I’m working my way through Objective C and Cocoa, and I wanted to screw with my coworkers.  So, what better way than to put silly messages on our workgroup printer?  Sure, I could have done it by telnetting to port 9100 on the printer’s IP address, but it was more fun to whip up a quick app to do it a little easier.

Here’s the freeware part – if you have a Mac, and a networked HP LaserJet printer, here ya go: LaserJet Message

For what it’s worth, the app was written on Snow Leopard, and I don’t remember what compile settings I used – so it might not work on your platform.  If it doesn’t, and you really really want it to work, leave me a comment.

Now for the legal disclaimer:  I don’t guarantee this little app to do anything, and I don’t guarantee it to work properly.  Heck I don’t guarantee anything about it.  It could cause your printer to spit garbage onto a million pages.  It could run you out of toner.  It could steal your girlfriend.  It might just steal your girlfriend.  Heck it might even start your Mac running off your desk.  It could set your pants on fire.  It could cause the start of the Apocalypse.  Just know this – whatever happens, don’t blame me for it.  You’re entitled to as much of a refund as you paid for it.  Yep, that’s right – nothing.  There’s nothing nefarious about the app, all it does is take the values from 4 text boxes, format it, and send it over the network to port 9100 of the IP address you specify.  That’s it.

But anyway — here she is at 15 weeks along.

She’s currently 21 weeks, and both momma and our daughter are doing well.

They are connected by Cogent, which raises other concerns for many people, but so far any outages I’ve noticed have been slight (a minute here and there, typically at off times).  Since I didn’t traceroute the outages, it could very well have been Comcast or some provider between here and there.  Network performance has been quite reasonable, I’m getting all of the 10MBit switch port I’m paying for.

The real praise comes in when I needed these guys, and is the fear of anyone who colocates a server.  “What happens when a component in my server fails?”  This is exactly what happened to me.  I noticed the box wasn’t available on the ‘net, so I submitted a ticket asking for them to take a peek.  The response was not what I expected — the box wouldn’t power up, suspected failed power supply.  What’s worse, is they didn’t have a matching 1U supply on hand – and why would they, it’s not THEIR server to be worrying about!  What came next really floored me.  They actually peeled the lid off the server, stitched in a regular ATX power supply, and got it back on the network.  They even ran the server opened up and running on their bandaid supply until I was able to locate a replacement supply and get it shipped out to them!  This is service well above and beyond what I would have expected, and it was obviously VERY appreciated both by myself and the folks who visit the sites hosted on the server.

So if anyone at ColoPronto/ServerPronto happens to stumble across this little blog post, thanks again.

We are not doing anything drastic like moving walls around, but it is a total refresh of the existing space. New flooring, going from linoleum to ceramic tile. New walls, tearing out the floral wallpaper in favor of freshly painted walls (even using eco friendly zero VOC paint). I’m no tree hugger, but it is pretty nice to paint without the fumes. We’re also painting the cabinets, installing some nice pulls where there were none, and installing new faucets. Finishing it up with new lighting and new towel bars and such.

We are at the mid point now — the walls are done, the cabinets are mostly painted and waiting for their final coat. There was a small water leak from the toilet, but after removing and inspecting everything around the area thankfully showed no wood damage. The subfloor has been stabilized in preparation for the tile, which will go in in the next day or so.

Long story short, we had hoped to get a bit further, but these projects always take double what you think they will Photos will be posted when it is finished.

No, this is simply a comparison of a “typical” user wanting to listen to his library of music while getting a few lines of code banged out each day.

I have built up a decent collection of music over the years, bought from various outlets — CD’s back in the old days and ripped to my drive, then a VERY big lull when the RIAA went totally insane filing suits against everyone and their grandmother (literally).  My multi-year pause in spending money on music was my little silent protest.  Hey, it only amounted to a couple hundred bucks a year, but I felt it was the point.  Anyway, once more outlets started selling non-DRM music online, I slowly started buying music again.  Well this library is only as good as my ability to listen to what I want, where I want, and when I want.  That’s the absolute BIGGEST reason I will only buy non-DRM’ed music now.  I have some music from the iTunes store that I can’t easily listen to — like in my car, which now has a nice Kenwood radio with a USB input.  It simply won’t play my .m4p files on my flash drive.  Guess I’ll have to upgrade those now that Apple has the option to un-DRM the files.

So now to the real bit of this post – WM vs iTunes.  Well, this one is pretty easy for me.  Windows Media Player loses.  Period.  Sure, it works — it plays music.  I’m not going to fault it for also not playing my DRM infested iTunes music, as that’s a music industry stupid.  But I will definitely fault Microsoft for building a very annoying player.  Usability was apparently not in the design specifications.  It tries, really hard, to do things for you, like scanning for music and organizing your library.  It tries, really hard, to present a snazzy interface.  It tries really hard, to look stylish.  It tries, really hard, to present 128 different ways to view your library of music.  All of this it does however, it does in a cluttered and difficult way.  I really hate to get on the Apple bandwagon.  It was tough enough to talk myself into buying my MacBook Pro.  But there comes a time when you just have to realize, there’s a better way to do things.

The best way to sum it up, is to NOT go into a bullet point conversion, and just point out the fact it takes one more interaction with WM11 than it does on iTunes.  I attribute this really to the interface differences.  iTunes is very clean, sparse, and straight forward.  In one word – it’s OBVIOUS.  All the advanced stuff is there, it’s just pushed down a level on the UI, and laid out in a very familiar manner.  WM11 on the other hand, feels almost obfuscated.  Functions and features are duplicated across the interface, and at inconsistent levels of UI menu depth.  The look and feel matches, well, nothing.  It’s like starting over, and I’ve been a Windows user since 3.0 and a Microsoft user since DOS 2.0.

You really don’t appreciate the differences, until you get used to something else.  The switch to the Mac for a year wasn’t easy, and it really is because you have to UN-learn some really bad habits and modes of thinking.  It’s the same with the move to Linux from Windows.  People ask me all the time, what’s different about using Linux/OSX than using Windows?  The best answer I can give, is “you spend less time f#*king with your computer, and more time enjoying it.”