Archive for May, 2012

Printer problem

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

My trusted Canon ip1500 finally broke down after several years of being my sole printer so I had to resurrect my Brother MFC-240C multifunction printer which I was basically using as a scanner. I had to order ink cartridges from Amazon ($7) – cheap! But when they arrived, I found out that it was printing blank pages . . . I ran the print head cleaning utility a couple of times to no avail . . . so I googled it and found out that you should go into maintenance mode and run the cleaning utility from there (which basically cleans it out better than just running it from the menu – I don’t know why engineers think this is acceptable)

To go into maintenance mode, while pressing the Menu button, unplug the printer and without releasing the Menu button, plug it back in (You might need another person to help you achieve this). Wait until you see maintenance on the lcd screen and all four lights (fax,scan,copy,photo capture) should be blinking to indicate that the printer is in maintenance mode.

You should then press 7, 6, 4 (in that order) and then press the black start button – this will start a thorough cleaning process which should clear out any clogged nozzles and afterwards, your printer should be able to print normally.

Funny thing is, pressing just 7,6 at maintenance mode and then start would clean the print head but not thoroughly enough as when I tried it out, it only printed out magenta, yellow and a faint black . . . so if you really want to flush it out, do the process above and it should work.

I’m putting this in my blog for my reference as well as to help out anybody out there who might be at wit’s end and about to throw their printer out the window . . .

Intro to Javascript Objects

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

I have recently signed up for a class in Web Analytics at UBC. I think it will greatly complement my knowledge in usability design and will improve how I produce websites in the future. I haven’t really had much time to study user behavior in the past aside from the usual A/B testing so it will be a welcome change to be able to delve into the analysis of the user and how my websites are being consumed.

I have also made great improvements in my javascripting, having completed a course last year on the basics. I’m also finishing up on the Javascript component at Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com/). I’m much more confident in my Javascript skills now and am consistently putting it into practice in whatever project I may be working on.

Here’s a snippet of what I have learned so far:

Creating Objects in Literal notation

var person = {
name: 'Ryan', // note the comma
weight: 150 // no comma after the last key-value pair
};

Below is the same but using an instance

var person = new Object();
person.name = 'Ryan';
person.weight = 150;

Now you can access the object’s properties by just stating

var weight1 = person.weight;
var weight2 = person['weight']; //this is an alternate way

You can also create a constructor to make it easier to create new objects

function person(name,weight)
{
this.name=name;
this.weight=weight;
}

And then afterwards, create new objects just by using the constructor

var myFriend=new person("John",150);

That is the basics of Javascript objects . . . I will be sharing more about Javascript and jquery on later posts.