The Tech Blog of Ken

Canon MP530 wakes from the dead

I love my Canon MP530 multi-function printer. I bought it because I just wanted to have a printer that could send faxes, but surprisingly it's become one of my favorite household gadgets.

A few great features:
- Duplex printing
- Batch scanning with the sheet feeder
- Duplex scanning (scan a stack, then flip it, software fixes the order)
- Scans legal sized documents

The usability is so good that I don't hesitate to scan things, even to the point where I routinely archive household documents to PDF. Canon did a great job of integrating the scanning software with the printer. I used to waste a lot of time fiddling around with a flatbed scanner and some quirky scanning software. Without a sheet feeder, it took forever to scan just a few pages. Now, I just drop a stack of documents into the sheet feeder, hit the start button, and a few seconds later I have a PDF.

So the other day, I was pretty sad to discover that my printer would not turn on. I thought maybe the power strip was fried, but after half an hour of plugging and unplugging things, I came to the conclusion that my printer was dead and that I would have to buy another one.

Fortunately, I made a last ditch attempt to Google a solution, and found a CNet forum thread where several people people had the same problem. Turns out that this happens on some printers and the solution is just to unplug the printer for 20 minutes. Half an hour later, I had a working printer instead of a $200 door stop. I hope this post keeps someone else from owning a door stop, too.

Happy belated 30th birthday Internet!

Dear Internet,

Sorry I missed your birthday last month. You've accomplished a lot in 30 years - here's to 30 more years of success!

Ken

Decluttering 2007

things I did to declutter last year:

1) bought a label maker
2) moved the big shredder downstairs by the door (near the mail pile)
3) started a paper recycling pile (also near the mail pile)
4) sorted a closet full of computer stuff into uniform, labeled boxes
5) consistently kept my email inbox under control (thanks merlin!)
6) started digitally archiving documents to PDF
7) purged the household filing cabinet and sorted into properly labeled folders

Warning for PowerPC to Intel switchers: repartition your backup drives

Warning for those going from a PowerPC to an Intel Mac. If you are using an external backup drive to create a bootable clone of your main hard disk, be sure to reformat the backup drive from APM to GUID format. If you don't, you won't be able to boot off of the backup drive if (when) disaster strikes. APM-partitioned drives are known to cause problems with Time Machine as well.

make your own Simpsons avatar

Make your own Simpsons avatar at the Simpsons Movie web site. Not quite as fun as the one on the Wii, but still pretty cool.

awesome: woman tries to buy all the iPhones and gets owned

this is awesome. "No doubt you've seen people all over the country who camped out for hours to get the hot new iPhone. So how did one local guy get the gadget AND eight crisp $100 bills to boot? FOX 4's Steve Noviello watched the money unfold." (via digg)

lazyweb: any good books on testing?

just a lazyweb: I'm looking for some book recommendations on software testing. Books that I can use for training a green QA guy, not books for developers. I'm helping someone get up to speed with general software testing principles. Any suggestions?

Antipattern: Something Stupid and Rapid Development

Every experienced developer knows this scenario - you're coding all day, churning out all kinds of code, feeling really productive, and then WHAM!

You run into a problem that grinds all that productivity to a halt.  Sometimes for the next day or two, or worse. 

I call this Something Stupid, as in "I've been stuck for the last three days on Something Stupid".

by Dizzy Girl

Something Stupid is characterized by some innocuous coding error that creates a severe problem - could be a missing semi-colon, a stray tab character, or a missing XML tag. Something Stupid is usually accompanied by bizarre and misleading error messages and strange behavior. Unfortunately, you don't usually realize it's Something Stupid until you waste a few days diagnosing the problem.

Usually when I'm stuck in the midst of Something Stupid, it seems like some kind of hard problem. Sometimes, I have the hubris to think that there's a subtle bug in some library that I'm using. I remember once in college I was totally convinced that gcc had a bug when it was something in my own code. In Java, 9 out of 10 times it has something to do with something wrong with the classpath.  (Always remember this, java developers.) If the code is dealing with J2EE, it might be 95 out of 100.

Be careful to recognize the signs of Something Stupid and deal with it as such. Use the principle of Occam's Razor to look for low-level problems instead of complex ones. In the worst case, restore your code to the last known working state and redo your changes.

Wasting a lot of time dealing Something Stupid with is often a sign of something wrong with your development process. Maybe you need to use better source control practices, or to create some build/deployment scripts, or should take advantage of unit testing more effectively. Avoid things that generally cause strange problems, like using spaces in file and directory names.

The new breed of frameworks are not immune to this phenomenon. Ruby on Rails has been touted as a framework that offers at least 10X the productivity of other web frameworks. It's been sold as being free from the configuration hassles associated with frameworks like J2EE. It is indeed very fast to develop in Rails, but don't be fooled into complacency - Ruby/Rails is just as prone to Something Stupid. Perhaps even more so. Because of the dynamic nature of ruby and the heavy use of conventions in Rails, Something Stupid can be even harder to hunt down than in other environments.

Cool stuff found at The Rails Edge

I love nifty tools. One of my favorite things about attending a conference is finding out about the latest cool tools that I haven't discovered on my own. Here are a few to look into.

Day 1:
workingwithrails.com - a directory of rails developers
Amazon EC2 - Amazon's grid computing service, start Linux clusters on demand
HomeMarks - very slick Ajax bookmark manager, written by one of the conference attendees using Rails
happycodr.com - a showcase site for Rails apps
rspec - Behavior Driven Development in Ruby, sort of a declarative unit testing framework
mule - another goodie from codehaus, an open source Java Enterprise Service Bus implementation
revolutionhealth - perhaps one of the largest Rails apps currently in production, from AOL's Steve Case

Day 2:
slicehost - Xen VPS hosting, only 256MB of RAM for only $20/month
witch for OS X - window switching for keyboard lovers
flexmock and flexstub - from Rails committer Jim Weirich, mock objects for Ruby
Selenium IDE - a Firefox plugin for working with the Selenium web testing framework
watir - a web testing framework in Ruby
zentest - not quite sure what this does, but one conference attendee was very adamant about this testing tool

Day 3:
visor - a drop-down terminal for OS X, a la Quake
Streamlined - a rich Rails view generator, sort of like scaffolding on steroids
deprec - a set of canned scripts for setting up a standard Ubuntu server with Rails

Technorati Tags: rails, ruby, testing, tools

At RailsEdge

I'm pretty glad to be attending The Rails Edge conference in Reston this week. It looks like it's going to be pretty interesting. The interesting thing about this conference is that there is only one track - meaning all attendees attend all the same sessions. There are a lot more people here than I expected, and lots of glowing Apple logos around, too :)

So far I've gone through a brain-melting session on metaprogramming, which isn't the best thing to try to grok first thing in the morning. Looks like a packed day.

Technorati Tags: rails