Category: Tech

Technologies

How To use canon C5045/5051 printer on OSX 10.6.7

 

I’ve been using a Mac book pro for last few years, work required it, otherwise I prefer my Linux laptop.

Anyway, updating OSX to 10.6.7 broke my ability to print to office Canon C5045 printer. Googling shows lots of people running into similar issues.

I’ve d/l Canon’s latest US version (v2.24) of the UFR II driver and installed it, but was still getting error about raster mode.

“Cannot continue printing because an error occurred. To continue printing, select {Raster Mode} in {Quality}-{Quality Settings}-{Graphics Mode}.: 15920”

Canon driver here:

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/office/color_imagerunner_advance/imagerunner_advance_c5045/imagerunner_advance_c5045#DriversAndSoftware

Anyway, to fix the raster error, you need to go to your printer setting options page and change the mode.  Go here:

http://127.0.0.1:631/printers/_10_3_1_25

Replace _10_3_1_25 with the IP address of your Canon printer (10.3.1.25 is the IP of MY printer).

Click on Maintenance drop down and go to Set Default Options

Click on General and scroll down till you see Graphics Mode:

Select Raster Mode

Scroll down to the very bottom and click on Set Default Option

You will need to enter your login and password to confirm the change.

That should do it.

Addendum (7/6/2011):  We got a Fiery board added to the C5045 and it broke my printing ability again (@#$!!), turns out I need new driver.  The driver is : CanonPPD_v3.05.zip (google for it, it’s also on Canon support web site).

 

Envoy router from Enphase

How to monitor your Envoy router with MRTG

So I am into green, whole family is. This past summer, I decided to install solar panels. Got a 4.4KW system installed with Enphase microinverters.

Traditional solar panel system generate DC in the panels, and all of them goes to a battery bank, then a DC-AC converter for the house. It’s big, bulky and wasteful (converting DC-AC, etc). The Enphase microverters uses a DC-AC converter per panel. So no batteries needed, and losing one panel (whether shade, damage, whatever) is not going to stop power production.

Anyway, long story short, along with the microinverter come an Envoy, which is essentially a small embedded computer that talk with each inverter, query their status (power generation, heat, etc.), collects them and send them to a central place (Enphase’s server).

You have the option of subscribing to Enphase Enlighten program which allow you to login to a personalize website and view your power generation history with nice graphs, etc. The first few months are free after installation so you can play with it and see how it work.

I didn’t want to pay for something I can do myself. The microinverters talk with the Envoy over the power lines, so use their own protocol. But since I have access to the Envoy controller, I can query it for the data it collect from the inverters. There is a web interface on the unit that I can login to and see the data. But there is no programmatic way to get that data, e.g no snmp or API that I can use to ask the Envoy.

Hmmm, ok, I’ll screen scrape the web interface. So I wrote a little perl script to do just that, and that script output MRTG data for graphing locally.

12/14

Sorry, didn’t finish this yet.  I’ll post my little perl script and the config I used for MRTG when I have chance.

3/9/2011

I posted my MRTG config and perl script in the comment to this post.  Too lazy to put it here….

 

VMWare error: Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permission to access file.

Recently I was making changes to one of my vmware vm and made a typo, heh, like that never happens.  Anyway, long story short, I had to recover from backup and when I tried to start up the VM, I was getting the following error:

Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permission to access file.

This is on one of my laptops, this one happen to be running Vista and VMWare Workstation 6.  Googling find that other people run into similar problems.  There were various suggestion about ACL, and disabling UAC, etc.

I’ve went through all the various checks, to no use.  Even after I login as Administrator…. hmmm…. WTF!

It turned out to be very simple issue (for me).  When I restored from backup (I dumped all backup to a NAS w/lots of storage), using rsync, I had not realize that the backup had readonly permission (UNIX 0444).  The culprit was myvmname.vmx, myvnmname.vmdk, etc.  After I removed the Readonly flag, all was happy.

EC2, AMI, baking, cooking, automation

I’ve been playing around with Amazon EC2 for over a year now.  In the beginning, it was just for my own education, amusement and experimentation.  Now, WORK, is a heavy user of EC2/SDB so I have to understand it and support it.

I’ve a modified script that generate my own AMI.  Let me clean that up and I’ll share it, since it came from an open source anyway.

More to come… keep your eyes here…

Web drop box

This is something that my users have been clamoring for, for a long time now.

It is the ability to share large files with external clients, but in a secure manner, e.g. encrypted, access control, time limited, etc.

I don’t want these files on my web server, e.g. www.mycompany.com site. And putting up FTP/SFTP servers is a pain (think, unsophisticated users).

I know there are companies out there offering these services – box.net, drop.io, mediafire, foldershare, MS Live, Google, etc. But I want something under my control.

So far I’ve found few and far between, unless I want to roll my own (always an option). The closest that I’ve come to what I need at the moment is AjaXplorer. There are limitations, but it is usable.

Anyone got other suggestions?

8/22/2010

I’ve found a few, I’ll add to this post over time (with comments if I’ve tried it).

  • http://www.mollify.org/features.php  – Mollify (AJAX interface, similar to DropBox.  Open Source, free for personal use).
  • http://www.ajaxplorer.info/wordpress/ – AjaxPlorer (AJAX interface, I’ve used this for a few clients.  It’s ok.  It’s also used in LG N4B1 NAS box).