They're against us, every one

Some months back I recounted a sad story about a workhorse printer which, nearing the end of its life, had gone stark raving mad. The madness, of course, was contagious: it drove us all crazy.

So I can relate to this guy:

Now that's the spirit.

Once in a while, though, we can score an occasional victory against our electromechanical overlords. We are in the process of switching the corporate Web site to an open-source server — Apache — and while I run Apache here, I can't legitimately claim more than the bare minimum of expertise. At some point, it was decided that we would install some Unix variant on a PC and use it for testing purposes; after some discussion, the variant chosen was FreeBSD.

Our IT tech, charged with the care and feeding of our fleet of PCs (and the occasional Mac), duly pulled a machine from the shelf, scraped the Windows from its drive, and began running the install. While this was going on, she sought the appropriate documentation, which turned out to be available in handy PDF form. There was just one problem: said PDF ran over 900 pages. Running this off on one of the corporate lasers would take hours, and the job might well die halfway through for lack of toner. (The HP LaserJet in my shop, three weeks ago, was warning: "Less than 700 pages." This week the warning had changed to "Less than 800 pages," which was probably true, but not helpful as far as planning was concerned; I said something to the effect that "At this rate, the cartridge will have completely refilled itself by mid-January.")

So she came up with another tactic. Pointing to the big monster printer that had replaced the Machine From Hell, she said, "Is there any way we can print this document on this machine?"

I was doubtful, and indeed the first few tests were unsuccessful. Finally it dawned on us: the complicated graphics routines which we used for our regular stuff would work at cross-purposes to this task. It would, we reasoned, be possible if we could strip it back to being a purely basic machine, a mere 9-pin dot-matrix box capable of only the simplest print jobs.

So I reset all the sets, which wasn't quite as time-consuming as I had anticipated — wiping them all out was a lot easier than deleting one at a time — and we attacked the document again. This time it worked, although, inasmuch as we were working with a mere 9-pin dot-matrix box capable of only the simplest print jobs, the results fell into the general category of Not Pretty. Not that we cared. The machine chewed through 938 pages in fifty-five minutes; it took nearly that long to burst the forms and punch them for the binder. (More precisely, binders: it took three of them, each three inches thick.) One task down, a few zillion to go.