Have fun playing pin the tail on the moose!

Even though paper is fairly cheap, I still have somewhat of an obsession to not waste paper. Unfortunately double sided printing is usually not something done in inexpensive laser printers. I had previously worked out a fairly good method for doing double sided printing on my printer:

1) Print out all pages selecting “odd pages only”

2) Put the printed sheets back in the printer the other way around (omit the last page if the document ends on an odd numbered page)

3) Print out all pages selecting “even pages only” and “reverse page order”

I recently discovered that my printer driver has n-up printing. n-up printing is where multiple pages are printed on one sheet of paper. For example, 2-up puts two pages side by side on one sheet. For most documents, printing 2-up is still very readable. For presentation (powerpoint) materials 6-up usually works well, or 4-up if it uses smaller fonts.

But unfortunately, using n-up printing is not compatible with the above double sided printing trick. You’d need an “every other pair of pages” option in there, and no application has that. Which means that if you print 2-up single sided, you aren’t saving paper versus 1-up double sided, just reducing the hassle.

I was searching google on tools to automate both n-up and double sided printing together, but one of the first sites I came across had the simplest solution:

1) Take all the paper out of the printer

2) Print your entire document

3) Insert one sheet

4) Flip the sheet and insert again

5) Unless done, return to step three.

It’s a bit more labor intensive, but since you’re getting 4 pages on each sheet, it goes fairly quickly. This exercise was all to be able to print out a 99 page document using only 25 sheets of paper.

This is one of those solutions that seems completely obvious after the fact.

I’ve successfully compiled and installed OpenSolaris from source code. While the build and install has a lot of rough edges still, it’s very exciting to have a working open source (mostly) copy of Solaris running!

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Dennis Hickey wrote an interesting article in the Taipei Times “Clearing the air over sovereignty.”

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My dad left this morning. The highlight of his visit was spending Sunday and Monday up on Yangming Mountain. We stayed at a nice out of the way hot spring resort and spent some time exploring some of the scenic spots. Emily got carsick twice and we got stuck in the rain at one spot, and I had to drive illegally (I can drive but don’t have a Taiwan driver’s license. My wife can barely drive but has a license. We tried it the legal way but it was not fun.), but overall it was pretty nice.

The low point was me getting a stomach bug again on Tuesday. We managed to make it out for a while to take the world’s fastest elevator to the top of the world’s tallest building (Taipei 101), but it wasn’t that fun for me. I think we know why I keep getting sick though. On Tuesday evening one of the downstairs neighbors in our building came up to say that the water tank for the building is very dirty and wanted to discuss splitting the cost of cleaning it. While we have our own separate water tank, it turns out that it is fed from the main building tank. I’d wondered about the water quality before, so I’m hoping that getting the tanks cleaned will solve the problem. I’m sticking to bottled water from 7-11 until they’re cleaned.

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Thanks for sending the salami, Bonita.

My dad’s coming into town for a few days today, so I’ll probably be quiet for a bit.

Posted some new pictures of my new computer case and a set of wood carvings of cats my wife gave me for my birthday. It’s hard to judge the size of the cats but the tallest is a bit more than one meter tall.

The Taipei Times published an interesting article about Frank Dikötter (馮客) and his research into modern Chinese history. He contends that problems in early Republican China were vastly overstated by communist historians. Interesting read.

I suppose I should give some background. I’ve never read any of the Batman comics. I saw some of the TV series when I was younger. I thought the 1989 “Batman” movie was quite good. I thought the subsequent Batman movies ranged from mediocre to awful. I had heard good things about the latest movie, though, so I went in with pretty high expectations.

I was not disappointed.

I very much enjoyed “Batman Begins” and would even say that it is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Unlike previous Batman efforts, they stayed solidly with a dark theme which avoided the painful awkwardness of trying to mix dark themes with humor which plagued the previous versions. The plot and writing were quite good, with few holes in the story (and hey, it’s based on a comic book, so you gotta let certain things slide). Visuals were excellent. Casting was very good. It seems odd to put a little known lead actor with so many veteran actors in the supporting cast, but it worked surprisingly well. This Wired review complains that Katie Holmes didn’t perform well, but I’d have to disagree on that point. I’ve been a Katie Holmes fan since Dawson’s Creek though, so maybe I’m biased.

Overall, I’d say it was an excellent showing, and hope they can come out with some more Batman stories of this high caliber.

I’ve started playing with DIY VOIP installations recently. Last time I was back in the US, I picked up a hardware IP Phone and an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) to experiment with. For the hardware phone, I picked the Sipura SPA-841 based on features and reviews.

Yesterday I took it out of the box and started playing with it. First, I got it working with Free World Dialup which went OK once I figured out that STUN is broken in the firmware I had, 0.9.1. I upgraded the phone to the new 3.1.3a firmware and after that it was fine. Then I configured it to use an Asterisk (Linux PBX software) server I’d set up. Had some problems with that, but it turns out it was because I hadn’t applied my changes on the Asterisk server. Oops.

That’s when things started going downhill fast. First the microphone started getting flaky. When making calls, I could only be heard if shouting straight into the microphone. While debugging this, I was dialing an FWD number when the phone just froze up completely. When I power cycled it, it came back up but froze again less than a minute later. After a few rounds of this, it started booting up less and less frequently. I was able to do a Factory Reset once, but that didn’t help any.

Worried that it was the new firmware that was flaky, I downgraded to an older version, 0.9.5. (I couldn’t find my original firmware version available for download, so that’s as close as I could get.) The phone was getting increasingly flaky now, but I was able to just squeeze in a successful firmware downgrade. That didn’t help either. At this point it has degraded to the point where it rarely boots up anymore.

While looking around the web, a saw that this guy and this guy have had similar difficulties with this model. The latter actually performed a postmortem autopsy which shows the fairly low quality of the phone’s manufacture.

Sipura refers support requests to the reseller, so I’m waiting to see what the place I bought it from suggests. Regardless, it’ll probably involve international shipping to send it in for repair which will be expensive and slow.

Sipura was recently bought by Cisco, so hopefully quality will start to improve, but for now it’s probably best to avoid this model.

On my main desktop and my laptop I use Grisoft‘s commercial anti-virus product AVG SoHo Edition. On my video capture box I use the very popular AVG Free Edition, a stripped down version without support. (If you don’t have anti-virus software on any of your Windows systems, take a moment to download the AVG Free Edition now.) I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. I’m pretty careful about opening email, but other people also use my computer and occasionally they will not be so careful.

Today I got a popup that a file had been identified as infected by a trojan PSW.Banker.ASO. I opened up the Virus Vault and found that a total of nine files had been detected as that same trojan horse over the past 12 hours. Looking into it some more, I became suspicious that there was any actual infection. The supposedly infected files were all legitimate existing files of various sizes, and there were no other symptoms of this type of infection present. Also, the file was pronounced clean by ClamAV.

Since this was on a system with support, I sent off a technical support request to Grisoft. They promise that they have support available 24/7, but I’ve heard that before and still had to wait a day or two for response. To my surprise, 35 minutes later a response came back from a support person. And to my further astonishment, he didn’t suggest stupid things like rebooting my computer or clearing my browser cache. He actually said they had found the problem. And to completely flabbergast me, he went on to say that they had pushed out a new update to fix the problem. All I had to do was hit the update button on the software (or wait a few hours for it to automatically be picked up) and the problem was solved!

THIRTY FIVE MINUTES!

That’s some seriously excellent customer service. Next time you need to buy anti-virus software, consider Grisoft.