For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been battling printing issues, trying to print some contract work on canvas through my Epson R1800. To say it hasn’t gone well is giving the experience too much positive light.

As I researched the issue, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one seeing dark prints with the R1800, and not just on canvas. I’ve seen that with other media, but I “band aided” the problem by increasing the brightness of the ready-for-print images. Not elegant, and shouldn’t be necessary, but it worked… generally. However, that process didn’t translate well onto canvas, and after blowing through a roll of canvas, and a lot of ink, I was still no closer to printing canvas correctly.

One of the interesting things I noticed was that the Windows-based folks weren’t having this problem. In fact, some folks would bring the same image up on their Leopard-based Mac and a VM-based Windows XP environment, see exactly the same thing on the screen, but get different print results. And the results on the Windows side were spot-on.

The more I read, the more I decided it was time to put VMWare Fusion and Windows XP on my MacPro.

A quick run up the road, a little time spent installing, and I’m close to having XP on my Mac. For printing. Crazy, eh? I truly have crossed the streams!

I just passed 9000 miles in the Big Green Jeep, and figured with that many miles and a couple of months with it beneath me, it was time to lob some of my thoughts into the ether.

Handling. In 2WD, this thing corners like crazy! I absolutely feel like I can turn it on a dime, and it feels solid as I make turns with some speed. As I discovered this last weekend, the turning radius in 4WD isn’t quite the same as in 2WD. That’s expected, so I’m not disappointed in that by any means.

Suspension. This thing is stiff. I’m convinced that if you ran over a bug in the road, you’d feel the bump. In reality, I like that better, but it does force me to slow down for advertised bumps in the road, lest I lose all the fillings in my teeth. In the TrailBlazer, I didn’t worry about the bumps too much, as they were dampened out pretty well. I don’t mind this though, as it makes me feel like I’ve got a better sense for what’s under my tires.

Cabin annoyances. Generally, I like the way things are laid out. But… (and there’s always a but)

Anytime you raise/lower the soft top, or install/remove the hardtop front panels, you have to use the latch hooks at the top of the windshield. Unfortunately, you have to move the sun visor out of the way in order to have access to the latch hooks. Were it me, I would’ve changed the design somehow to keep from having to do this.

I love running with the doors off, but there are some caveats. With the doors off, there is no chime to let you know that the headlights are still on after the engine’s off and key’s removed. That hasn’t bit me hard… yet.

That same thing also affects the radio to some degree. With the doors on, once you’ve killed the engine and removed the key, the radio shuts off as soon as the door is opened. With no doors installed, you can either turn off the radio manually, or just wait for the regular timer to turn it off after a few moments.

My guess is that both of these are tied to unplugging the wiring harness between the door and body when the doors are removed.

My only other cabin complaint surrounds the power windows and door locks. The lighting for these switches is abysmal, both on the front and back console (for the windows switches) and the door switches for the locks. In the dark, they are not very easy to find! Were it my design, I would’ve put the door and window switches on the doors. I mean, if you’ve opted for the power door/lock package, you’ve got different doors anyway, so why not put both switches in those special doors. I’d also have added a power option for the side mirrors. I know, I know… real Jeeps don’t have power accessories… but it really would make things a little nicer on the inside.

Radio. While we’re on the radio… I really don’t like Sirius. There’s no option for XM, and I really prefer it. The XM birds are in geosynchronous orbit, and I’ve never really had much problem with hearing them. The Sirius birds use a tundra orbit configuration. Dunno if that’s the issue, but I get pretty frequent dropouts with Sirius, especially crossing under bridges or across bridges that have an overhead suspension system.

And one more thing about the radio. Chrysler has moved to using a single electronic harness for a lot of the onboard systems. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t just swap out the radio for something else. Oh, you can put another radio in the Jeep, but you also have to drop a Benjy on a special harness to interface with the Chrysler electrical plumbing. Urgh.

Overall. I really have no major complaints with the vehicle, and after a lot of miles in a short period of time, crossing long highways and rocky trails, in dry and wet, I can’t imagine having a different vehicle beneath me… except maybe a Rubicon.

Casey has engaged me to do a little printing on canvas for him. This is the first time I’ve tried to print on roll paper, and the first time for me to print on canvas.

First off, it took me forever to load the 13″x20′ roll of Epson Premium Canvas Matte. As documented, you’re supposed to gently push it through the rear paper guide until the paper stops. Well, there are two stops, and from the first one, the paper will never load correctly. One problem down.

That’s when I ran into the conundrum concerning custom paper sizes. If I set up a custom paper size at exactly the size I wanted, I was unable to select canvas in the printer dialog. Believe me, I tried every combination I could think of. What fixed it? Well, I made the width 12.94″ instead of 13″ — found that one on a website somewhere — and I changed the margins to 0.25″ at the suggestion of another site. I’m not sure which fixed it, but it’s fixed, and that’s the important part for tonight.

I am getting some bodacious form feeds after the printing process, but I can recover from that reasonably well, although the end of the roll fills me with fear!

Now if I can just get the colors right on the canvas….

I’ve been looking for a mirror solution for when I have the doors off the Big Green Jeep. Shortly before I first took the doors off in July, I picked up the Mopar add-on mirror, and discovered that I missed having a passenger side mirror.

That led me to ponder moving the mirrors from the front doors to the front window post. While the solutions for doing that work pretty well from what I’ve read, I’ve also read that the passenger-side mirror is almost unusable after the move because it sits kinda low on the post. That’s kinda a shame, as I really liked the idea of getting the mirrors off the doors — it makes it easier to store the doors when the mirrors are sticking out (even when they’re folded in).

So then it was add-on mirrors to fit in the door hinges when the doors were off. After looking at several types, I selected the American Outlaw mirrors. They slide over the hinge, with a set screw that runs through the upright part of the AO mirror mast. Having run with them at Washita this weekend, it sure seems that they stay in place quite well. However, I’m sure the set screws are messing up the paint on the hinge, so that’s something I’ll need to stay on top of to ensure no rust is forming.

All in all, this is a nice solution, although not my preferred route. Ideally, I’d move the mirrors from the doors to the window post, and yet have them high enough that I can see them with the doors on and allow the doors to open with them installed. One of these days, someone’ll make those!

Today would’ve been Dad’s 68th birthday. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone, and has been gone now for six years.

Watch for a page dedicated to my father coming soon. Of course, in terms of Deauxmayne-time, that could be anywhere from next week to three months from now!

Sio and I drove to the Washita MX facility to help the Midwest Jeep Thing folks build trails for Jeepstock (coming up in about a month). This is a big event for the club, and they’ve been working down at Washita to clear trails in advance of the event.

We met the group at the McDonalds at Farmington, where I quickly figured out that these folks were serious — my Jeep was the smallest of the lot! We loaded up and followed them to Washita. After a quick lesson in how to read the trail map, we were on our way…. and I was faced with a 15-20′ hill that to me looked like it went straight up! Of course, that wasn’t a big deal, and the road to our first stop was flat and uneventful. I thought this was what we’d see the rest of the way.

I was wrong.

We finished up and decided to go on some of the logging roads — described to be easy to get around on — and that’s when I discovered that my version of “easy” and theirs were a little different. The logging road was rutted and pretty tough for me to cover. I made it thought, and we walked up an extreme trail, clearing what we could. I looked at the boulders, and couldn’t believe folks put their vehicles over them, but the evidence was there… plenty of scars on top of the boulders.

While we were there, some Jeeps and trucks came through, crawling the rocks and pounding the undersides of their vehicles on the boulders. And of the group of five, two had mechanical failures — one with a broken U-joint, and the other with a tire that came off the rim. Neither of those would I be equipped to fix, and yet there they were, pulling out tools, and getting ‘em back on the road.

Once we finished with our trail clearing, the folks there decided to see if a couple of their “easy” trails were passable by a stock JK. In other words, I became a science experiment. The first trail was a grass trail through the forest, climbing up and down the sides of stream beds. It wasn’t too bad, but there were some places on that trail I wouldn’t have tried without someone leading me along. And then we hit the easy trail.

I couldn’t believe some of the climbs on this one! And it’s on this trail that I got my first “love tap” on the Jeep. Sio looked back and told me that I had dented the plastic fender on the rear passenger side. And apparently that was so much fun that I did it again. But this time, I took down the tree that was in the way. Shouldn’t be a big thing to bang out, and after all, I didn’t buy the Jeep for its resale value!

All in all, it was a fun day, and a great opportunity to gain some experience and confidence with my new toy. I’m sure we’ll be back out to Washita to play again!

BLOD – (n.) Acronym for Blinking Lights of Death. Endemic to Netgear GS108 gigabit switches.

After a weekend spent at Lake of the Ozarks, the last thing I wanted to come home to was a hardware failure. In truth, the failure waited until I’d been home a couple of hours, but failure it was.

I moved the house to gigabit ethernet a while ago. I know, I know, there’s all kinds of conversation about whether that’s really necessary for home networks, and whether home ethernet NICs could actually benefit from the added bandwidth gig-e brings. For me, it certainly seems to be a big help, as I move gigabytes of data around the network almost daily in order to keep my images backed up, on multiple spindles and machines. When I decided on the move, I tried some other gear with no real success, and finally landed on the Netgear GS108. It wasn’t terribly expensive, and have me an eight port switch when most switches I could find at the time were five ports. Check and mate.

Tonight, it appears my quiet little switch has blown chunks, thrown up its hands, and given up. All the lights on the switch blinked on and off, like someone was playing with a light switch. I tried playing with cables and ports, and finally googled the problem. It appears this is not a problem only spotted at the Deauxmayne.

I found a blog, the Technical Blog for Jim Beveridge, in which the author details the same problem I discovered today. Lots of folks have apparently stumbled onto this problem as they’ve encountered this problem. Some folks pursued RMAs, which is probably the best answer, but in truth, I couldn’t begin to guess where the receipt is this switch, when I bought it, and whether it would still be in warranty. Some folks reported some rough experiences with the Netgear support folks in trying to get an RMA, so I elected to investigate another path.

In several of the comments, folks mentioned a pair of blown capacitors in the unit, so I figured I’d look. Guess what? Sho ’nuff, one of the normal flat-topped caps had obtained a rounded head, presumably blown, and hitting the descriptions on Jim Beveridge’s blog dead on.

Tomorrow, it’s a stop a Radio Shack, and a cap that a little beefier than the 6.3v 1000uf stock components. I’ve read someone’s comments that they fixed it with a 15v 1000uf part. I’ll just have to see what RatShack’s got available for me tomorrow.

After Wednesday’s triumph with the hardware, today I elected to fight the battle of the software, and take the OS to 10.5 (Leopard).

As with the hardware upgrade, the first order of business was cloning the boot drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Just like Wednesday, this took a couple of hours, and appeared to work just fine. I popped the Leopard disc into the Mini, and let the machine reboot off the install disc. Everything appeared normal… until the installation stopped, telling me I couldn’t install to the boot drive. Panic stricken, my brain leaped to all kinds of conclusions — failed drive, lost data, and all kinds of awful things. As it ends up, somewhere along the way, the new 250GB drive I installed the other night used an Apple Partitioning Scheme rather than a GUID Partition Table. First off, I’d never known these were even options, and I certainly didn’t know how the 250GB internal was set up with the Apple scheme. In any case, that was a Bad Thing — the Leopard upgrade wouldn’t go until the drive was re-partitioned with the GUID Partition Table setup. That meant everything would be lost on the 250GB, leaving the USB connected 120GB as the (potential) master copy. Urgh.

Remember the nice 2GB freeware disk image from OWC? My guess is that when they partitioned the drive to put that on there, they used a bit more “universal” partitioning scheme. Not a big deal, but that’s one thing I’ll remember to look for in the future before trying these kinds of hijinks!

I started looking to see if you could boot a Mini from an external USB drive, and found you could, although almost everything I read indicated that Firewire would work better, and that the USB-booted OS would … run … very … slow. Figuring the only real path I had here was to boot from the USB drive, repartition the 250GB drive, and then recopy from the 120GB to the 250GB, I set about getting that going. The system did boot from the USB drive, and it really wasn’t that bad. A little slow, but since all I was doing was copying the data across, there wasn’t any real processing going on, so no big impact on the copy time.

Knowing that my sites had been down for several hours already, I decided I needed to set up a “Gremlins Are on the Loose” page to handle requests, knowing that the Mini would be down for at least three or four more hours. After a little bit of searching for the location of the system-wide default page (/Library/Webserver/Documents, just in case you’re looking for it), I dropped it into place on the MacPro, and pointed all HTTP traffic to it from the router.

So two hours later, it was time to reboot from the newly GUID’d 250GB drive, and make sure that Tiger was working. The boot seemed fine, so it was off to try the Leopard installation again. Boot the disc and… no GUID issues! Now, it was time to let Leopard do its upgrade voodoo. What’s odd to me is that the DVD media, once you’ve selected all your options, does a self-health check to ensure that its consistency is good before installing. While I appreciate the paranoia, I also appreciate the “Skip” button for this step, and skipped the DVD health check. So almost four hours after I thought I was ready to upgrade, I was actually upgrading. Now I just had to wait another hour or so for the OS to be upgraded!

Unfortunately, after the upgrade, neither my webserver nor mailserver were up and running. Well, not running right anyway.

Leopard takes Apache from a 1.x codebase to 2.x, and in the process, changed the directories for users’ individual webserver configuration files. These moved from /etc/httpd/users to /etc/Apache2/users. I’d remembered the files, but forgotten the location and naming convention for them, so they were a bit of a bear to find and scoot from the old structure to the new. Once I did, Apache started, but would bomb on any page that was requested from it. The culprit here was a commented out php5 directive in the httpd.conf file for Apache 2.x. Not hard to change, but was a bit surprised that php wasn’t turned on by default. A quick uncomment, restart, and things appeared to be good on the webserver front.

The mailserver was a little trickier, but the messages in the mail log gave me the answers. For some reason, the UID used for the mail server changed. Not quite sure why Leopard did that, but a little change to a config file and a restart of the mail server, and all was well… I could see the spam floodgates opening!

However, I still couldn’t send or receive mail from my MacPro.

This one was a little harder to fix. Apparently, xinetd has been dropped with Leopard, in favor of launchd. Well, I’ve never used launchd, so that was a total mystery for me. Thanks to my good friend Google, I was able to find an example plist for my pop server, and that allowed me to get the pop server back up again.

So, from all appearances, things are back to normal at the Deauxmayne, nearly twelve hours (with breaks for dinner, visiting the gallery, etc.) after I began what I thought would be a small update. If something appears to be squirrely, let me know!