simonb.com: blog > articles from 2007

I wept

read more

Google have released their chart API. Here’s a few alternatives for Python:

• Matplotlib
• ChartDirector
• jpgraph
• dislin

See also vtk and MayaVi

read more

How to change the number of pages (NumPages) displayed in Word documents. Edit those field codes.

read more

China has published pictures from its first moon orbiter.

read more

Interesting talk by Bryan Cantrill on DTrace. At the beginning he rips into Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Scott’s talk at Google is here.

read more

“Print file was not accepted (client-error-document-format-not-supported)!”

Is the error line appearing in /var/log/cups/error_log on the Mac

The reason was this line:

in file /etc/cups/mime.convs on the server being commented out.

To enable raw printing of octet streams (what the mac sends with foomatic etc.) - the line needs to be uncommented. Otherwise the job will be rejected. You can only see this in the cups error_log file on the server with the cups LogLevel set to debug:

print_job: request file type is application/octet-stream.
Print-Job client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported format ‘application/octet-stream’!

Remember Luke.

read more

Google Apps is a marv thing. And free too. Since looping our email through Google we’ve been getting much less spam. But I’ve noticed the following quirks:

1. smtp.gmail.com is clever about the From field. The user I authenticate as is the one that shows up in the From field when the message is received. So even if I set the From field to be info@..., if I login as simonb@… The receiver sees email From simonb@… Once you’ve authenticated most services let you set the From field to whatever you like.

2. Mail from me to…

read more

Here’s a page explaining how to make the sasl_passwd.db file used by Postfix when SMTP relaying mail.

read more

We like to print invoices in a variety of currencies. There’s no setting in QuickBooks for this - it takes the system default… Well, most of the time. If you have your Region (International PreferencePane, System Preferences) set to one where the little yellow triangle shows up with the message about Unicode and WorldScript, the currency symbol is ignored. So, say I have China selected for no other reason than say I’m in China and billing in Yuan QuickBooks will use the $ (USD) symbol. I have to set the Region to ‘United States’ (not the Unicode one,…

read more

I’m re-installing the latest in a line of sick iMacs after it has returned to us with new hard disk. I keep getting “perl crashed” messages appearing in the console when doing a software update and when trying to print with cups. The perl crash log tells us why:

This is fixed by copying over a version of libperl.dylib which does have the symbol ‘atfork’ (available on every other Mac in the office) But the question is why does this happen. I got the iMac back…

read more