As one might have guessed from my last update, Midwest FurFest is weighing heavily on my mind.

Friday I took takaza into work and took advantage of the glorious weather to take some nice pictures in and around McHenry County (well, except for the first one; that’s on Milwaukee Ave. in Niles). You’ll be seeing some of those pictures again come the convention. After driving for several hours I made a big loop and stopped back by Schaumburg and found a good place for MFF to store our stuff for the next year right near the hotel. I’ll be stopping by there later this week to nail down a contract with them. Afterwards I went to Dan’s employer and read the paper and killed some time until he was ready to leave, only about two hours after quitting time. steviemaxwell was over visiting so we had a pleasant evening of dinner from the taquiera and good conversation.

On Saturday I took off early and headed up to roho and genet‘s place where we were joined by neowolf2 and attempted to assemble all of the parts of the Registration server. Things didn’t go quite as well as we’d hoped. I got the client laptops all set up, no problems there. We ran into a problem when we hooked the three new Samsung ML-2010 laser printers into the server via a USB hub. Rustitobuck built and programmed the server that we have a few years ago, and he did an excellent job. We’ve had a problem that has dogged us from the start, though: with the installation configured as it is, CUPS could not differentiate between the printers, it just saw them as one big pool and sent print jobs to the first available printer. This wouldn’t be a problem, but we have two different badge stocks being fed into the printers: 95% of the badges printed will be on standard stock, but 5% will be for minors, which are printed on highly-visible yellow stock. The idea was to set aside one printer and only send minor print jobs to that one. Obviously this isn’t possible if you can’t distinguish between the printers.

The workaround in past years has been stopping all print jobs until the minor job goes through, but obviously that’s a tremendous disruption to the workflow and not workable during peak periods, like Wednesday night. The first solution we came up with was to perhaps set aside two of the new printers and incorporate the Samsung ML-1710 laser printer (our own personal one) and the Publications Department’s ML-2151N network laser printer. This is suboptimal because 1.) I don’t know how much toner is in the 1710 (and at $75 a pop, I’d rather not refill if I don’t have to) and 2.) Publications may need their printer Thursday and/or Friday.

Time caught up with us, so Neowolf took the server and a printer home to hack on for a bit, and I left feeling kind of down and worried that we didn’t have a working system. To skip ahead a bit and put all the geekery under one cut, I was talking with unclevlad, who just happened to have been on the CUPS development team. He put me on the trail of a possible solution: it turns out that by default CUPS groups printers into “implicit classes” and creates one print queue for all of the printers. If the value of ImplicitClasses in cupsd.conf is set to “NO”, this behavior is turned off, and that should hopefully make each printer individually addressable. Hopefully, that will do the trick; if not, Vlad can look forward to a panicked phone call or two 🙂

After we wrapped up our work on the Registration system, I met Dan and mirkowuff for dinner at Johnny’s Chophouse in Prospect Heights. It took a long time to get seated and the food took even longer to get to us, but it was pretty good once it got there. And the “Moonshine” (Level vodka, Peach schnapps, and cranberry juice) was extremely tasty.

Then on Sunday it was time for the last-minute “Oh Sh#t!” MFF staff meeting. This just entailed going around the room and making sure all of the departments were ready to go. I made the happy discovery mentioned above, and that made the day so much better. After we wrapped up, Dan and I grabbed dinner at Potbelly’s, then came home and worked on some last-minute signage and watched The Amazing Race (the ending of which, while sad, was pretty much destined to occur).

So here we are: a new week. I’ve got some househusband stuff to deal with today (laundry, groceries), as well as some more signs to work on. Wednesday I’m planning on visiting Neowolf’s to work on the Registration system, and hopefully make any PHP tweaks that might be necessary for the system, though an additional pilgrimage to Rusty’s sometime thereafter may be necessary (Rusty: we’ll talk about scheduling should it become necessary. I don’t want to dump anything on you unexpectedly!) Friday through Sunday we’ll be at Windycon, where Dan and I are on staff in Operations. That should be a fun weekend, made all the better by a relatively relaxed atmosphere and the fact that we’re not actually in charge of anything 🙂