Raible Designs

What's the best way to setup networked printing?

I made the switch to my new XP box last night - swapping hard drives, CD Burners, etc. from the old to the new. In the process of putting 1.5 GB of RAM into my Linux box, I thought I'd upgrade Samba to 3.0 and setup a shared printer. Samba upgrade - piece of cake. Installing a printer on RedHat - no luck. I've tried it before, but I've never succeeded. I have a HP OfficeJet G85 that is a great printer. My main goal is to setup this printer as a shared printer on Linux or XP and I'll be able to print to it via OS X, Windows XP and RedHat 9. However, I can never get it installed on RedHat - even though I select the right printer (using printconf-gui). It does recognize it as a USB device, but it can't print to it. On Windows XP, the printer installs (and works) just fine, but I can't print to it from OS X or RedHat - it just doesn't work. Here's what happens on both:

• OS X 10.3: I select Windows Printing and I can navigate to my XP Box, but I can't connect. When I try to view the printers, it hangs for a couple of minutes - then I'm prompted for a login and my XP login doesn't work. This same login/password works just fine for connecting to shared drives. I think it's a bug in Panther.
• RedHat 9: I select Queue Type: Networked Windows (SMB) and my Windows box does not show up in the list (just the RedHat box and my PowerBook). If I try to manually enter my server, printer, etc. it just flashes and prompts me again.

I do have a wireless print server that I could probably use, but that's hooked up to our Canon 900 Photo Printer - which only seems to work well if it's plugged into the wireless print server. We've tried to plug it directly into a Windows box and print, and the quality just isn't as good - who knows why. I bought a USB hub for it in hopes of hooking up multiple printers, but that doesn't work either.

I wish I could just give my HP an IP address - then it would probably work for all of them, but alas, all it has is USB.

The fun part of all this switching hard drives? I thought I lost a 20 GB drive of important data this morning - I was up until 2 a.m. last night trying to fix it. Luckily, I got some assistance from Experts-Exchange this morning and didn't lose a thing.

Update: I got this all working using HPOJ and CUPS. I did have to uninstall LPRng and cups from Red Hat 9 - then re-install CUPS from source. I also had to install Ghostscript and all its fonts. Finally, to get it to share the printer via Samba, I had to tweak some Samba config files.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

One year ago today, early this morning at 12:52 a.m. - the best thing that every happened to us was born. Abbie Loo - what a cool kid. I never thought life could be so much fun as a Dad. I knew it would be good, but I never thought it would be this much fun!

Cooking dinner in the Raible household

PowerBook for recipe, beer for motivation.

Sports, Sports, Sports

I've had quite a ride these last couple of days. I started my new project yesterday, and spent the evening at the Monday Night Football game at Mile High Stadium. A buddy and I had great seats thanks to another friend's season tickets - 6th row, 45 yard line. It was awesome - too bad The Broncos lost (24-23) - but at least it was a good game. Tonight, my companion from last night got (free) club-level seats to see The Colorado Avalanche at The Pepsi Center. It was another great game - went into overtime and resulted in a 4-4 tie. Professional sporting events sure are a good time...

Pictures from Halloween and Abbie's Birthday Party

What a great weekend. On Friday afternoon, we took Abbie to the Denver Children's Museum for some trick-or-treating. Checkout the pictures of our little Winnie the Pooh. On Saturday, we had a Birthday Party (1st one!) for Abbie - and here's more pictures for your viewing pleasure.

The Last Day

Today is my last day at my current contract - my new contract starts on Monday. This has to be one of my best "last days" in quite some time. I gave my notice a month ago, and everyone has been super nice ever since. To show you why I think it's a good day, let's review some other last days I've had:

• [Highschool] Fired from McDonalds after 1 1/2 years for calling in sick and going to a basketball game (a co-worker saw me and reported me).
• [Real World] Gave two weeks notice (contract was ending as well). Escorted out of building two days before my last day for telling head honcho of Marketing that I'd be available to do work after my contract ended. I was advised to do this by the webmaster (who was a contractor). Apparently, this was a violation of my contract with IBM and the VP immediately told my boss I'd sent the e-mail. Started new job at eDeploy the next day.
• [Real World] After three rounds of layoffs, the CEO announced that we'd be closing the doors. Started drinking at noon, found contract two weeks later. This led to full time work through Raible Designs.
• [Real World] We were told we needed to re-estimate the project since we were over budget. They told us to take a week off while they figured out some budget stuff - when we came back, they told us we had one week left. Javadocs and knowledge transfer all week. Didn't find new gig for 2 months.
• [Real World] We had nothing to do for the last two months of the project - finally found out ending date. Quit one week early to do a small side project.

Any good last day stories out there?

What do you get a 1 year old for their birthday?

Abbie turns 1 year old next Wednesday - a birthday so good that they've decided to release The Matrix: Revolutions on the same day! We're having a party this weekend (yes, a keg will be there for the papas) and I don't know what to get her for her birthday. So I'm asking all you Dads out there - what was the coolest gift you got your kid(s) for their 1st birthday? When I say cool - I mean to say that they thought it was cool. Of course, if Mom thought it was cool - that counts too (esp. since it seems to be just as much for her as for Abbie).

At the game

Nuggets behind by 6 at halftime.

Guys night out

Light Rail to the Nuggets game.

eBay hooks me up with a new computer

One good quality of a company - they keep your computer up to date. The company I work for bought me a new computer today. Dell Dimension 8300 P4 2.6 HT 80G. This will replace my 1.5 Dell Dimension 8100 - XP Pro, which (with cygwin) continues to me my favorite development environment. We're giving my Dell and Julie's Dell (that I bought for $200 from eDeploy) to charity. I also have an old 300 MHz Compaq Presario that's slow as slugs - I'm going to throw it away and not place that burden on someone else (it serves as a patio umbrella stand right now).