January 2006 Archives

I took apart, cleaned, and reassembled a $15,000 piece of equipment this evening. Eek! Granted, I didn’t pay anywhere near that much for it, but it was hardly pocket change, either.

My main envelope printer is a Pitney Bowes W790 color (more or less) printer, or possibly a SECAP (or Bryce) 13K-C, which is the same machinery, but with a different nameplate on the front. It might also have slightly different software inside. I think this one started life as a SECAP printer, and got refurbished by Pitney Bowes. That would explain the identity crisis (PB serial number, SECAP nameplate). And yes, the picture is of a DA750. That’s also apparently the same thing.

Anyway, it’s been having misfeed problems for some time, and they’ve been getting pretty unbearable lately (a job earlier today included a blank envelope for every two printed envelopes).

Looking into the gap between the two front panels revealed a set of rollers I’d never seen. What’s worse, they weren’t moving (or were barely moving) when an envelope was moving through the machine. Aha! Problem found.

And was it ever a problem. The other sets of rollers can be cleaned pretty easily, but these are in the dead center of the machine. And because I paid far less than $15,000 for the printer, I don’t have a support contract.

On the other hand, I also don’t have a warranty to worry about voiding, so out came the toolkit. Two hours later, with one screwdriver, three hex keys, two pairs of pliers, a lot of table and floor space, and an anxious wife, I had the machine apart enough to clean the rollers. They definitely needed it. Another hour, and it was back together. I didn’t realize the purpose of one of the ribbons on attempt #1 (it uses a piece of plastic with a vertical line at set intervals to measure how far the head has moved — very very neat), so it didn’t work at first, but once I got the ribbon fed through the head properly, it worked fine, and just printed a set of envelopes perfectly.

I meant to take step by step pictures and post them as a reference for myself or anyone else who needed to access that part, but forgot. So, if you’re reading this because you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem inside a W790/13K-C/DA750 printer, let me know, and I’ll help guide you through it, with the understanding that if you want any sort of guarantee, you should pay Pitney Bowes (or SECAP, or whoever your rep is) to do it for you.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site that deefs.net is my playground for trying out new technologies. Well, here’s a new one! This site is now running on Drupal, giving me the option of evaluating it for use elsewhere.

Let me know if anything looks broken — I moved the entire site over today with a Perl script and a whole lot of copy-and-pasting, and may have missed things.

Today my equipment put on demonstrations of various ways to create accordions out of innocent sheets of paper. My primary and backup folding machines held a contest, each trying to outdo the other. The envelope printer made a few attempts, but then decided it was outclassed, and resorted instead to complaining about needing its rollers cleaned.

I think the backup folding machine gets the prize for best accordions. It also had the most impressive way of getting attention, by getting a full sheet of paper rolled tightly around the innermost feed roller, such that I either had to take the entire machine apart or try and cut the paper out enough that running the machine long enough would cause it to fall to pieces and clear the roller.

However, my main folding machine put in a very good showing, giving me several error messages and icons that I’d never seen before, jamming in nearly every position available to it, and requiring a partial disassembly of it as well in order to get at a particularly well-jammed sheet of paper.

Yet another computer crash. Having the entire computer lock up when you have some 20 windows open and three print jobs going simultaneously is a real killer for productivity… (And yes, I actually do use all of those windows, and that’s not including the Firefox tabs.)

I needed to get a second backup motherboard in any case to keep up the redundancy, so I decided to get a higher-quality CPU+MB+RAM set to serve as my primary system, and I’ll keep the backup stuff in a separate case, so that all I’ll have to do is move the drives and video cards if there’s a serious problem.

Money, money, money… But, redundancy is good. Uptime is even better. Hopefully this will end my desktop “woes” for a couple of years. It’ll be practically a new system with these upgrades (the two video cards being the oldest by far, though also the easiest to replace in a pinch).

Lost ground on E-Mail yesterday. Net Change: +15. That will be something to tackle today.

So, here’s a question for you: If you were to present a plan for studying the Bible, what would you say? One restriction: you need to support your plan with scripture.

Some places to look:

• Deuteronomy 6
• Psalm 119
• 2 Timothy 3:14-4:4
• James

As of End-of-Day:

• Received: 51 (only includes non-spam and most non-bulk)
• Sent: 30
• Still in Inbox: 0
• Total in Inbox: 42

That’s definitely progress over yesterday, and I got a little ahead on work as well. Not as much as I might have liked, but Faye had to go and plan a Bible study on a really good topic this evening, so I was much less inclined to skip it than I was originally intending.

I wonder if the people behind reformed.org know that they’re running advertising for Unitarians through their Google advertising at the bottom of each page…

For instance, on the Westminster Shorter Catechism page is an ad with the following text: “Dedicated to fighting for truth. One God & One Lord not the Trinity”. Outside of being somewhat lacking in punctuation, I’m pretty sure the ad and the site are not of the same mindset.

As of End-of-Day:

• Received: 62 (only includes non-spam and most non-bulk)
• Sent: 35
• Still in Inbox: 2
• Total in Inbox: 59

It definitely felt like a busy day for incoming E-Mail, at least when I was trying to get other things done. :-)

I wonder if it’s worth tracking this info… It wouldn’t be hard to automate (scriptlet in .procmailrc and a cron job at midnight that looks at my inbox and sent folders).

As someone who doesn’t drink (alcohol) or smoke, it always catches me off guard when I get carded for anything other than something like a car rental. Before today, the most recent time was two summers ago at a restaurant in Portland, OR, when I got carded even before I ordered — apparently, I was sitting in what was considered the bar, and they checked everyone in that section.

Tonight, I got carded at Staples of all places. Apparently, to buy canned air, you need to be at least 18 years old.

On Saturday, an event occurred in my business that is cause for a celebration. :-) Ask if you’d like to hear.

I haven’t figured out how to celebrate it yet. Any suggestions?

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.65

Since I now have friends with blogs that only support Atom feeds, I’ve taught my news collector a new trick, which took about a half-hour of research and four lines of code.

I’m thinking this will be a fun little script to mark up and put online here as a demonstration of how Perl can be used to make life easier. It isn’t complicated, terribly efficient, or following many of the “thou shalt write code this way” standards, but it does exactly what I want, and has taken a grand total of maybe 1.5 hours of development time since last April or May, while saving me far more time that would have been spent clicking and being subjected to advertising. I win. :-)

I just read this in someone’s source code:

 # I understand this now. That scares me.
 sub AUTOLOAD { my $self=shift; $AUTOLOAD =~ s/.*:://; $self->{$AUTOLOAD} }

I’ve had that reaction at times. :-) I don’t think I’ve ever written it down like that, though.

I got tired of hearing local radio stations on the cheap PC speakers I was using, and putting up with their bass-heavy response, so I decided to hook up my EV Sx80 speakers to the computer (with my mixer and an amp in between to make it work).

Two discoveries:

1) Computer monitors show all sorts of pretty colors and patterns when you put an unshielded speaker next to them. 12 inches of distance is enough to prevent this, at least for the Sx80 speakers.

2) The internal sound card on my motherboard sounds really bad. I was just blaming it on the cheap PC speakers that pick up local radio stations and CB radio, but I know the quality of these speakers, not to mention the difference if I play the exact same file through my MP3 player.

I have a USB sound card kicking around, so I’ll probably try that to see if it improves things any. I also have a 24-channel I/O, but it has a PCMCIA interface card, so I’d have to buy an adapter, and I’m trying to avoid spending money on this until I figure out exactly what I want (EV EVIDs arranged so that I can have two or three surround-sound setups oriented to where I’m working in the office, adjustable by pressing a scene button on the mixer…) and can afford (alas, not that).

The transition of going from zero employees (Christine doesn’t count) to more than zero employees is going to be very, very hard. Never mind the paperwork, the costs, the space, and the extra hardware required, I’m just not at all wired to manage people. I’d rather do almost anything else.

Should I aim to remain a one-person shop, get a partner (which would bring a host of other issues), or deal with it and work at rewiring myself? Or sell out, I suppose, but I’m not nearly ready to do that (see two posts prior to this one).

A friend of mine asked one of those good icebreaker questions a few months ago: if money wasn’t an option and you could have any job/life you wanted, what would you do?

After a few seconds thought, I replied: “I’m doing it.” Three months later, I’m as sure of that answer as ever. Even days like Thursday, where I:

• lost a motherboard in the middle of the afternoon
• messed up a mail merge twice (catching it before mailing, but after stuffing)
• got a corrupted Word configuration
• missed a font that was on my main computer but not my laptop, which I was using to print while swapping out the motherboard, causing the loss of more paper than I care to admit
• had an envelope printer with a misfeed complex

… all of which, combined, resulted in my staying up until past 4am to get everything done for the day… Even then, the prospect of doing anything else (well, other than sleep) was utterly unattractive.

Between the contact I have with missionaries from around the world, and the contact I’m able to have with people at Dartmouth as a result of the flexible work schedule, I’m thoroughly enjoying what I’m doing.

What would you do if you didn’t have financial or other constraints?

How can you make that dream a reality, if it isn’t already?

Ok, so I read your blog at work today, where I have my perl book nice & handy. The second-from-right element of localtime() is the day of year, so as long as you ran your code after January, the substitutions wouldn’t kick in. :-)

The code was most likely written in September (or early October), so right he is.

This code (written by me) is phenomenally wrong:

my $today     = join("-", (localtime()            )[3-5]);  
my $yesterday = join("-", (localtime(time - 86400))[3-5]);

$date =~ s/$today/Today/;
$date =~ s/$yesterday/Yesterday/;

It has two major problems:

1. I’m accessing array slot number -2 (3 minus 5), instead of array slots 3 through 5, which is what I intended. It should have been written [3..5] instead. Array slot -2 would be the second from the end (it loops in Perl, rather than overflowing). I haven’t looked up what that slot contains.

2. Even supposing number 1 was behaving properly, localtime returns an array where the three elements returned would have been day-of-month, month-number-with-zero-base (i.e. January is 0), and number-of-years-after-1900 (i.e. 2005 is 105). Since I’m looking for a date in YYYY-MM-DD format, this ain’t it. December 31st would have returned “31-11-105”. The numbers need to be adjusted and the layout reversed in order for it to return “2005-12-31” instead.

The strange part, though, is that it didn’t fundamentally mess up until today, and I use the results of the code practically every day as part of my worklist (though not yesterday, since it was a holiday). So, presumably, something about the new year caused it to go from being invisible to being highly distracting (producing 2Yesterday06-0Today-02 where previously it either worked or did nothing; presumably the latter, and I just didn’t notice that they weren’t relative dates).

Anyone care to figure out why this happens in Perl, for a challenge? :-) My guess, without taking the time to look anything up, is that the week number is probably the second-from-right array slot, and caused the problem to become apparent in the new year. Sunday the 1st would probably have been week 0 (I believe Monday is considered the start of the week in Unix) and today would be week 1. I probably implemented the code late enough last year that it never triggered this behavior, and therefore apparently did nothing. Day of year could also be the cause, if it was in the appropriate slot.

You know there’s little hope for you when you spend a good chunk of the night of New Year’s Eve engrossed in the IRS guide for doing audits of veterinary practices.