Justin's Blog

February 26, 2004

Epson 580 and OSX

I bought an Epson 580 Color from a friend, and after swearing over and over again when I realised there were no OSX drivers for it, I came across gimp-print for OSX. Those crazy geeks have made it work with OSX annnd CUPS, and lo and behold, they have got an Epson 850 driver in there. And it works! You do not get the nice feature of being able to control the head or anything to add a new print cartridge, but I guess you can do that in the OS9 driver, so that isn't too bad. Hopefully googlers looking for info on it will be able to track this down.

gimp-print

Epson 580 problems!

Well, looks like I was to quick off the mark regarding the Epson 580. It looks like there is a pretty big bug in OSX 10.3.2 regarding USB printers. Other people have reported that you can print once, and then the printer stops responding. Unfortunately this is what is happening with me. So all I can do is sit tight and wait for 10.3.3 to come out and hope it is fixed. Apparently Apple are aware of this, but I submitted a bug report just incase.

February 23, 2004

Nyquist's Theorem

I am doing my degree the the Open University, and the module I have chosen first was data communications. Thinking this would be piss easy as I have been doing networking for a while, I chose it. Boy was I wrong! I have added a link on the left with information about stuff I am learning. First in there is sampling theory, including Nyquist's theorem.

February 19, 2004

Megahal

I just came across quite an advances natural language processor called megahal. It looks like it is commonly used in eggdrop bots, which is a bit lame really. I have decided to play around with it and get megahal to teach itself from numerous sources to see what impact a random learning method has on it. From subscribing megahal to daily tip emails to disseminating information from websites (with a crawler) to see how much hal actually learns. I am planning on giving it as much information as I can, including encylopedic data, and popular culture. It should prove pretty interesting as to how well Hal deals with a large "brain". I will publish a web interface to him once he has grown up.

February 18, 2004

Certifications out of my ass!

Well, I am now certification boy! For working at CSF, I need to get quite a few industry certifications to keep vendors happy, so I have just recently got my.... wait for it... OCA (Oracale Certified Associate), DB2 CA(Certified Associate), LPI level 2 (also means I can go for the SuSE Master certification once it is released, which is good, seeing as I used to work there!). Now that I have those I will be going for my Websphere certification which will be nice (I hate JAVA!). One thing I will say about these certs is that you really do not need to know that much about the subject you are studying. I thought this applied to the thousands of people taking the MCSE exams, but I managed to pass the DB2 exam with no technical training, or revision and I passed based on my experience with Oracle, and that is limited to say the least! The only exam I have taken that I thought was good had to be the LPI ones, not difficult, but you did at least need to know what you were talking about, and with the IBM exams, you only need to get about 60% to pass! I would say you have to be stupid to fail, but I did manage to flunk the xSeries exam, too many bloody model numbers and stats to remember, and anyone who knows me, I am baaaad at remembering facts and figures!

GPS

I finally took the plunge and bought a GPS mouse for my Tungsten to go with my new car. Being a Laguna II with a heat reflective windsreen, I had to wire uo the mouse from the boot (which happens to have a small hook that the GPS mouse sits under) going to the Tungsten with mapsonic installed. After reviewing Tomtom (crap, as it is low res and does not have voice directions), mapopolis (ok, but the UI is shitty and the voice prompts are dire to say the least) I decided mapsonic, although bad in some respects is the best. It is hires, the vioce prompts are excellent, and it will read the map data directly off the SD card via VFS, all good! The downside to it is that you have to cut out portions of the map on windows (I use a MAC!!!) and export them to the palm. For anyone wanting mapping apps on the palm, use mapsonic, it is by far the best (maybe until tomtom releases the new navigator, for the T3!).