Barring a server outage or interweb fiasco, tomorrow will show me my one-hundred-thousandth guest. Get a screenshot if it’s you!

Test (odd posting errors).

Hm, that’s odd.

I knocked the plug out of the wall on my way to start dinner. So sorry for the outage.

Between 11:00 and noon today, this site has experienced over 1,000 site visits. I’ll update this entry with more information about the surge as I figure out what is going on. The box is just slightly pokey, so as long as things don’t accelerate I don’t anticipate a problem.

UPDATE: The discussion was cited as ‘some degree of debunking’ in a Fark posting citing the Mini campaign, which it seems is just getting going and being received rather credulously.

The link has scrolled well off the active area of the thread so traffic should be dropping, I think.

UPDATE II: Hm, hard to tell, actually. Tailing the log and looking at server usages shows no drop in traffic; and the SQL-based traffic-reporting system I’m using is now sending multiple emails each time it rolls over another 50 visits. That bug may mean multiple simultaneous visitors, or it may mean that the software lacks record locking, in which case the database records are going to grow more suspect over time. Not that I’m terribly concerned, the system is an estimation device, after all.

UPDATE III: 3:30 and they’re still coming. The page is now well in the lead as most visited page in the site, with over 10,000 visits. The tide is definitely slowing, though. I didn’t record the page’s count yesterday, though. What’s most odd, to me, is that NOT ONE of the has farkers commented so far. Maybe they’re just shy.

Finally, this has distracted me from the Anhalt series sufficiently that I believe I’ll do the interiors tomorrow.

Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation: Oh, OK. I’ll give it a shot, while I’m tinkering with another site. Not that I’m actually linking to anything.

After all, what fun is debugging unless you pile on the untested variables?

Hm…

My gallery albums for Thanksgiving through March were successfully posted directly from iPhoto using the very sweet iPhoto2Gallery plugin.

One aspect of the process that is a clear improvement is that it definitely took less time to set up the nested albums, for example.

Alas, however, there appears to be little motion on the iPhoto to Movable Type front. I believe I will experiment with this at some point anyway.

The iPhoto to TypePad project is also apparently moving with all deliberate speed, which is too bad, since one presumes that Atom support will be folded into MTPro.

Email Servers and Mac OS X – by Graham Orndorff, original publication date 2001.

Mac OS X Hints thread – scroll down for an updated rewrite of the preceding article.

Troubleshooting with Postfix Logs: by Kyle D. Dent, author of Postfix: The Definitive Guide – 01/22/2004 (at OnLamp, an O’Reilly site).

Send E-Mail Everywhere: Postfix on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther / 10.2 Jaguar. Step-by-step for CLI activation

The Postfix Home page.

PostFix Enabler bolts a GUI front end onto the vanilla Mac OS X postfix distro. Unfortunately it’s documented rather sketchily, and the SSL cert tool it sports has yet to perform reliably for me, prompting this research binge. I think I figured out how to set up certs at the command line when I set up sendmail but that was a couple of years ago, as I recall.

Even when I have been able to get the cert to take, Eudora chokes at login; the message I get looks to me as though Eudora is misreading EOL characters from the server.

So here’s a page on Eudora authentication errors.

I have a vague recollection of wrestling with UW-IMAP and the associated UW doohickeys to get Eudora to play nice; I thought that was all associated with the ‘secure-only’ reqs that is the current standard for email transfer.

In a science experiment I conducted last night, it was determined that the introduction of one (1) complete dirty martini into the chassis of one (1) Macintosh Wallstreet G3 Powerbook via the apertures provided for speakers and keyboard will produce the following results:

1) a pleasant, gin-and-olive aroma will be noticeable in the environment of the computer.

2) upon initial introduction of the liquid to the chassis, the computer will no longer respond to keyboard commands, such as tapping the space bar to awaken the computer in preparation for an orderly shutdown.

3) No amount of verbal instruction to the computer (or to other entities traditionally associated with faith-based enterprises) will alter result number 2.

4) when partially disassembled after about twelve hours, a residue of liquid may be noted resting on the motherboard of the computer.

5) if power is experimentally reconnected to the computer and the power button is pressed, after a few minutes, a disturbing staticky noise will travel from speaker to speaker for about thirty seconds.

Observations are continuing.

A pointer post to yesterday’s USB printing plea, now resolved.

If your USB-shared HP printer is misbehaving under Mac OS X by not providing all options to all clients on the network, make sure the drivers on all the machines are the same version.

1. Download the updated printer drivers from HP.

2. Install the drivers on all the machines in the network, servers and clients, to ensure the same version is deployed. HP notes that differing versions of drivers can cause problems in printing in networked environments.

3. On each machine, delete and re-add the printer in Print Center to be certain that the installation process zapped old prefs and settings.

Kudos to Manuel for prompting me to think this through systematically, leading to my decision to read the readme. D’oh.

OK, you non-Mac users, move along. Nothing to see here. You remaining ten folks, limber up your noggins, ‘cuz I’m asking for some help.

Without going into brain-stunning detail, I have a small home network. On my primary server unit, an inkjet printer, the HP 970Cxi, is configured to be available to the network via OS X’s USB printer sharing. It works well for all machines.

However, the HP offers a cool feature that I use when printing locally by default, two-sided printing. On only one of the networked machines does this option appear when printing to the remote queue.

On my main desktop machine, the option is not available in the remote dialogs, but if I plug the printer directly into that machine, the option becomes available.

My main machine is using 10.3.x, the server is under 10.2.x (8, I think), and the other machines that use the service are also under 10.2.x.

I’m digging around at Apple, and my instinct tells me that for some reason, the desktop machine is using two different printer drivers when it should be using the same one for both instances.

Any experience, insight, or opinions out there?

UPDATE: Goodness! MacSurfer linked to this in their headlines. So… Let me add some info resources.

I did find a thread on the Apple Discussions website, not about the disappearing two-sided printer option under USB printer sharing specifically, but about the disappearing option under HP printer drivers. I was unable to use the thread to develop a resolution, however.

Regrettably, Apple deletes old discussion threads after an unreasonably short period – three months – so the utility of the link and the data there is quite llimited.

The gist of the thread is to install the updated HP drivers, and to always work through the ‘Page Format…” dialog when printing. However, not everyone finds that the update respects the two-sided option.

I did install the updated driver, and it did not provide the two-sided option when revising the settings for the remote printer.

UPDATE II: A comment from Manuel led to some thinking, and a patient readthrough of the HP driver readme led to the resolution. HP mentions that version differences between drivers could cause unexpected printer results. So I gingerly installed the updated drivers on the server, and voila, I have access to the 2-sided printing and ink-throttling features again. Thanks, Manny, and thanks Internet!