Hi, Planet Gentoo (and Gentoo Universe). Pretty please, if you’re syndicated here, could you disable summaries in your blogs for the Planet? Just make the rss feed include the whole article. That way, those of us who read the Planet (or Universe) can actually benifit from your blog entries, instead of seeing a sentence and a …
Nah nah nah nah nah! Indie loooooooost! 
Okay, it’s childish, but I always hated Indie, so I’m glad they finally lost.
The gnome-experimental overlay has now been updated to 2.13.3. Get it while it’s hot!
So, over the weekend, we had an adventure. It all started like this.
Janette: “Is there some way to get jpilot to print out address lables? I want to get the Christmas cards out this weekend.”
Me: “Maybe. If not, we can dump them as text, and I can write some scripts to do it.”
First problem: Due to hardware crashes and whatnot, we haven’t had network printing working for a while. Well, no problem, we’ll hook up Janette’s laptop directly to the USB printer, and print that way. Seemed to work fine, more on this later.
Second problem: Jpilot doesn’t (as far as we can tell) print lables, and we wanted to print directly on the envelopes anyway. Okay, dump the database and start googling. Yay! I found an enscript script to print labels! Play around a bunch, get something that looks like it should work, re-plug Janette’s laptop into the printer to try it.
Third problem: Cannot print anymore. <sigh> No matter what, the printer just sits there. No error messages I can find anywhere. Okay, I’ll just copy the files over to the Windows box and print from there.
Fourth problem: The Samba part of the fileserver isn’t working yet, can’t copy files over. No problem, I’ll use a USB thumb drive.
Fifth problem: Windows can’t print postscript files. This has always boggled me, but I’d forgotten it. <sigh> Okay, download gsview and ghostscript, and it prints now (after nagging). Do some test runs. Tweek. Test. Tweek. Finally, it’s printing fine. Oh, wait, it’s printing upside down. Okay, flip the envelope, and try a real run.
Sixth problem: In that orientation, the envelope always jams in the printer, with the open flap edge (either tucked or not) catching on the side of the printer. <sigh> Back to the drawing board. Okay, google mentioned that OpenOffice can print envelopes. Play with that a bit. Hey! It can import from evolution’s address book!
Seventh problem: Janette doesn’t use evo, and I can’t print (64-bit, and printer drivers are binary only). Okay, we’ll import into evo from jpilot (yay for vcards!). Didn’t quite work, but some script foo later, and evo has the full set of addresses, all nicely formatted. Janette plays with the layout, goes to test print.
Eighth problem: We can’t print from her laptop, remember? USB doesn’t work anymore for some reason, and no network printing. We can’t just load up oo.o on the windows box, because no evo there to get the addresses from. <sigh> Okay, go and configure samba on the server, play around again with various cups configuration methods, and finally I get her laptop to netprint.
Ninth problem: All we’re getting is the field names (<name> <address> <city>, etc.) rather than the database entries. Google to the rescue, apparently you have to say “yes” when it asks you if you want to print a form letter (WTF?).
Tenth problem: Janette had checked “Don’t ask me again” and we couldn’t find where to get them to ask it again. Also, I tried clicking that and saying Yes, and it still never worked. So, nuke .ooo-2.0, and we’re back in business, minus any settings we’d done. <sigh>
Finally, we have printed envelopes. I know, it was a ton of work just to get printed envelopes. We could have easily addressed them all by hand in the same amount of time, and probably with less frustration. But, keep in mind, there are three big positives out of the whole experience. First, Samba is back running, so the windows box is back on the network. Second, we have netprinting working again, so both of Janette’s laptops can print, and even from the living room. And third, we know how to print envelopes. Next time, it should be quick, easy, and painless.
So, since the Planets are full of entries about Firefox 1.5, I thought I’d throw my 2 cents into the mix. First off, I haven’t noticed any huge differences. I have gotten maybe 5 popups in the past 2 years, so I’m unlikely to notice the popup changes. The speed doesn’t really seem any different to me. It does seem to use less memory. It looks pretty much the same. I still have problems with text running off the edges of dialog boxes, but this may be related to my theme somehow.
Where I’ve noticed a difference are the regressions, all related to extensions. First off, there are a number of extensions that I use that won’t work with the new Firefox. I just lose their functionality entirely until they’re updated, and I’m sure some of them won’t be. Obviously, I can’t force FOSS developers to update their code, and if I care enough, I should update them myself, but it’s still annoying. Second, some of the functionality in extensions I use all the time has changed. The biggest example is adblock. I don’t have a media player plugin in my firefox, so embedded media causes firefox to complain about the lack of plugins. In 1.0.x, adblock still was told about the media, and put up it’s button to block the URL, allowing me to click on the button, and copy the URL to another program, say mplayer. However, in 1.5, adblock no longer sees that media, and therefore I can’t get the URL without scanning the source. This is very annoying, necessitating a change in the way I use firefox. Ideally, what I want for this use case is the equivilent of flashblock for all embedded media. Maybe I’ll go hack it… Another problem is with sessionsaver. Before, it worked perfectly, saving the history of each tab, and properly restoring all state. Now, the first saved tab is always blank, and the history of tabs is not being restored. It’s possible this is a problem with sessionsaver, and will be fixed, but for now, it makes it hard to use.
On the whole, firefox 1.5 is nice, and it works pretty well. My memory usage seems to be noticably lower than it was before, based on watching the system monitor. Hopefully, my other issues will be worked out, but I just wanted to float onto the blogsphere that firefox 1.5 is not a perfect improvement.