Archive for June, 2009
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*@#($*(* Hewlett-Packard
HP seems to be the printer vendor of choice at U of M, and it’s very convenient to buy their printers and supplies. I have an HP 2605dn color laser printer, which I’ve generally liked except for an occasional tendency to print pages with a solid red background, which is both expensive and ugly. Now that I sent a grant proposal off, I decided to try to fix it. I quickly discovered that this problem has gone away for some people with a firmware update, so I decided to try that.
Unfortunately, the Mac version of the driver doesn’t work with the current version of the Mac OS (and, let me say, it isn’t a particularly new version of the OS, either). So I tried downloading it under VM Fusion, but the Windows version seems not to work unless you connect directly with a USB cable (and it’s too far away). I resurrected an old XP laptop and after updating the software was finally able to put that in the center of the various cables I need to connect to the network and the printer at the same time, and finally was able to update the printer’s firmware driver.
I’m pleased and relieved that this did, indeed, fix the problem. But I don’t understand why HP can’t keep their drivers up to date. I had a similar experience at home, with an early printer/copier/scanner they sold. After XP came out, they never came up with an updated driver, so I lost the scanning capability. I bought an early tablet computer from them that would suddenly lose its image when connected to a projector for more than 15 minutes. I sent it back and forth three times with them without getting them to connect it long enough to reproduce the problem. When I said that I was going to return it, as I could under the purchase agreement, I got a call from the regional sales manager and a tech person, who acknowledged they’d had that problem but had identified and fixed it. I told them that if they sent me a new computer and it worked, I would keep it and they promised to do so. Unfortunately they didn’t decide between them who was supposed to do it, so neither of them did. That was the last computer I bought from them, and I think this is probably the last printer I’ll get from them.
Other than that, it’s a nice printer—it has an ethernet connection and duplex printing, as well as being a pretty good color printer.
Sometimes it’s good to vent…
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What’s wrong with this picture?
Interesting discussion by Simon Winchester on a book tour in China. It captures a sense of how deeply strange it can be to be there, and how you can suddenly be expected to engage in the kind of public discussion that you’d ordinarily want to prepare for (this happened to my daughter, too, who was unexpectedly taken with another newly arrived colleague to what turned out to be a training session for teachers from outside of Beijing. The young man just left, and she tried to do the best she could, but apparently it didn’t go well). Two other things that struck me. First, why is no one in this library? Bookstores in Beijing are constantly crowded. This place (where I’ve never been) is empty, to a first approximation.
Secondly, who decided to title his book on Joseph Needham (which I’ve read, and is certainly above average) “The man who loved China” in the U.S. and “Bomb, book, and compass” in the rest of the world. I think the latter is a much better title.
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In the news…
Inside School Research
Debra Viadero, a reporter from Education Week, came to our presentation at the IES Research conference and put together a brief piece on it here. The photo shows Lauren Phelps, who’s the project manager on the grant.
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Snow leopard hidden feature — Chinese character trackpad input
I see that the next edition of the Mac OS, due out in September, will allow you to enter Chinese characters by drawing them on the trackpad with your finger. The iPhone already does this, and I’ve been very impressed with it. This is definitely good news.
Apple – Mac OS X Snow Leopard – Refining the user experience
(page down to “Innovative Chinese character input”)—I think that the blue image of the character on the trackpad is a conceptual rendering of the finger tracking, complete with the ability to anticipate the parts of the character the user hasn’t written yet.