Ok, the house move is complete, the DSL is back online. And faster now too 
I don’t think I’ll bother shifting the site off to one of the public hosting servers now 
24 / 1 at almost full speed. If Amnet are using Annex M I can probably unbalance that a little in favor of the upload throughput given the signal strength
When my Samsung CLP-300N failed, I had about $200 worth of new unused toner sitting around and so I bought a 2nd hand CLP-300 (the network version is rare and so prohibitively expensive). This worked ok for about another 6 months, but before I can even change the toner, the black imager is dying again. So I investigated sub $500 color laser printers, and I found that the Dell is one of the cheapest capital expenditures while still giving good quality. I think this is because they sell the toner with the imaging unit, which makes the toner about $100 per color, very expensive. However, it should prolong the printer. I saw these on special at $180 from Dell’s site and picked one up last month. I hadn’t set it up because of the shift though. Now, in the new place, in a hurry to print something, I unboxed it and set it up, only to find that:
1) Mac OS 10.5.8 does not support the printer natively
2) The driver disc Dell included includes only the electonic version of the manual, in about 10 languages, in the Mac OS mount partition (obviously the Windows drivers are on the Windows partition).
Googling tells me there is no driver, and to use a Fujixerox driver that uses the same electronics, and so will print, but will not give any options. Great. I couldn’t even find the driver they were talking about. However, dispelling these myths and the myths of Dell’s lack of support for Mac OS X, they do indeed have a Mac OS X driver on their site. And it’s just the driver – 550kb download or so. The application has been split. I like this. It works perfectly now. Thanks Dell!
I recently started using eLance for some work I am doing, and I wanted to see how others use it. I opened a couple of projects from the main page and found this one. A US company outsourcing some IT work, fine. I’ve seen some US freelances on the site ranging in bids from $20ph to $100ph. Sounds reasonable enough to me, a little like Australia. Then the asian / indian market freelances are operating at $12 – $25ph. This was also no surprise. This one job posting that I opened here though, $2 PER HOUR?? Isn’t that a bit low? I agree with a freemarket economy, but I also agree with rewarding good people (it helps with retention of those people / good business, which makes life easier in a freemarket). I was surprised anyone would try to get something done for that amount. Maybe they’re going for quantity not quality…
I have just had to write a web application that links to the local file system (NFS actually) to open a directory that stores common business files in FireFox 3. It doesn’t allow it. I found many sites saying this, but not offering any real helpful workaround. Mozilla is quite clear about this fact, and the appropriate work around:
For security purposes, Mozilla applications block links to local files (and directories) from remote files. This includes linking to files on your hard drive, on mapped network drives, and accessible via Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) paths.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_do_not_work
The solution is to alter the security settings for the site in question, with the exact settings shown above. Note that the settings do not require using the user.js / prefs.js file and can be enabled in about:config, although doing that on many computers might be a drag!