The first anniversary of my 35th birthday

Today is my birthday and it is being spent relaxing and playing with my new iPhone. A couple of friends showed there's to me on friday and it was then that I realized how much I have been missing. Already watching a movie on it this morning.

Sent from my iPhone

Network Printing and Canon PIXMA MX310

Purchased the Canon PIXMA MX310 all-in-one office printer tonight and the heat was on to get it to work for the MacBook over a wireless network. I have the DLINK DPR-1260 wireless router/booster/print server which does not have any support for Mac OS X. Therefore, turned to the CUPS drivers in the Gutenprint project. As it turns out, Gutenprint does not have the exact driver for the PIXMA MX310, but you can use the MP-150 driver.

To get everything working, I did the following:

1. Downloaded and installed the drivers
2. Went to Print & Fax setup and added a new printer
   
3. Selected HP Jet Direct - Socket for the Protocol
4. Entered the address: 192.168.x.xx:9100 (9100 is the port assigned by the DLINK print server)
5. Entered the queue name assigned by the DLINK print server
6. Selected Canon PIXMA MP150 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.2 in the Print Using box
   

Viola, I'm printing like a champ over the network from both our MacBook and PC system. Copying works great, faxing works great, but still have to figure out to get the scanner to work.

Experimental site navigation added to blog

Recently, I have become enamored with the concept of a "command line" interface. While, I wish I could take credit for the concept, I was quick to realize that before the OS UI, there were punch cards...the punch cards were good...but, quickly replaced by a terminal with a command line for telling computers what to do.

Anyway, I digress. With Mac OS X, the Spotlight application is my most favorite as it provides a command line interface for launching any application or searching for any document on my Mac. Furthermore, I found Enso from Humanized that provides similar functionality to my PC.

So, thinking about it some, what bothers me the most about web sites is the fact that you have to use a mouse to navigate them effectively. So, I figured bring the command line to the web site. The "kui navigation" is a beta navigation tool for websites (v. 0.000001...you get the point, it's very new and not tested at all) leveraging the DOM and Yahoo! AutoComplete GUI library. The result, is a command line that allows you to start typing the text of a hyperlink on the page and it will shortlist the matches based on the DOM which you can select to jump to the next page.

Get it? Give it a try, it's in the right navigation pane. Remember, no comments from the peanut gallery unless they are positive. I made no attempt to test outside of Firefox nor did I worry about duplicate links.

ZFS File System...now that's big

As I surfed the Internet tonight, came across an article about the ZFS File System. Not being familiar with it, I did a bit of reading to learn more, as that is what one may due when trying to learn.  Anyway, looking on WikiPedia, I found an interesting assertion that frankly, made my head hurt.

If a billion computers each filled a billion individual file systems per second, the time required to reach the limit of the overall system would be almost 1,000 times the estimated age of the universe.

Wow, not that's a lot of data.  Makes you wonder how much it really is...ok, maybe not.