Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

Via Slashdot, the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness.

(Also via Slashdot, how carrier Pigeons transfer data faster than networks)

My friend Simpson Garfinkel, the award-winning journalist and author, had, it seems, a fairly odd hobby. It started when he spotted piles of cheap used hard drives on sale in a local computer supply store:

I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.

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I used to think that the next time I was in a silly mood I'd order a few pounds of brightly colored Dilatant compound. I certainly don't want 100 lbs of it, and even $12/lb seemed steep.

But now I'm thinking the black stuff would be nice. Except that it's $24/lb. Would just one pound really be enough? And then there are all those other neat colors….

(Other problem: the stuff seems to melt in Florida, even indoors under air conditioning. I bunch it up and two hours later it has ooozed out into a flat boring ameboid shape. Could it be the humidity? Or does it do that everywhere?)

My day as an election judge is a very interesting first-person account of a day as an election judge baby sitting electronic voting machines—written by Avi Rubin, a leading critic of Diebold's Accuvote machines. (Spotted via Ed Felten blog.)

There's something you've gotta love about this sort of inaccurate but fundamentally true coverage. In this case it happens to be of an industry press conference, but the method surely has other uses.

Lexmark takes wrap off user friendly printers: Fearlessly breaking the mold of IT marketing, the printing giant boldly commissioned a study into consumer attitudes towards printers late last year. By an enormous slice of luck, the findings just happened to confirm all Lexmark’s prejudices about the printer market.

…

Lexmark CEO Paul Curlander introduced a morale sapping day of inconclusive speeches about printers to an audience of journalists from all over Europe and South Africa. Some presenters spoke in their second (or third) language, in a move to make already turgid material even more palatable to a jaded audience. Having lost the will to live by mid morning, The INQUIRER was unable to take note of the figures produced by this study, despite their enormous gravity. For the same reason, we neglected to write down the solutions to the continuing challenge of making printers more user friendly.

But here goes. The printer market is going to be worth seventy quadrabezillion dollars, according to our memory of this event. Lexmark's projected growth could be as much as 116.9 per cent every quarter, or something, we seem to remember someone saying. In a near future timeframe, we may or may not see a day when printers can obey voice commands, such as 'Just fsking print will you' and 'no I don't want fsking letter paper. But in the meantime we'll continue to be confused by a bewildering array of features we'll never use and instructions only a seasoned photocopy engineer could understand.

For a long time the home network was fine. Then yesterday nothing would print. The problem seems to be the print server. I've proved that the printer cable from the print server to the printer works. The printer self-tests fine. I've tried two different cables from the Netgear PS111W print server to the Linksys BEFW11S4. The print server also has a wireless card in it (free if you mail in the coupon, but it took six months to turn up), so even if the cable were bad, it should work.

None of the computers on the network see the printer any more. After I reset the print server to the factory defaults, the administration software was able to tell it was there…sort of. Although it comes up as the sole item on the list of print servers when I do a survey, and I was even able to rename the print server from the default name to 'P2', the configuration software was initially unable to do any other sort of configuration, or even to read the settings. Yet the config settings are there: I can get the print server to print them out to the server.

In desperation, I read the manual and downloaded the binary file to re-flash the firmware. The manual does not list the error message I get from the administration software. But it does have instructions on how to configure the print server via FTP. I try that (I know the IP number because that's on the printout when you dump the config file). The print server will not respond to FTP—I get a 10060 (timeout) error. I can force my win98se computer to “find” the printer on the network if I give it the name, but I can't get it to install a new printer to that name (or take existing printers back online) because the printer installation system thinks the printer is not found or offline. I bet Linux users don't have these problems.

Having downloaded the firmware flash binary, I look for instructions on how to apply it. There are none in the manual, and none in any evident place on the support page .

Basically, the print server is not responding to tcp/ip requests. Maybe flashing the firmware would help, maybe it's hardware. I think it's just out of warranty, so it may be planned obsolescence. I've spent about three hours debugging this, and I didn't fix it. I've emailed my story to tech support, and if they don't have useful ideas, then I suppose I give up and buy a new print server.

I think I know a fair amount about computers, and usually feel proud that I can debug most of the domestic problems that come up on MS products, PC hardware issues, and the home network. But this experience makes me wonder: was this knowledge helpful here? If the right answer is, buy a new print server, a complete tech ignoramus could have reached that conclusion much more quickly….