11 turtles
3 toads
10 snakes
Totally badass.
Totally.
Mountains
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
PC LOAD LETTER
My recent experiences swapping old laser printer parts around reminds me of what I used to do for fun, which was abuse of office equipment. Printing technology has been a point of interest for me. In concept, transferring digitally written words to a page seems simple. The devil is massively in the details: things like how to render a font at a given size, space margins on a piece of paper moving through a printer, drawing smooth lines at an arbitrary resolution, color matching, and lining up hundreds of tiny rollers in such a way that a piece of paper doesn't jam all have to be in place for a printer to work.
All this complex engineering just so we can print mom's mac'n cheese recipe.
I have had a particularly long history of laser printers. In the mid-nineties, our family acquired a used Laserwriter Plus, a printer that we exhausted several toner cartridges printing essays, Boy Scout News Letters, and all the crap that a couple of dorky kids came up with to print and share with their friends. Mostly expressions of sibling rivalry and worship of the Marathon series. Stuff that would get us landed in therapy now.
One of the major issues that slightly stymied our burgeoning "creativity" was that the thing regularly choked on complex print jobs. You know, the ones that used every font on the computer (an number that reached into the low twenties, a ghastly number at the time, thanks to the Mac Bible CD-ROM, it would be years until we had internet access), and included many MacPaint drawings of things exploding. The Laserwriter, built in 1988, only had 1 megabyte of memory (though, it did have a screaming 12 mhz Motorola 680000, meaning that jobs with a small ram footprint would scream), and was simply not suited to that kind of work. The imager would crank for about an hour, print an error page, and then give up. 1 megabyte of ram was enough to print a page with 4 fonts and no diagrams on it. That's it. That is all that you could get away with.
Important childhood take home message: for laserprinters: more memory meant faster printing and more complex jobs.
(And use spell check. When writing long treatise on the vastness of your younger siblings foibles, you need to spell check. You are the perfect one, remember? Even perfect spelling.)
At the end of my sophomore year at Tech, I won a Laserwriter 630 at an auction for ~$5. The rollers were dry, but other than that, it worked fine. I soaked the rollers in silicone grease all summer and they got sticky enough to print normally again. With a 25 mhz 68030, ethernet, and a 8 megabytes of ram, it never hiccuped like mom and dad's old printer. I would ultimately print my senior thesis on it. Somehow, the printer made it to Baltimore, where it died curled up in a dumpster somewhere.
While the Laserwriter went to Baltimore, I went to grad school. New discovery: grad students print. A lot. Journal Articles. Manuals. Essays/Homework/Reports (during classes). Book chapters. Then more painful things like cumulative exam questions. Proposal drafts. The proposal defense. Then the many dissertation drafts.
I started dumpster diving for a printer within the first six months. I found a few inkjets that were hard to find drivers for and and were rather finicky. Then, my graduate adviser offered me the disused Laserjet 2100 sleeping in the corner of his office. Compared to the old laserwriter, it had a wimpier processor (66 mhz intel 80960), 4 megabytes of RAM, fed data via parallel port (that was cool in 1999, though passe in 2005) and no Postscript support. While it tended to choke on documents with large arrays of vector graphics, it would slowly and steadily churn out page after page of graduate school related dross. I kept wondering if it would die, but it only once wanted a new cartridge. Something which it got late one night while I was writing my research proposal. About a year before my defense, I found a 2100mp laying in the hall awaiting janitorial attention. I scavenged the cartidge and the postscript ROM/DIMM from it, bringing my 2100 to a wonderful 8 megs of ram and providing postscript support. Toggling between PCL and Postscript allowed me to print any document with wierd printing errors: if one didn't work, the other did. The extra RAM also hurried along the vector graphics, just in time time for the later chapters of my dissertation, which had lots of complex vector plots. The stinkpad's parallel port bares the scars of hundreds (thousands?) of plugging from the daily connection. I ultimately left it for other graduate students to enjoy. I hope it gets worn out before being thrown away.
There seem to be quite a few of these in existence. There are lots of printers from that lineage (Laserjet 6mp, 2100, 2200, 2300 and maybe few others are closely related) at work that are still functioning, long after the computer they came with was sent to salvage. While I think most of them are around simply because they still work, there are a few people who seem to love them because they still work.
At work, I have a HP cp1518ni... color printing! Compared to the other printers I've had, it's an interesting combination out of the box: light, cheap plastic feel, nearly empty "trial" cartridges, tiny normal cartridge capacity, but with decent print speed, fast CPU and RAM (Motorola Coldfire V5 @ 450 mhz, 96 megs of ram). The days of sending a big print job to a small desktop printer and then going for coffee appear to be numbered. Where the 2100 would cough up a copy of my dissertation in 90 minutes to two hours, this thing did it in 20 minutes .I doubt it will ever need to be upgraded, I'm worried it will far apart before then.
It's also possible that the digital age will finally find a way to replace paper. Then, it could last forever too.
All this complex engineering just so we can print mom's mac'n cheese recipe.
I have had a particularly long history of laser printers. In the mid-nineties, our family acquired a used Laserwriter Plus, a printer that we exhausted several toner cartridges printing essays, Boy Scout News Letters, and all the crap that a couple of dorky kids came up with to print and share with their friends. Mostly expressions of sibling rivalry and worship of the Marathon series. Stuff that would get us landed in therapy now.
One of the major issues that slightly stymied our burgeoning "creativity" was that the thing regularly choked on complex print jobs. You know, the ones that used every font on the computer (an number that reached into the low twenties, a ghastly number at the time, thanks to the Mac Bible CD-ROM, it would be years until we had internet access), and included many MacPaint drawings of things exploding. The Laserwriter, built in 1988, only had 1 megabyte of memory (though, it did have a screaming 12 mhz Motorola 680000, meaning that jobs with a small ram footprint would scream), and was simply not suited to that kind of work. The imager would crank for about an hour, print an error page, and then give up. 1 megabyte of ram was enough to print a page with 4 fonts and no diagrams on it. That's it. That is all that you could get away with.
Important childhood take home message: for laserprinters: more memory meant faster printing and more complex jobs.
(And use spell check. When writing long treatise on the vastness of your younger siblings foibles, you need to spell check. You are the perfect one, remember? Even perfect spelling.)
At the end of my sophomore year at Tech, I won a Laserwriter 630 at an auction for ~$5. The rollers were dry, but other than that, it worked fine. I soaked the rollers in silicone grease all summer and they got sticky enough to print normally again. With a 25 mhz 68030, ethernet, and a 8 megabytes of ram, it never hiccuped like mom and dad's old printer. I would ultimately print my senior thesis on it. Somehow, the printer made it to Baltimore, where it died curled up in a dumpster somewhere.
While the Laserwriter went to Baltimore, I went to grad school. New discovery: grad students print. A lot. Journal Articles. Manuals. Essays/Homework/Reports (during classes). Book chapters. Then more painful things like cumulative exam questions. Proposal drafts. The proposal defense. Then the many dissertation drafts.
I started dumpster diving for a printer within the first six months. I found a few inkjets that were hard to find drivers for and and were rather finicky. Then, my graduate adviser offered me the disused Laserjet 2100 sleeping in the corner of his office. Compared to the old laserwriter, it had a wimpier processor (66 mhz intel 80960), 4 megabytes of RAM, fed data via parallel port (that was cool in 1999, though passe in 2005) and no Postscript support. While it tended to choke on documents with large arrays of vector graphics, it would slowly and steadily churn out page after page of graduate school related dross. I kept wondering if it would die, but it only once wanted a new cartridge. Something which it got late one night while I was writing my research proposal. About a year before my defense, I found a 2100mp laying in the hall awaiting janitorial attention. I scavenged the cartidge and the postscript ROM/DIMM from it, bringing my 2100 to a wonderful 8 megs of ram and providing postscript support. Toggling between PCL and Postscript allowed me to print any document with wierd printing errors: if one didn't work, the other did. The extra RAM also hurried along the vector graphics, just in time time for the later chapters of my dissertation, which had lots of complex vector plots. The stinkpad's parallel port bares the scars of hundreds (thousands?) of plugging from the daily connection. I ultimately left it for other graduate students to enjoy. I hope it gets worn out before being thrown away.
There seem to be quite a few of these in existence. There are lots of printers from that lineage (Laserjet 6mp, 2100, 2200, 2300 and maybe few others are closely related) at work that are still functioning, long after the computer they came with was sent to salvage. While I think most of them are around simply because they still work, there are a few people who seem to love them because they still work.
At work, I have a HP cp1518ni... color printing! Compared to the other printers I've had, it's an interesting combination out of the box: light, cheap plastic feel, nearly empty "trial" cartridges, tiny normal cartridge capacity, but with decent print speed, fast CPU and RAM (Motorola Coldfire V5 @ 450 mhz, 96 megs of ram). The days of sending a big print job to a small desktop printer and then going for coffee appear to be numbered. Where the 2100 would cough up a copy of my dissertation in 90 minutes to two hours, this thing did it in 20 minutes .I doubt it will ever need to be upgraded, I'm worried it will far apart before then.
It's also possible that the digital age will finally find a way to replace paper. Then, it could last forever too.
Friday, September 9, 2011
An interesting observation
I saw this plaque in a very nice federal building that has been around since the early seventies.
At the time the building was built, it was located far from higher price/high cost of living area of DC, inside the beltway.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that the government actively planned on putting the building far away from the beltway to encourage the local economy and provide a manageable cost of living for the federal employees. This makes perfect sense in terms of returning value to the tax payers: jobs go where they are needed and the personnel costs are kept lower for the government (who is paying the employees), as well as the employees themselves.
Now, DC has spread out far beyond the building, so while it once was in undeveloped forests, it is now in a light industrial/office park area amidst the 'burbs. The goal of stimulating the local economy has likely been consumed by the size of the local economy, and the cost of living has gone into the upper echelon of locality pay adjustments.
Especially with the modern state of communication, it seems like locating federal installations in areas that do not have locality pay adjustments and that could use the economic benefit of having a large body of employees. Every decade or so, the location could be evaluated and changed with the cost-efficiency goals in mind.
There are, of course, limitations to the efficiency and benefit from this. I wonder what a spreadsheet model would yield?
Sounds like a nice homework assignment...
At the time the building was built, it was located far from higher price/high cost of living area of DC, inside the beltway.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that the government actively planned on putting the building far away from the beltway to encourage the local economy and provide a manageable cost of living for the federal employees. This makes perfect sense in terms of returning value to the tax payers: jobs go where they are needed and the personnel costs are kept lower for the government (who is paying the employees), as well as the employees themselves.
Now, DC has spread out far beyond the building, so while it once was in undeveloped forests, it is now in a light industrial/office park area amidst the 'burbs. The goal of stimulating the local economy has likely been consumed by the size of the local economy, and the cost of living has gone into the upper echelon of locality pay adjustments.
Especially with the modern state of communication, it seems like locating federal installations in areas that do not have locality pay adjustments and that could use the economic benefit of having a large body of employees. Every decade or so, the location could be evaluated and changed with the cost-efficiency goals in mind.
There are, of course, limitations to the efficiency and benefit from this. I wonder what a spreadsheet model would yield?
Sounds like a nice homework assignment...
Friday, September 2, 2011
Broke/Fixed it
My boss was complaining that his printer would not print a document that a collaborator had sent him. The document in question was a large PDF with many many objects. He was considering purchasing a new printer.
The printer in question was a laserjet 6mp with 1 meg of RAM.
I suggested that we try an alternate approach first; there are many 90's era printers in the pile of equipment that gets sent to salvage. I scrounged through all the printers, and found a few laserjet 5's that used the same 72 pin SIMMs with the 'magic' hp presence detect. I mined about 6 SIMMs with capacities unknown. I put the largest looking ones (more chips==more ram?) in the printer, including one that had a postscript rom from the Laserjet 5. The test page showed that postscript was no more, but that the printer had 14 megs of RAM. Score!
A few test prints showed that it would now print the documents. I noticed, however, that the printer ram in the driver was still stuck at 1 megabyte. IT has this section blocked through GPO (we can install printers, but not modify settings).
Apparently, printing to PCL instead of postscript was the real "fix".
The printer in question was a laserjet 6mp with 1 meg of RAM.
I suggested that we try an alternate approach first; there are many 90's era printers in the pile of equipment that gets sent to salvage. I scrounged through all the printers, and found a few laserjet 5's that used the same 72 pin SIMMs with the 'magic' hp presence detect. I mined about 6 SIMMs with capacities unknown. I put the largest looking ones (more chips==more ram?) in the printer, including one that had a postscript rom from the Laserjet 5. The test page showed that postscript was no more, but that the printer had 14 megs of RAM. Score!
A few test prints showed that it would now print the documents. I noticed, however, that the printer ram in the driver was still stuck at 1 megabyte. IT has this section blocked through GPO (we can install printers, but not modify settings).
Apparently, printing to PCL instead of postscript was the real "fix".
Thursday, September 1, 2011
My purpose
I leaned back, hanging onto the cabinet doors, admiring the tupperware landscape. I lazily gazed left and right, trying to gain some sense of intensity.
"I am here for something," I thought. "I know that because I'm here looking for something. I'd only be doing that if I had decided that I needed something from here." I tried hard to push the deduction further, but hit the mental wall of full tummy torpor. I gave up, and decided to start from square one. I leaned back a little more and examined the room: wife. dog. dirty dishes. 1/2 full pot of spaghetti sauce. Clump of noodles.
Right.
That's why I was there.
"I am here for something," I thought. "I know that because I'm here looking for something. I'd only be doing that if I had decided that I needed something from here." I tried hard to push the deduction further, but hit the mental wall of full tummy torpor. I gave up, and decided to start from square one. I leaned back a little more and examined the room: wife. dog. dirty dishes. 1/2 full pot of spaghetti sauce. Clump of noodles.
Right.
That's why I was there.
Microsoft: Still Lost
I was saddened to read microsoft will be making more use of the ribbon interface. While I have slowly gotten used to it in office, it feels slower and more clunky than the original interface. Everything seems like it is lots of extra clicking and dragging to get results.
Reading their post, it seems that their designers are loosing touch with the purpose of a computer: getting things done. Making pretty graphics and making huge buttons the clog screens slow CPUs (or boost install requirements yet again!), is detracting from the point. Moreover, it is not focusing on the basic aspects of making a quality user interface. Attractive design is important, but it also needs to be psychologically intuitive, infinitely and instantly responsive, and non-intrusive. The ribbon, and to a larger extent, Windows, violates these points in several dimensions, and shows something of Microsofts core DNA.
I normally berate Microsoft for copying other peoples ideas, but I am beginning to wish that they would. There are so many good UIs in operating systems and other platforms past and present (Windows 2000 was nearly perfect in comparison.) (Google is really getting its act together, the new blogger interface is great!) There is a lot of information available about what works and what does not in user interfaces.
Fundamentally, the essential core of tasks related to productivity hasn't really changed for 10 years. The focus should be on how to make those tasks easier and more straight foward. Their msdn blog post notes a detailed statistical analysis of commands often used in explorer. Never do they ask why people are copying files around so much, where they are copying them to, and to what end? Could the process be improved?
This may be one of many signs of the slow fall of MS (I have no moral issues with naked shorts on MSFT). The browser and the cloud appear to be slowly taking over, and the OS is likely to be just another application layer for many purposes.
Reading their post, it seems that their designers are loosing touch with the purpose of a computer: getting things done. Making pretty graphics and making huge buttons the clog screens slow CPUs (or boost install requirements yet again!), is detracting from the point. Moreover, it is not focusing on the basic aspects of making a quality user interface. Attractive design is important, but it also needs to be psychologically intuitive, infinitely and instantly responsive, and non-intrusive. The ribbon, and to a larger extent, Windows, violates these points in several dimensions, and shows something of Microsofts core DNA.
I normally berate Microsoft for copying other peoples ideas, but I am beginning to wish that they would. There are so many good UIs in operating systems and other platforms past and present (Windows 2000 was nearly perfect in comparison.) (Google is really getting its act together, the new blogger interface is great!) There is a lot of information available about what works and what does not in user interfaces.
Fundamentally, the essential core of tasks related to productivity hasn't really changed for 10 years. The focus should be on how to make those tasks easier and more straight foward. Their msdn blog post notes a detailed statistical analysis of commands often used in explorer. Never do they ask why people are copying files around so much, where they are copying them to, and to what end? Could the process be improved?
This may be one of many signs of the slow fall of MS (I have no moral issues with naked shorts on MSFT). The browser and the cloud appear to be slowly taking over, and the OS is likely to be just another application layer for many purposes.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Dating a Chemist
Keywords that link to my blog:
The list of stats blogger coughs up changes over time. The one thing that seems to be constant is a stream of people coming for advice on dating a chemist.
Which, I find odd, since I have not written much of substance about dating or relationships here. Check my old blog for that.
Or, this post.
Dating a Chemist
If you are going to date a chemist, I first recommend consulting the chemists personal affects. Many chemists carry some from of identification that they use when they are in bars to obtain the large amounts of ethanol laced beverages they are known to consume. Baring that, it is possible to use carbon dating to certain the age of a chemist. Great caution should be used when attempting to take core samples, however, as chemists are notoriously picky about having large holes introduced into their mortal vessel. Their are rumors of alchemical procedures and magic circles that may also be used to date a chemist. In particular, circles inscribed with a modern language or a direct precursor (say, Shakespearean english) would denote a relatively young chemist, while a circle in an ancient tongue corresponds to an older specimen.
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