Enavigo

I love my laser printer, a Brother HL-2070N. It is fast, has a network interface and on my Mac it installed itself automagically. Sadly, on my wife’s Mac it installed alright but all print jobs failed. Even tinkering with CUPS did not work. Luckily I found the solution on this Apple support page.

The solution is essentially to install a new version of the open source driver set called Gutenprint. The problem I faced was that the version I tried to install, 5.2.4, did not install fully. I tried the Gutenprint uninstaller that comes in the same dmg file but it failed to work. Downloading the previous version, 5.2.3, and installing it worked just fine. All that was left to do was add the printer as usual (using JetDirect/Socket) and instead of using the default Brother HL-2070N drivers, to use the “Brother HL1270N – CUPS + Gutenprint 5.2.3″ driver.

Hope this helps and thanks to the folks from the Apple forums. This was a doozy to solve.

Tags:   Apple · brother · brother hl-2070n os x · fix · gutenprint · hl-2070n printer · os x · problemNo Comments.

So I got an email today from Nokia inviting me to get an email account on their Ovi Mail service.

I was a huge fan of their Share on Ovi photo service until its redesign several months back. Instead of a service that empowered you to do more than anything Flickr could do, and integrated better than Flickr with existing services built into your operating system, it became a crippled photo album. It was bad enough that despite being a free service, I got a Flickr account for which I pay. I love Nokia. They are original, free thinking and build phones that unlike my iPhone, don’t lose the call about 20-30% of the time. If they only had a better operating system on the excellent hardware… but that’s outside the scope of this post; Ovi Mail is.

After reading about Nokia introducing push email to the Philippines I was keen to see what Nokia has to offer in its mail service. This in light of the fact that Nokia still offers Nokia Messaging that consolidates emails from multiple accounts to a single inbox, which supposedly Nokia delivers to your messaging phone. Sadly, it appears that instead of a step forward, Ovi Mail is another step into ho-hum direction. In one sentence, Ovi Mail is another webmail service. Really. And like Yahoo! mail and Hotmail, it is accessible only from your web browser. There are no instructions on how to use this account anywhere outside the web.

One place where Ovi could have been great is integration with, well, the rest of Ovi. Namely, Ovi’s contact book. That would make sense. Those are extra awesome because they back up, for free, all the contacts from your Nokia phone, and sync with it. Great service, great idea. On an iPhone that would be extra cash for Mobile Me, unless you have a Microsoft Exchange email account. Sadly, your Ovi contacts are not present in Ovi Mail. Tragic, perplexing, sad.

I just wonder, what were they thinking? Is there a compelling reason to use Ovi Mail that I am missing?!

Inbox

Compose Message

Contacts

Tags:   Email · Hotmail · iphone · Microsoft · Nokia · operating system · Ovi · Ovi Mail · Push e-mail · Webmail · World Wide Web · Yahoo! · Yahoo! Mail2 Comments

Started playing with the Google Apps Engine last night. Now that Java is supported, even I can be lured after the magical charm of what is close to the infinite scalability holy grail. These are my impressions spending a couple of hours with the tutorial:
1. Eclipse makes it easy
Google created a pretty nifty plugin for the latest generation of Eclipse to help you with app engine development. It generates some of the code you need and hides the boring stuff. It also contains a Jetty app server that helps you deploy apps locally for debugging.

2. Old Java, new tricks?
Google appears to want to simplify the uptake and adoption. Therefore the tutorial uses old school servlets and JSPs. Need to test deeper to see if there is any reason not to use more modern Sping framework and templating engines like Velocity. Doubt that.

3. It’s JDO, JPA: not your average ORM
This will take some getting used to. To gain access to the bounty of ‘infinite’ no headache (supposedly) storage you will need to get cozy with JDO or JPA. These mainstream Java standards are less popular than Hibernate and other ORM libraries. You will need to learn yet another framework. Had one nit here with an annotation specifying the type of primary key causing a bug.

Overall, though, things appeared polished and working. Cannot wait to play more.

Tags:   Google · google app engine · hosting · Java · jdo · jpa · jsp · orm · programming · servletNo Comments.