Friday 13th; Unix Time: 1234567890

Tomorrow will be Friday 13th. To make this the coolest friday 13th ever, at 23:31:30 UTC (in São Paulo daylight savings time that would be 21:31:30), Unix Time¹ will be "1234567890". Cool, isn't it ^_^

Thanks to that, I've seen what might be the coolest programing joke I've ever seen on the slashdot history comments:

Every day is a long day, because 86400 seconds won't fit in a short."² — FooAtWFU,

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1: Unix systems keep the time by storing the amount of seconds which elapsed since midnight of January 1st, 1970.

2: a (unsigned) short in programming is a variable which can keep a value from 0 to 65525 (aka 2¹⁶-1).

Manga: Bleach 19 with colored pages!

I've had a pleasant surprise yesterday: The people at Panini have included some colored pages in Bleach 19. AFAIK¹, this was the first manga released on Brazil with colored pages. thumbs up ^_^

BTW², It's interesting how Panini has been releasing good mangas lately... To think not so long ago JBC was the best manga publisher around there... They have lost themselves somewhere, I hope they can recover.

Edit: As nee-chan pointed out, indeed Chobbits had colored pages before Bleach

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1: AFAIK = As Far As I Know
2: BTW = By The Way

Stuff to keep in mind (part 1?)

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people Courtesy of xkcd (#438)

HP Laserjet P3005d

We have acquired a new HP Laserjet P3005d printer at work some months ago, to replace an aging HP laserjet 2300dn which was consistently jamming on duplex jobs. The new printer just doesn't feel as good as the older one though... Anyway, there are some notes about problems I've found with it for reference.

CUPS, driver and advanced options/booklet printing

The printer was conected by USB to a Debian GNU/Linux server. With the 2300, running the setup allowed one to choose "client setup", tell the URI of the printer and have it just work out of the box with all the resources enabled. Unfortunately, this option isn't available in the 3005 driver (maybe HP people want to sell more network modules for the printers?).

To work around this issue while getting advanced options, such as booklet, working, one needs to install the printer as if it was connected on the computer, and create a new "local port" with the printer samba URI as "name" when asked about the printer port. (If such advanced options aren't needed, following the steps on the samba howto to install the printer driver on the server works well).

Strange printing anomalies after changing the toner

After replacing the toner with a new one, there was some horizontal bars and strange bubble-like stains on the printings. Took some time to figure out that the basic mandate of the computing would solve this one: just turn the printer off, give it some small time and turn it back on.