Geek on Two Wheels

It’s the all-too-familiar case of Decent Product, Crappy Drivers.

Both printer and scanner drivers from Brother are simply binary blobs wrapped with [L]GPLed code. Really, really crappy code at that.

The stock CUPS filter wrapper for MFC-420CN actually did not work at all as it was, for some bizarre reason, written in csh: not the most widely used default shell for Linux distributions. After dissecting the code, I realized that the two or three dozen calls to the binary blob printer configuration tool could be replaced with a single call, provided that some smart argument processing is done instead of configuration the printer for every single setting that needs to be parsed from 3 separate sources.

I am currently working on replacing this abomination with Perl.

Of course, that’s only half of the story, as the MFC-420CN is a multi-function printer/scanner/fax.

To make a long story short, I am about 10 minutes into trying to get the scanner to work, and I’m already baffled at the sheer insanity of it all. It requires /proc/bus/usb to be mounted 0666, a manually created usbscanner node, and, from what I can gather from the “source” tarball, has various parts of other OSS projects compiled in statically, like snprintf, strdup, getenv, and usleep.

On the plus side, if you don’t care about polluting your /usr/lib, the drivers do seem to work reliably if you let the RPM do its thing. Nevertheless, cheap toners be damned, what Brother printers I have now will be my last.

So, wearing my flector band to reduce the chance of being ran over by a car while crossing the Hastings/Kensington intersection didn’t exactly work.

First, a white van cut me off. Okay, I was still a good ten feet away, so it wasn’t exactly cutting me off. However, seconds after, the grey Matrix next in line proceeded to make the same turn, without stopping, driving by, literally, three feet in front of me. On the plus side, he did actually see me after he had sped up and slowed down to apologize. On the down side, well, I almost got ran over, again.

At this point, I’m confused more than anything.

The intersection is well lit. And, although I had originally theorized that my silhouette is not clear due to a dark background, that didn’t seem too plausible when I looked back at the intersection from the other side. Despite my noticing that the reflector does not work too well under lightning with a yellow hue, I was spotted perfectly fine by another car making a left some blocks later, in an area that is clearly less lit than Hastings.

Next time, I’m bringing my red blinker as well, and, if that doesn’t work, I’m going to bring a flash light and shine it directly at the driver’s face. Failing that, well, I’m crafty with electronics…

Here’s a interesting statistics for you: for every time that I’ve walked home, alone, at night from the Hastings/Kensington bus stop, I have almost been hit by a car at the above intersection.

Seriously, what the fuck?

The two times that I’ve walked home at night from that bus stop, I was almost hit by a left-turning car both times. Yes, it is true that my jacket is black, and I wear dark-coloured pants. I will also accept that I may be hard to see despite the intersection being fully lit and the fact that I was, at one point, in the path of the headlight of the vehicles that almost hit me. So, at least the first time around, I’m not going to claim that I am free of all faults.

However, in tonight’s incident, there were two other people walking directly behind me, both of whom were carrying umbrellas. Not see the guy in the black jacket? Fine. But how the bloody fuck do you miss a group of three people crossing a lit intersection, while heading in their direction?!

Had I not been cautious due to the previous incident, I would surely be, at best, interviewed for a police report, and, at worst, spending the night in a hospital. Juding from the fact that one of the other two walkers bumped into me when I stopped, I’m fairly certain that they would have at least walked into the side of the car.

From now on, I’m wearing my reflective band when walking home at night. I’d also like to carry a bazooka around so I can teach the fucker a lesson if it ever happens again, but I’m sure the law frowns upon things like that.

To summarize, it was a great day of riding, and I replied to about 200 pieces of email today. Why, you ask? Read on…

Lets start from the beginning.

I first noticed something was amiss when I noticed that a co-worker of mine — who receives emails sent to our webmaster@ address — forwarded me about 8 pieces of tech support email in the morning. As atrocious as the integration of our various systems are, I average roughly a email per month that has to be forwarded to me from webmaster@ — something was terribly wrong.

As a matter of routine, I check my helpdesk email account, and Lo! 60+ pieces of new email since Friday. Something is definitely wrong.

Now, since I could not actually scroll through my email, due to the horrible web interface to Lotus which I have no choice but to use, I was not able to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation until much later. However, a quick scan revealed an email which points out that the database server for the PASBC has gone belly-up, bringing down the entire system with it. Fantastic. I will have to deal with all these emails after I get back from the chiropractor.

When I returned to my post, after an unsuccessful attempt to use Internet Explore (apparently, Lotus Notes works even worse in IE, as in, I can’t get a list of emails), and using some clever window-manipulation (I’d never thought that xfce’s Alt+drag for moving windows will come in handy) I discovered, to my horror, that the new email count was over 220.

Fuck.

This, afterall, being my job, I had no choice but to push ahead. Quickly composing two canned-responses, I began the flurry of click and pasting that would occupy a good portion of my day.

Well, after completing my application for funding for CUTC, anyway.

Now, at this point, I thought that it couldn’t possibly get worse. Well, we all know how that usually works out…

The Lotus Mail web interface is such a mess of javascript and pop-up windows such that after prolonged use, it would actually bug-out Firefox’s pop-up blocker, causing no new tabs to be created, even with the website whitelisted, making reading the nebulous amount of email, much less replying to them, impossible. Even worse, the javascript heavy site actually brought Firefox down to its knees several times, even causing my poor browser to raise warning messages asking if I was absolutely sure that I would let such destructive and snail-paced scripts to run.

Only a few minutes into my daunting task, I am quickly tempted away from the task at hand by the promise of good bike riding. As fortune would have it, today is the first day in quite a long time when it has not rained the night before, and the day-star was actually showing it’s blinding but glorious face.

This oppertunity was not to be wasted, massive inbox or not.

Long story short, the riding was awesome. Slightly muddy and wet, but awesome.

After getting back to campus late for my evening class, I proceeded to spend the next hour struggling with wireless in a futile attempt to get back to answering all of my emails. One misconfigured accesspoint and much profanity later, I was once again greeted by auth1, which, miraculously, was eager to grant me access to the IntarWeb.

Much pasting, web-browser restarting, half-assed attempts at paying attention to the lecture, a break to ride home in the darkness (which, again, was awesome), eat dinner, and even more profanity later, it was done: my inbox once again in a glorious state of no-new-emails.

Even accounting for duplicate emails from the more impatient clients, at least 200 pieces of email was replied to today, of which most are from unique users. I hope never, ever, to do this again, EVER.

Now that I have completed this relatively brief but much needed rest from electronic mail, I’m afraid I must once again open my digital notepad for yet more email writing, as there are announcements that need to be made, and events hyped about.

Lets hope that only a very, very small portion of those 200 users decide to ask me more questions tomorrow…

So, turns out the late charge is due to the decreased total credit hours when I dropped the courses. It was entirely my fault that I’ve neglected to remember such a charge.

That being said, since it’s a charge that only applies between Aug. 6th and Sept. 12, why is it not added then? Why add it after the tuition deadline when students have supposedly already paid their tuition and have no reason to look at their tuition charges again for at least another semester?

See, what we have here is a failure to communicate effectively. Or, rather, an utter failure at applying good usability principals.

Yet another drop in the goSFU-fucking-sucks bucket…

Apparently the university is charging me a $100 [Under Grad] Tuition Drop Penalty.

Why, yes, I did drop a few courses due to having my coop term extended. And, if I recall correctly, I dropped them before the deadline, at least a week before the semester even started.

The records also show that I paid my tuition before the mysterious charge was added, which was also before the deadline, since I wanted a shot at the prize draw. Even more aggrevating, the extra charge shows up on record for Sept 20th, two days AFTER the claimed due date before they start charging for late fees. Fuckers.

This means I will have to go to school early tomorrow to get it sorted out before unicycling. This geek is not happy.