The reason for low frequency posting on this blog

Although it is a little higher in my Chinese version blog, my frequency for posting this blog is quite low. The reason for the low frequency is that, I'm a busy and lazy man. Besides, the Blogger system was quite unstable recently. I cound not publish my blog some days ago. Hmm....
Read more ...

Creating my own printing spool

The OIT (Office of Information Technology) provides a PostScript massive printing service called central-ps, of which there is no quota limitation but can only print two side black and white printings. Besides, there is usually three delivery times per day that the printouts are delivered to the public bins and people can pick up their printous at there.

This service is quite usefull for me, especially for that I have lots of documents to print in this semester. There are basically three ways to submit jobs to the central-ps printing queue:

• Through the computers in some special locations that share the printer through Samba
• Through the web printing service
• Through the prnt command on the Solaris workstation

The first one is the most straight-forward method that requires no file format converting. However, OIT seems to have no plan to allow the printer sharing to all IPs within the campus. Although it requires file converting for the remaining two methods, the web printing is also convenient. But there are some scripting error within the web printing pages that it always causes the browsers other than IE to complain that there is a time-consuming script by continuing running which the system could stop responding. It is not effect for the print jobs if stop the script, but it feels bad to see some kind of message like this. The last one seems to be the most sophisticated one for submitting jobs, but, since the command line is one of the most powerful tool for UN*X, I can play some fun game with this!

The idea is simple:

1. Write a script that monitors a specific directory. If there are PostScript files in that directory, submit them with prnt command, move the success files into other directory, also move the failed ones into another directory, and mail a notice to me.
2. Schedule a cron job that execute that script every 10 minutes.

After setting up this, I have a "private print spool" that automatically submits the files! All I have to do now are just converting the file, transfer the file to that directory, and then pick up the printouts after the delivery time!

UN*X and command line rocks!
Read more ...

Minimo v0.013 vs. Dell Axim x51v

My PocketPC, Dell Axim x51v, uses M$ Windows Mobile 5.0 (WM5) as OS. However, since WM5 did not fully compatible to earlier versions like WM2003, lots of applications that run on WM2003 can not run correctly on WM5. The applications built in WM5 are quite "basic", and PocketIE is quite sucks that it now always render ALL pages into blank without known reasons. This is the second time that PocketIE fails. On the first failure, it backs to normal by deleting all caches and cookies, but this does not work this time. I am absolutely not willing to hard-reset only to let the sucking PocketIE back to normal!

I personally dislike IE for that it does not comply to standard and has no tab-browsing support. And I don't like PocketIE either for that it lacks lots of features that makes visiting some website extremely difficult. So I had tried the Minimo for PocketPC (MinimoCE) after I got my Axim x51v, even before the PocketIE went strange. Although MinimoCE supports WM2003, but it seems not worked on WM5 for the version older than v0.009. Version 0.009 did run on WM5, but it is not very stable. Version 0.010 is much more stable, but the UI is not very suitable for the screen resolution of my Axim x51v. So when v0.011 released, I installed it immediately. But v0.011 went even worse -- it does not start and just shows the splashing. Although the stopped Minimo does not hang the whole system, it is not usable in this situation. Originally, I though this was caused by some bug in v0.011, but, when v0.012 released and I got the same result, I think that maybe it is just incompatible with my device.

A few weeks ago, MinimoCE v0.013 released, and it officially claims to be WM5 compatible. I, of course, install it and want to get rid of the almost expired Opera Mobile, but, unfortunately, it still does not work on my device. When I execute it, after the splashing, a error message popups:

TypeError: securityUI has no properties

In the popup screen, it requests user to report this as a bug. I tried to report this to Minimo project, but, since the bugzilla system of Minimo requires a user account, and I am a little too lazy to create one only for reporting this bug, I did not do this. Instead, I did some search on Minimo's project page, and found something interesting in the Minimo forum of mozillaZine: there are some people of which has the same problem on MinimoCE v0.012 with his/her Axim x51v, but someone found that Minimo works if the x51v is hard-reset and then MinimoCE is re-installed. Furthermore, some other people who were not willing to do hard-reset found that it can work if the MinimoCE is reinstalled after completely remove the old installation files.

Since I have no idea whether this also works for v0.013 for my case or not, I actually do the following steps:

1. Uninstall "Mozilla Minimo" from Setting->Remove Programs
2. Delete completely the \Program Files\Minimo folder
3. Delete completely the \Windows\Mozilla folder
4. Reinstall MinimoCE v0.013

And, it works like a charm!

The UI for Minimo v0.013 is re-designed that it looks much better on PocketPC than the older versions. Although it is has some problem with the software on-screen keyboard, it is a usable browser for me now.

The following screenshot is the one shown on the Minimo project page. Maybe I'll take one of mine later.


Read more ...