!@#$%^*() Windows XP Printing

Stupid goddamn WinXP apparently doesn't know how to route LPR requests between subnets. Stupid goddamn WinXP stupid firewall apparently doesn't allow port exceptions for the same port on multiple machines. Stupid goddamn WinXP...

For the record, here's how you connect to a CUPS/IPP printer on a Linux box:

1. Set up the firewall to allow a connection to port 631 on the machine you want to print on.
2. Add a printer, telling the stupid wizard that you want a network connection. DO NOT browse for the printer, specify the HTTP address (third radio button down)
3. Specify, e.g., <http://nova.thestarport.org:631/printers/lp> as the URL.

I'm easily amused

Didn't get much done today -- spent the morning at home waiting for a FedEx shipment that didn't show up until after the flower_cat got back and I'd already left for work. But I didn't know that at the time, so I spent the morning beating my head against Windows printing, and failing to install OpenOffice due to a corrupted download.

But when I did get to work and got through all my email and web reading, I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do for a while, and installed x2vnc on my desktop machine, along with OSXvnc on my ageing Mac laptop. (I picked up a stand for it over the weekend -- that was my excuse.) Worked perfectly.

What x2vnc does is to put up a 1-pixel-wide window along one edge of your X display. When you move your mouse into it, it grabs the mouse events, hides the cursor, and ships mouse and keyboard events over to the VNC server it's linked to. Effectively it joins two displays on two different machines along one edge. There's one called x2x that works better if both machines are running X.

It wasn't until much later this evening that I realized I had OOo on a CD, a copy of The Open CD.