Back to the basics...

The past couple of times I tried to print to my venerable Brother laser printer, Windows reported the unit to be offline.

I ran all sorts of diagnostics, reinstalled the driver, and generally tore my hair out trying to figure out what was the matter.

Then (and it always seems to be "then," instead of the other way around, i.e., I do this stuff first) I recalled the hard-won lessons of my engineering days and proceeded to check the wiring and cabling in the setup.

The power cable? Check. The printer turned on with no problem.

The USB cable? Check. My computer made a suitable noise when I plugged the USB cable into it.

So what was the matter?

Eventually, I decided to unplug and replug the other end of the USB cable, on the printer's side.

When my fingers brushed the cable at the point where it was plugged into the printer, the cable came away with hardly any resistance at all. My computer made the noise that it does when a USB device is disconnected.

I plugged the USB cable into the printer. The computer recognized the connection of a USB device. I reran the printer diagnostic, and the unit was back online.

So it turns out that when one get around to checking the basic stuff (whether at the start or sometime after the start of a troubleshooting session), it's a good idea to throw all of one's assumptions out the window.

Cheers...

Wow...

I must admit that I missed the "sunsetting" of Dr. Dobb's this past December, after almost 40 years of publication. Somewhere, I think I still have some of the early issues (perhaps even the #1).

I thought of the magazine because during the course of the day, I had given quite a bit of thought to something my cardiologist said on Monday during my follow-up, about my 2013 hospitalization in Moscow, i.e., given what was recently learned about my heart, he was really surprised I hadn't died back then.

And dying suddenly of heart disease was something that happened to an editor at Dr. Dobb's (or maybe it was a different Miller Freeman publication), and I was trying to recall his name. A young fellow—smart as a whip—but only in his late 30s.

That led me to the Dr. Dobb's website, and eventually to an old column I had written back in 1994 for AI Expert, which had been republished in 2008 under the following intro:

Even back in 1994, Alex Lane was warning programmers not to rely solely on the language-du-jour to solve all their problems. As this nugget from AI Expert illustrates, an open mind has always been a useful tool.

I must admit, despite the missing graphic and some squirrely math formatting (e.g., 39 instead of 39), I was genuinely touched to see that the piece had been republished.

Ah, well... back to work. There's a pile of it left to do!

Cheers...