Planet TLLTS

Some days things just go right. It’s been a while since that happened to me, hence the lack of posts lately. Well, that changed tonight…

I decided it was high time to get a new printer. I have been using used HP LaserJets for years and my last, a LaserJet 5 was finally starting to show some wear, not to mention hogging enough electricity to power a small city. I have also endured about 4 years of complaints that we didn’t have a color printer.

I checked out the stock of some local electronic stores online and spent an hour or two googling whether this or that model printer wold work under Linux. I actually wanted to grab the same printer Dann bought, just because I knew that one would work, however, I couldn’t find a local source. I settled on buying an Epson Workforce 520 from the local BesyBuy.

Setup was an absolute breeze. I unpacked it, followed the setup instructions to add it to my local wireless connection via the printer’s control panel. Then I headed to openprinting.org to grab the driver and installed it. It’s just a deb (or rpm) package so it was a click or two to install. After that I headed to Linux Mint’s printer config utility, told it to search for network printers and it was found and installed automatically with no fuss, no muss whatsoever.

Everything works, and I mean everything. This is one of those multifunction printers that not only prints, but faxes (actually I haven’t tried that and probably won’t), copies AND SCANS! After my initial test print, I fired up Mint’s “Simple Scan” which scanned a document I had on the printer easily and perfectly. I was amazed!

I believe I may have found the perfect wireless printer/copier/scanner to run under Linux Mint (yes, it’s wireless too, did I mention that). I know Linux printing has come a long long way, but this was trivially easy. If you are looking for a great new printer addition to your Linux setup, this is it!

I do not work with XML enough, that is a fact. Even more, like most technologies I come to I spend more time putzing around implementing it than I should researching it. Now XML is fairly straight forward but validating with a schema is not as easily grasped. So I am passing on some bits of info I learned today while pulling my hair out over some XML that was not validating.

First, most validators suck. I went through a handful today, most of which just told me that it could not validate or gave me some error which was not at all helpful. I finally settled on this which provided the most information http://tools.decisionsoft.com/schemaValidate/. Had I started with this tool I could have saved a few hours of work.

There are two element types: Simple and Complex. When validating with a schema be aware that simple elements cannot have attributes. Thus, if you have an element without any children but with attributes you must declare that element as a complex element and use extension:

xs:element name="lemonTunaMan"
xs:complexType
xs:simpleContent
xs:extension base="xs:string"
xs:attribute name="HoagieGuy" type="xs:string" /
/xs:extension
/xs:simpleContent
/xs:complexType
/xs:element

How about that?

When working with child elements it i a good idea to be aware of occurrence and to specify occurrence. The way to do this is to specify minOccurs and/or maxOccurs. By default the values of these are 1. Now most documentation I was reviewing talked about and showed examples of using one or the other but not both which really threw me.

I had a situation where the test instance I was using to pull the XML did not have complete data and therefore some child elements were not present. This kept throwing and error in validation. Now generally these elements would have values but I know in dealing with other people there is a great than average possibility that someone would not have entered in all the data necessary. Therefore, I needed to cover this base and not just ignore the problem.

The value minOccurs specifies the minimum number of times a element can appear and maxOccurs specifies the maximum number of times. Again, left to defaults, not declaring in the schema, the values are 1 meaning that said element must appear once and only once. Now you can set minOccurs to 0 which means that the element can appear 0 or 1 time. NOTE: 0 or 1 time! You can set the values for maxOccurs to equal “unbound” which means that the element will appear 1 or more times. So what if you want to set an element that can appear 0 or more times? Well then you have to do this:

xs:element name="hairShavingsColor" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" /


You must declare the minOccurs to equal 0 and the maxOccurs to equal “unbounded.” No where did I see this made evident I just happened upon it by deductive reasoning.

Oh the fun! No my XML validates against the schema and all is well in my world until Monday when I add more elements!

Happy days!

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The last book, the Last Battle. I must say, the mythos Lewis created really had a powerful effect on me when it came to this book. What Shift and the Calormenes did to Narnia revolted me, that it did. This surprised me somewhat as after seeing the first movie and then reading the book I did not expect Lewis’s universe to have such an impact on me.

Compared to the rest of the series I found this book the darkest. There was much more violence to the level of the end of days scenario. Many times I expected the plans of the enemy to be thwarted but unlike the other books, events did not resolve so smoothly. Compared to the rest of the series I found this book the darkest.

I also found this to be the most allegorical to what I suspect had become Lewis’s Christian beliefs. But given that, I found his message very simple, timeless and refreshing. From the message to think for yourself, do what you feel is right to Aslan’s treatment of Puzzle and the Calormene’s was just fantastic and compelling. Not once did I feel Lewis was "in your face" with his beliefs.

The ending left me torn between sadness and joy. I do not want to spoil it but leave it that I surely did not expect this series to end this way, yet reading up to the last pages realized how could it end any other. The treatment of Susan was very interesting, although not unexpected as references to her characters later in life from some of the other books remained true. Her turning on Narnia had her removed from the flock; yet one suspects that she would always be welcome back by Aslan.

The one character that remains prominent throughout the entire book, Aslan, is just a fantastic metaphor for Christ. His compassion yet stern demeanor, his forgiveness and understanding fit perfectly with what I would portray Christ to be. A Lion, frightening and fierce but with gentle paws, tears that heal, and breath that washes away fears and sins. I dig Aslan, that I do.

So all-in-all, I am very glad I read this series.



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The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The origin of Narnia, very interesting. Though like the Silver Chair, this one was much darker than the rest of the series. The world of Charn was pretty compelling and not something I expected to see in this series but it offered the antagonist for the entire series. Lewis really seems to have it in for strong, female characters; that he does.



Part me was hoping for a lot more world hopping but Charn and Narnia were all there was. The in-between world of the wood offered tons of potential but alas, this is not to be.



Uncle Andrew was a very horrid characters. I did not expect him to be so wicked and skirting the line of lecherous old man. While he gets his just desserts in the end, Lewis made him a very creepy characters.



Some critics proclaim that this should actually be the first book of the series. I myself do not think so. While I am reading them in the order they were published so it may be a bit harder for me to consider reading them in any other order; given the content of each book do not think it would work without some serious rewording. Much of the origin of Narnia depends upon the reader having some experience with Narnia already to appreciate the work here. The contrast between Narnia and Charn would not be as powerful. The Aslan mythos would not be ingrained enough for the reader to appeciate his kindness and wisdom. No, I prefer to read them in the order they were written.



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Now that I’ve had the Archos 101 for a couple weeks I’d like to discuss what I like using it for. The Archos seems to float between the family room and my bedroom. Generally in the family room we leave it plugged in and on with the photo slide show continuously running. The photo album application has some nice transitions and works as well as any dedicated digital picture frame. The kitchen in my house is right next to the family room. More than once the Archos has made its way into the kitchen and used for recipe reference while cooking. Streaming my MythTV videos around the house via UPnP is an absolute no brainer. The tablet detected my MythTV system right out of the box and works very well. Old school gaming on this device is simply awesome. Android has a wealth of emulators (NESoid, SNESoid, SGENoid, UAE4Droid, Gameboid) and access to tons of ROMS. I recently picked up a Wiimote game controller and it works very well on Android devices via the Wiimote controller application. Most of the emulators I listed are capable of using the wiimote as a game controller. This past weekend I had family over and the kids were literally fighting each other to get in line to try some old school gaming on the Archos 101. It’s a lot of fun. Plug in the Archos 101 to your HDTV via the hdmi connection and you now have a complete old school gaming system. The sound is even piped into the tv via the hdmi cable. Big win when you take into consideration that the more expensive Android tablets (Viewsonic gtablet & Samsung Galaxy Tab) require you to purchase a multimedia doc to get an hdmi out connection. As I mentioned in my previous post the kickstand on the Archos 101 is such a great idea. The fact that no other tablet manufacturer has implemented one so far is kinda mind blowing. Another area where the Archos 101 excels at is as indoor Ebook reader. Aldiko and the Kindle app work exceptionally well on a device with a bigger screen. Comics look absolutely stunning. I’m tempted to start buying electronic comics to have the excuse to use the Comics application. So far I’m very happy with the Archos 101. I like using it whenever I can. More expensive devices may have nicer displays but for $299 you get a nice mix of good hardware and a very capable version of Android out of the box. It’s by no means perfect but definitely very usable and tweakable. A solid purchase for the price.

Words of advice: Definitely check out in person any device you’re seriously considering purchasing if you can.

Whoohoo! Paige’s new netbook came today – the System76 Starling. She is very happy, that she is. We got it all set up for here and transferred over her files from my System76 and sent her on her way. The Starling is running Ubuntu 10.06 netbook remix edition and she was not liking the interface so we switched her back to standard gnome and she is configuring away out there.

The Starling is a nice little system. I am not too keen on the track pad but the rest of it has me envious. If it were my system I suspect I would become accustomed to the pad, but never-the-less; it’s all hers.\

We spent the New Years holiday down with my Mother-in-Law in Chester, South Carolina. She runs a bed and breakfast out in the middle of no-where so cell phone’s were not working. On top of that the server seemed to drop down again the day after we left and did not come up. Long story short, the server hiccuped by my scripts caught it and for some reason, while the server was fine and running the isp was not reconnecting. I should have called them and will in the future. But….

My M-I-L had a system she never used anymore with a hard drive that had gone south. She was going to get rid of it so I brought it home, slapped in an ancient ide drive (this thing has sata and it pains me, that it does), installed Arch and now I have a back door into my network should the server go down. So if the server goes and my back door is not accessible it is time to call the ISP (Cox, who has been very good to me).

I had to work with the technicians today to get the IP working. I had done this a few months ago on my other server and it worked for a bit but then stopped. I chalked it up to a problem with my routing and since things were running very well for a while did not get around to fixing the problem. Well lo and behold here we are with a new machine and the same issue. I had to work with the Cox technicians to diagnose this and ultimately we could not figure out what the problem was.

The last thing we tried was plugging the modem right into the nic and that worked. Plugged the modem back into the switch and the nic into the switch and all was fine. It survived a reboot too. For some reason before doing this the modem was not even picking up the node connected to it. Weird. They are going to send out a new modem.

Well I am off now to bigger and better techie things. 2011 should be a lot more exciting and geeky for me.

The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hands down this has been my favorite of the series so far and the first (if not only; I’ve not completed the series yet) book that does not have any "real world" time. From the first chapter until the end the adventure never ceased. My expectations were side railed a few times which was nice as this book did not seem to "linear" compared to the rest in that problems were easily surmounted. Aslan had a lot of interaction on a different scale with the protagonists which was refreshing.

I suspect that while some of the twists, the whole twin thing and such, were a bit more novel back then. Today, with the influx of media we are exposed to, it’s not as exciting and new; more like old hat; but I can hardly fault Lewis for this.

There are easy lessons to be learned in this book and the maturing of the characters was just fantastic. The pace was great.

I wish there were more stories with Shasta and hope there is some way he comes back in the last book.



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The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another enjoyable read by C.S.Lewis. This time the adventure was a trek across land. The quest was botched throughout which is a different change of pace to everything always working out from the start. I found the book a bit more violent and dark and not just because of underworld. Speaking of which, there was some very interesting topics breached I hope Lewis comes back to in the remaing three books: The land of Bris(?), Father Time and the slumbering beasts that will awake at the world’s end.

The giants were great, acting like giants should; big, mean, and hungry. I enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed the whole book. I look forward to finishing up the series, that I do.



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