Battlestart Galactica: Epiphanies

This was the first time that I’ve actually been annoyed with the resolution of am episode of BSG.

After building up to what is basically an inevitable death for a lead character, the sci-fi engine kicks in and saves Roslin from dying of terminal cancer. Not only that – but she’s completely cured!

Nevermind the final ‘twist’ at the end which was completely unneccesary and unwarranted. I can’t fathom how that could have even be pulled off.

It’s a shame because the episode had some really good strengths. When Boomer started banging her head against the glass window, it was a shocking display or raw emotion.

Tigh’s restrained jubilation as Adama grabbed the terrorist by the throat was an excellently executed.

And of course, there was the issue of Baltar’s motivations which now even he’s confusing himself. With two clear motivations available to him for helping Roslin and saving her life, it seems he’s deluded himself into thinking that he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart. The root motivation of course is that he’s trying to save Boomer’s child.

Yep – not a bad episode in the least, just let down by a few quirks in the storyline.

Windows Server 2003 Print Spooler Issues

I had a problem with a newly installed server that was the print server for about 12 – 15 printers.

The printers were dotted around the site and connected to Intel print servers themselves to allow them to be available on the network.

It was reported to me that the server repeatedly stopped allowing you to print and it was true, when I checked the spooler service, it had stopped.

After examining the event log, I found the following information messages appear every 6 seconds:

Printer \\server\printer was set.

This was cycling through around 6 printers – and possibly meant a lot of network and server bandwidth was being chewed up.

All of the printers connected happened to be Brother 1230 or Brother 1430 printers. Oddly, the Brother 1240 printers were unaffected (possibly because they were series 40).

Anyway, after poking around the printer settings and the registry, I found the problem to be that the printers were using the native Brother print processor.

To remedy:

  • Open Printers and Faxes
  • Right-click on the printer and click Properties
  • Click the ‘Avanced’ tab
  • Click ‘Print Processor…
  • Select WinPrint and RAW
  • Press ‘OK’ and ‘OK’

Now go back to the settings and check that the print processor is still using WinPrint. If it is not, you also need to disable ‘Advanced Print Services’ in the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Desk Marker

I’ve found a pretty nifty (and free) program on the Internet called Desk Marker.

Basically it will allow you to turn your mouse into a desktop drawing tool so that you can annotate what is on the screen. What is even more useful is that when you move any windows around the screen after you have drawn your doodles, the markup will remain as long as it’s visible.

The only catch is that the inteface is a little clunky (you have to press and hold ALT+1 to use the pen by default).