night for the first time in months.

Here’s what was going on:

  1. The HP driver installer writes files inside the driver application with broken permissions.
  2. SuperDuper runs “Repair Permissions” before cloning my drive.
  3. Repair Permissions encounters the driver files with broken permissions and (this part’s still murky for me) in the process of repairing the permissions, turns them into zero-byte files.
  4. I try to print, and the driver can’t find the files to draw the print dialog.

For now, I’m reinstalling the driver and turning off Repair Permissions. I e-mailed HP. Sigh.

Epson TWAIN drivers still suck.

While I was troubleshooting the printer problem, I noticed something strange in ~/Library/Preferences. There are a bunch of empty folders with garbage names like ” -A†H¯øˇ”0è¿√” and “M61†mH¯øˇ”0è¿√”. Awesome.

This forum thread points to the driver for my Epson Perfection 4490 PHOTO as the culprit. And that thread’s two years old.

And my system.log is still full of these messages:

Scanner software for ‘EPSON Perfection 4490’ is illegally releasing the ‘CFBundleName’ object. However, Apple has protected your application from crashing as a result of that action. Please contact the vendor of the software for ‘EPSON Perfection 4490’ to report this problem.

I e-mailed Epson. Sigh.

The moral: Mac drivers suck. Universally.

I’m surprised that Apple allows these companies to put the “Made for a Mac” logo on their products when the drivers are so consistently terrible. It’s not just these two examples — every piece of non-Apple hardware I own has inconsistent, flaky, crappy drivers. I’m still too angry to write reasonably about the Logitech mouse situation (HAXIES ARE NOT DRIVERS).

Why can’t they just take the time to do things the right way, rather than hiring a coupla interns for a week to write kludgey CUPS and TWAIN wrappers? I ask, but I probably know the answer: the sales that matter are the big corporate contracts, and us Mac folk will always be under-represented there.

Filed in Computing | Comments (1) »

How to be the tech support guy

27-Jan-08

I have a reputation among family and friends as being a tech support wiz. I get questions about all operating systems, all software, all web sites. Here’s the thing: I don’t really hold much techie stuff in my head. I just Google well.

Here’s the trick: pretend you know the answer to your question, figure out how you would phrase that answer, then Google that in quotes, with the unknown bits left out.

For instance:

“breaks keyboard input in VMware Fusion”

“to install your Audacity plugin”

If that doesn’t work, stick the whole error message in quotes, and add a word or two to your search to refine.

Ta-da! You’ve got 90% of your tech support questions answered.

Filed in Computing, Web/Tech | Comments (1) »

Robinson Crusoe at Home

23-Jan-08

Without really trying to stay inside, I’ve managed to go five days without leaving the house. What I got out of this lost weekend:

  • AshleyGandDrew.com, a from-scratch site for the business, proving that it is possible to learn Ruby on Rails in less than a week, even with my “magical black box” method (feed things into the box, get error messages out, put error messages through Google, repeat).

  • a ginormous shop update. Eleven (!) bearded guys and seven new members of the permanent open-edition family.

  • a respect for and fear of my new CPAP. It ruined my Friday with too much pressure, I think, and screwed up my inner ear or CO2 levels or something. Dizzy all day. Terrible.

    Then, the past three nights, it’s been spitting droplets of frigid condensation into my nose an hour or two into operation. Explanation below.

  • a newfound appreciation for fingerless gloves. Sometime Saturday afternoon, our heat stopped working. The blower kept circulating air, but it wasn’t particularly hot air. Sunday morning, it was 52° inside. Three-way phone tag between the landlord, the heating guy, and my iPhone finally got us a visit this morning. A part’s being ordered, and we should be back in business tomorrow afternoon. Maybe. Ashley and I have both been in five layers the whole time.

Tomorrow, I pledge to leave the house for at least a minute or two. Upward and onward!

Filed in Ashley G and Drew, Home, Web/Tech | Comments (0) »

Fresh Start

01-Jan-08

New Year’s Day, and I’m busting out the thermal shirt for the first time this winter. It’s also our fourth (!) anniversary, based on the day when Ashley finally gave in to the inevitable and said “Yeah, I guess I could be your girlfriend.” Silly girl.

It’s an awkward day for celebration — nearly everything’s closed. We’re about to walk up to Blueberry Hill to burn off some gift certificate thingies I have, if it’s not too swamped.

Oh crap! Snow, as I type this! Wee flurries, yes, but still: snow. Fun.

If everything goes well, 2008 will be a marker year, one of those years you use to put other events on a timeline. I’ve been short of those recently, and everything turns into an experience slurry. Framework is good.

Happy 2008, everybody.

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Remember when the whole Internet was stuff like this?

08-Aug-07

So, a few days ago Kelly Sue sent me a link to some funny GTD buttons on Etsy. I responded, “How long until somebody makes ‘David Allen has a posse’ t-shirts?”

Cut to the next morning, me tracing bits of Faireyana on Ashley’s lightbox and whipping together this. I bought the domain name for $7 and pointed it to my existing web space, et voila. Instant internet silliness.

I bookmarked the new page at del.icio.us and pointed it out to Merlin Mann, and it’s currently sitting at the top of 43 Folders, one of my Favorite Sites Ever. Well, DavidAllenHasAPosse.com got two thousand hits yesterday (more than half from Firefox!), and among the server log entries was this gem: a bunch of hits from the private forums at DavidCo, David Allen’s consulting company.

I will give you a billion dollars if you can arrange for The David to have a David Allen Has a Posse t-shirt.

The Internet is still magic.

Filed in Productivity, Web/Tech | Comments (4) »

Variations on reading

29-May-07

I’ve gone through a few phases with books. I grew up keeping every book I read, pristine and alphabetized. Living in a wee East Village apartment changed that for a while. I got in the habit of buying a paperback off a table on the street, reading it over a few days’ worth of subway rides, and leaving it in one of those “Free Writers’ Workshop” boxes. When I moved back here, though, and started frequenting thrift stores with Ashley, I filled up the apartment with stacks piles of SF paperbacks. We pared the library down to essentials again before the last move, but I’ve still got four knee-high piles surrounding the Big Shelf.

A good number of these books came over from my old room at mom and dad’s, like my copy of Lord of the Flies from freshman year of high school. Here’s where we get to my problem: this thing is pretty extensively highlighted and annotated — we got participation points for raising our hands with “interesting comments”. And, though I’ve just flipped through, most of the highlighted lines and scribbled notes are embarrassing. “SEVERE CONSEQUENCES FOR BREAKING RULES? CONFLICT.” says page 33. “Beast = fears → parachuter → pighead → Simon → Ralph” says the inside cover.

Granted, I was all of 15, but… what am I supposed to do with this book now? I’d hate for the next reader to get distracted by the near-complete pink highlighting of page 143, or my affected semi-cursive (who writes an “F” that way?). Trash it? Drop it at the thrift store, after taking a sharpie to the edges of the pages to obliterate my name?

Okay, so I’m not afraid to ruin a paperback anymore. They’re great rolled up in pockets and dogeared. I just don’t know if, by writing everything in the margin that comes to mind when I read a passage before bed, I’m doing worse than if I tore out pages as I went. Keep a side journal, maybe?

As a geeky experiment, I’ve copied a text file of VALIS into an InDesign doc, fixed up the margins and typeface, run a few Search & Replaces to sew up line endings, and printed it, ten pages at a time. The plan is to write everything that comes to mind in the (now wide) margins and see if there’s anything worthwhile at the end — or see if transcribing my thoughts makes the book more enjoyable.

So, what do you do? Margin-scribble? Journal?

Filed in Books | Comments (3) »

Fiddlin’!: A Musical Adventure in Wordpress

26-May-07

For half a second, I thought I’d do the Ben Greenman thing and make a musical out of this post. Laziness prevailed. I’ve started really getting into TextMate, and I’m using it to write this post, in Markdown. Here’s how:

More…

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If you don’t mind the gore

25-May-07

If, like me, you’re pinned in front of a browser for a chunk of your day, and your usual haunts run dry, take a look at Si Spurrier’s new book, which is being released bit by bit online. For free!

I’m only a few chapters in, but it’s got that Fight-Club-by-way-of-Ellis wry humor that I like so much — I’ll probably be in for the long haul. Even though (because?) it’s ghoulishly gory so far. Hitmen are the new pirates.

Filed in Books | Comments (1) »

Looking at something different

24-May-07

For the most part, I’ve kept my desktop straightforward: non-distracting solid background, standard icons, wee Dock pinned in the upper right. A few things led me to change that a bit, though.

More under the fold.

More…

Filed in Computing | Comments (0) »

Look at me. LOOK AT MEEEEEE!

29-Mar-07

A few years ago I spent some time in front of a few DV cams. This week, both projects are viewable online:


Click To Play

Be sure to add Hooch and Daddy-O to your Netflix queue!

Filed in Uncategorized | Comments (3) »