Jon's Notes

December 27, 2004
Food Allergies Most of the people in my immediate family have food allergies. I used to think that I had escaped and could eat anything. Now I am discovering otherwise.
I seem to be allergic to the following edibles:



December 12, 2004
Cat, Israel, and the CSM The Christian Science Monitor is currently running a story about groups divesting of Cat stock because Cat sells equipment to Israel.

First off, the caption on the photo states that the earthmovers are being used to demolish illegally constructed homes. There is nothing wrong with that. The earthmovers are used to demolish Israeli and Palestinian homes alike.

Secondly, the wording on the poll is inappropriate. The diplomatic actions of the United States government have, in most cases, no bearing on the economic actions of religious sects. Stating that the church should act because the government has failed to act shows a misunderstanding of the place of churches. The government is forced to act when churches fail to act in cases of social justice. Consider who is supposed to tend the elderly and widowed. Yes, the church.

Lastly, will the PCUSA be following the teachings of the Christ with regard to great wealth? I don't suppose that one gets an $8 billion portfolio by giving all to the poor.

Found via: LGF

December 07, 2004
Jobs, Finals, and the Future Yep, one of those days… again…
I'm trying to decide whether to spend the spring in Central Illinois. My family and friends live there, but there are no decent jobs. Or, I could try to find a decent job in the Milwaukee area. Having a job up here would hopefully let me attend school part time.

Half of my finals are finished. I just have two more to take tomorrow and then I'm finished.

December 01, 2004
Talking to a LaserJet with PHP I recently found this article on using C# to display messages on the LCD screens of LaserJet printers. The sample code compiled and ran cleanly with mono, even though the version of mono that I was using was nearly a year old.
So anyway, I was playing around with it and mentioned it to a few people. One of them, Kevin, decided to write an implementation in PHP. We hunted around with Google looking for a PCL refrence. This continued until we found a decent one. Thus equipped, Kevin quickly wrote a command line PHP script to send messages to the printer. Shortly after that, we turned it into a web form. I polished up the HTML and took some pictures. Then we went back and added some validation code to ensure that only the LCD message was updated.
You can see the result here.

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