Web 0.2

Or: “how to set draft printing quality as default”

[warning: non Linux post]

I’ve had two pretty modern (year 2006+) HP InkJet printers. Their driver adds a new tab to the Windows “Printing Preferences” dialog (I really enjoy those vendor-specific dialogs!), through which  one can change the printing quality.

For 90% of my home needs, black-only draft quality is enough, so upon printing, from the “Printing Dialog”, I click “Printing Preferences” and change the quality to black-only + fast/economical printing:

However, the GUI designer forgot (or the MS API doesn’t allow) a “make this the default” button, which is a MUST in my opinion.

A quick digging revealed the forbidden truth, though.

So, how can we really set the default printing quality?

Control Panel -> Printers -> right click on your printer -> Properties -> “Advanced” Tab (Cuz it’s only for really advanced users! are you sure you are one?) -> Printing Defaults button:

Microsoft (and Apple), as the biggest OS vendors, have the [almost] ultimate power: they set the rules for most of the world computers, and they set the defaults. By making power-saving options very straightforward, and even making the defaults environment-friendly, they can decrease the world power saving by very large numbers. Same should go with Ink saving.

I’ve been using VMware server mainly for accessing Windows (sometimes I need MS Office or IE). VMware server is a very good product, but is also closed source, and very disconnected from the community.

Some of the source is open (such as vmmon & vmnet kernel modules), but still VMware don’t cooperate with the FOSS community. This means that good people make patches to support newer kernel versions, but they act like pirates. VMware won’t apply their patches. VMware can’t work out-of-the-box on kernels since ~2.6.21 or so.

Same goes with a more minor, X <-> GTK <-> VMware bug I’ve been writing about. It might be a non-VMware bug but something in Xorg. But I’d expect them to figure it out and post a message or even help to fix the Xorg bug, if it’s an Xorg bug. Instead, they either ignore our requests or tell that we use non supported distros. Which is true. But if the problem is Xorg7.3 integration, they’d better fix it, because RHEL 6 would probably use it as well. Same goes for new kernel versions.

Both bugs are being neglected by VMware for more than a year.

So screw them, I chose a community supported virtualization solution: VirtualBox Open Source Edition. Debian has a kernel module package for each kernel versions, and stuff looks much better so far.
I’d suggest VMware to hire a single FOSS guy for Linux integration and “community special tasks”. He’ll be very busy, but I think that this is all it takes to change their “community involvement” upside-down.

Update: been using it for few days, VirtualBox is cool

I always say “Debian unstable” should be renamed to “Debian stable” (and Debian stable -> deprecated), because it hardly ever gets broken.

Well, this time of the year has come. Wordpress got a security update backported from 2.6.1->2.5.1, but.. only half-baked (some functions are missing)

The bad version is easily recognizable by this PHP error:

"Fatal error: Call to undefined function admin_url() in
/usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/link-template.php on line 470"

A debian bug has already been opened.

/etc/ldap.conf (CentOS/RHEL) and /etc/libnss-ldap.conf (Debian) has an interesting line:

# Reconnect policy: hard (default) will retry connecting to
# the software with exponential backoff, soft will fail
# immediately.
# bind_policy hard

By default (when commented out) it is set to hard. This means that LDAP queries would wait & retry a long period if LDAP server is down. soft means try once, and return even if failed.

Then yet again we get the chicken & egg problem.

Long story short: on an LDAP-client+server machine, services that start before LDAP would simply freeze for a long period, if they resolve user/group names. On CentOS it happens with the dbus service. (Even if user/group are set locally on passwd/group, an LDAP query would be triggered to find additional group membership).

By the way, on Debian “hard” policy differs from CentOS’s “hard” policy. Debian waits a few seconds while CentOS waits about 2 minutes. The “how long should I wait” params are set in the code (ldap-nss.h), and can’t be tuned from the config file.

So as a workaround I’ve set “bind_policy soft” on my LDAP server+client; but I believe that a better solution should be done. Either:

• Default should be soft (just like DNS default)
• CentOS timeout should be lower, like Debian
• Timeouts should be tuneable through the config file

First two bullets are probably “management decisions”, but I’ll add the 3rd bullet to my TODO

Following the interesting post about Li-ion batteries, I’ll write a bit about a new type of battery in the NiMH area.

NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) is the most popular solution for rechargeable AA / AAA batteries (1.2 Volt). In recent years, these batteries got better, and competed on the “who has a bigger” mAh (Milli-Amper-Hour) category, which measures the batteries’ capacity. 2700mAh is the biggest number I’ve seen yet in stores.

One of the disadvantages of NiMH batteries is their quick self-discharge: within few weeks, a 100% loaded battery would self-discharge to 50% state, regardless whether it’s been in use or not.

The new NiMH variant is called Low self-discharge NiMH batteries. These ones are supposed to self-discharge much slower: After a year, a 100% loaded battery would self-discharge to 70-85% (compared to 50% after few weeks(!) with regular NiMH, as mentioned in previous paragraph). A nice side-effect is that it also comes partly charged from the stores.

GP ReCyko is one brand, so far the only one I’ve seen in Israel. I bought 4 AA such batteries for 80NIS ($22). I’m sorry that it looks like an ad, I just don’t know any other brand yet. Actually these batteries are only 2050mAh (written in really small letters), but still, it’s 2050mAh that stay longer..

The big advantage of the new type of batteries is for low-profile consumers, such as remote controls, clocks, calculators, or my bicycle led flashlights; for in these appliances, the main factor for discharging is the self-discharge, and not the appliance’s regular electricity consumption.

So, is it really greener as the ad says? Probably yes, for two reasons:

• Now we can use a rechargeable battery for more-or-less all appliances.
• In many cases we’ll recharge the batteries less frequently, thus power plants could rest more.

So.. stop buying single-use batteries that ruin the environment.