Steven Harms’ Blog

Technology, Linux, Life

Archive for January, 2009

Ubuntu Device Report: Epson NX400

Jan 18

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 4 Comments

NX400 printer

This device is a multifunction device providing:

  • Printing
  • Scanning
  • Media Card Reading

Operating System
This was tested on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 AMD64 release with all updates installed.

Printing
Printer configuration dialog
Printing was recognized out of the box. After editing some gimp settings, was able to print photo quality prints to 4×6 borderless.

Scanning
Scanning did not work using current Sane drivers. This printer says it is supported in Linux using the Epkowa driver, and drivers are provided, but not working in Intrepid. Some people have it working in Hardy.

Media Card Reading
This worked out of the box, immediately prompted to open pictures.

Tags: , , , ,

Dirty little secret

Jan 13

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 4 Comments

Some people might not be aware of this, but there are people who run Linux out there, and we use google. That means if we need to interview you, and we see a bunch of uneducated anti linux comments, you won’t get that interview. Nobody wants to hire anyone opposed to learning and technology.

Mass adding hosts to ssh known_hosts file

Jan 12

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 2 Comments

If you’re like me, and you have thousands of systems running ssh, and you want to ssh to all of them, you will get really familiar with the following:


The authenticity of host '10.97.56.242 (10.97.56.242)' can't be established
but keys of different type are already known for this host.

As fun as it may be to type ‘yes’ over and over again for practice, there is a better way:

ssh-keyscan -f ips-to-check.txt -t rsa >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

Where ips-to-check.txt is a list of all the ips, 1 per line.

To be fair

Jan 11

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 8 Comments

Can you imagine the amount of criticism Ubuntu would get if one of the beta releases deleted your mp3s? Microsoft accomplished that with the Windows 7 Beta, but somehow they don’t get much flak for it. I think that speaks to the honesty of the linux community.

Python magazine customer service

Jan 8

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 6 Comments

I enjoy python, program in it weekly, and subscribe to just about every python related blog. I was really excited during the holidays to get an email from Python Magazine saying they have a holiday offer:

“The coupon below can be redeemed at the php|architect and Python Magazine store for a surprise amount—up to $50 off your purchase!”

This sounded great, was very excited. Until I tried to add any item to my basket, and was unable to. I promptly notified support, on Dec 26. The coupon expired Dec 30, and no response was received until Jan 3, at which point they closed my ticket without explanation. I then reopened it and let them know that nobody could add items to their basket.

Jan 6 I get another email telling me it is fixed now. Try out the site, and it is still broken. Today they finally fixed the issue, but obviously I can no longer use my holiday promo code. I used it on php magazine before it expired because they never responded. So I asked for my code to be reactivated so I could actually use it on Python Magazine, which is what I actually wanted.

Cathleen from their customer service says no. I should not even have bothered to let them know their site was broken at this point, and I won’t subscribe to them. Congrats on phenomenal customer service.

Tri-head

Jan 5

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 10 Comments

I am going to write a post on how I got this to work (preview: failsafe X fails and so does nvidia-settings) etc, but until then, I added a vertical monitor which so far is really cool, and is now running on Ubuntu 8.10 (pic is from Windows). Until then, my desk looks like:

My computer desk