Printing on Brother HL-5070N on Mavericks MacOSX 10.9

I've had problems with this printer before and created a post for others with the same problem (http://goo.gl/nUGYCJ).

Well it looks like Apple updated the HL-5070N driver on 10.9, so the old technique is no longer necessary.

The date of the new driver should be: Dec-6th-2012. i.e.

ls -al "/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/Brother HL-5070N series.gz"

*However* you need to make sure when adding the printer, DON'T select the nearby autodetected printer BUT "Add printer or Scanner" instead".

Select the printer that appears and make sure that the "Use" drop-down has "Brother HL-5070N BR-Script3" rather than "Brother HL-5070N series CUPS".

The "CUPS" one is the one that is selected when you use "Nearby" printers and doesn't work for me at least.

Let me know if you this works for you.

Branching in source code control

Every single company I've worked at, there's always been a heated discussion about what's the best way to do source code control. ie. Release from the HEAD with all development on branches verses development on the HEAD, with each release on a branch.

Since branching in subversion is a pain (and why should all engineers have to deal with it), I've always leaned towards doing releases on branches.

With Git, it's super easy to do branches and most engineers will be using them to do bug fixes.

Luckily Vincent Driessen has highlight his approach: http://bit.ly/6bYB7X

It's worth reviewing for ideas if you have to set up an environment.

Printing on Brother HL-5070N on Snow Leopard MacOSX 10.6

I have one of those fancy network aware bonjour printers. The idea is that it communicates to MacOSX and lets it know its capabilities and tells my mac how to set things up. I love it.

This used to work nice and dandy for Leopard 10.5, but with Snow Leopard (10.6) it picks the wrong printer driver and uses the CUPS one. This is because for some reason the HL-5070N BR-Script3 driver is NOT supplied on the Snow Leopard DVD. grrh

I was banging my head for a long time (I hate printers and wanted nothing to do with it) and googling found no results. So in order to help any wandering lost souls, I thought I would write it up.

As I mentioned, when you set up your printer (SystemPreferences -> Print&Fax) and then add printer, it says it's using "Brother HL-5070N series CUPS". This is WRONG. Well its wrong for me anyway.

If you try printing you will get something like:

ERROR NAME; undefined COMMAND -12345X@PJL OPERAND STACK;

Useful isn't it? :)

So you need to pull the OLD printer driver from Leopard (10.5), to get this puppy to print.

It's called 'Brother HL-5070N series.gz' and is under: /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/Brother HL-5070N series.gz

If you look at this directory in Snow Leopard, the driver isn't there.

So drop that file Brother HL-5070N series.gz into the same directory in Snow Leopard (don't uncompress it), delete and re-add the printer and it should say:
Print Using: Brother HL-5070N BR-Script3. This is RIGHT!

Let me know if this works for you.

Minimum Viable Product

A lot of startups have great visions of them taking over the world without validating that there are customers who are willing to buy it.

This is the great area of 'Customer Development' which tries to create a feedback loop of conversation between you and your customers.

The 'Minimum Viable Product' is core to this idea. Build the least amount, get it out there and get feedback. Iterate.

Here's a great video from Eric Riles about M-V-P.

Running robots

The new Toyoto humanoid robot runs at 4mph. I hope they start programming the 3 laws into them.

I can imagine that scene in Star Wars I with all those robots on the hill.. :(

Shopzilla site redo

Just watched a nice video from Philip Dixon (Shopzilla) about the performance gains when they redid their site.

The general philosophy is to refactor rather than rewrite. They had a mixed approach by slowly exposing more and more traffic (via load balancing) to the new infrastructure.

Something I didn't realize is the impact of serving static content from cookie-less domains. Sites like yahoo use yimg.com (I always wondered why they did that!)

no such file to load -- builder

For my rails infrastructure, I used to use nginx talking to a mongrel cluster which was painful to figure out how to set it up. (This before the nginx module from Phusion Passenger)

I then switched to using apache which worked well, especially with the php files I also had to host (wordpress/drupal etc).

Last night I tried to go back to nginx.. bleeding edge nginx and Ruby Enterprise.

This was a whole load of pain. :( Google didn't seem helpful. WTF was going on?

Phusion Passenger worked fine with regular ruby (ruby 1.8.7) but when I tried using Ruby Enterprise I would get the following crypted error:

"no such file to load -- builder"

WTF was this all about? I spent all night hacking/slashing trying to get it to run.

It was obviously having a problem finding the 'builder' gem, but it was right there.. wasn't it?

# gem list

builder (2.1.2)

and that was the crux of the problem! REE uses its own gem command and its own location of gem packages.

# /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/gem list

** builder not present **

AAARGGH! Apparently this is a good thing, not sure why.. but w-e.

# /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/gem install builder

As if by magic, the Shopkeeper appeared.

Heres some links for you.

Some Inspiration

When your working hard on an idea with no hope in sight or when your trying to solve the impossible, a little inspiration can help you get through it.