printing to a receipt printer from OpenBravo POS

P had installed a new POS system on a Win7 Lenovo netbook and was having trouble printing to the USB receipt printer. It was printing, but leaving a lot of blank space at the top before printing and cutting the receipt. Finally fixed it by going to the printer properties, and in the paper settings, choosing 'Conserve paper' 'Top and Bottom'. The font is also different from the one seen in his other POS, which runs Linux. Probably because the Linux machine is printing to a driver similar to Generic Text. Trying Generic Text driver on the Win7 box gave the "correct" font, but the layout was awry. Probably an issue with paper settings for that driver, too. Anyway, since the smaller font is OK, he'll probably go with the Epson driver.

Edit: P adds:
Finally was able to get this work with correct font size.

Suggestion from this forum post.

Solution:
Epsons POS website had the latest virtual COM port software which works for Windows 7: TM Virtual Port Driver Ver.5.00aE . Assigned the printer to COM1 through the software and changed the openbravo pos settings to Printer: epson -> Serial -> COM1

set mime types in Plesk

Noticed that after the server migration, the pls and asx files were no longer being served from www.radiosai.org - so went into the Plesk control panel,
radiosai.org -> Virtual Directories -> Mime types tab and added
asx - video/x-ms-asf
pls - audio/x-scpls

upgrading ActiveSync and more

A brought a Toshiba Portege for me/A. When I attempted to sync it, it wanted me to upgrade to ActiveSync 4.5 from 4.2. After doing that, syncing from the old phone no longer does Contacts Sync - it says install Outlook for that functionality. So, for now, using ActiveSync merely as a connection mechanism to manually transfer files. Initially internet connectivity using ActiveSync did not work. Then changed the Connection settings on the desktop, "This computer is connected to:", changing the dropdown to The Internet



Also, as this post points out, changed the Remote NDIS host setting on the mobile so that the "Unable to obtain IP address" error stops popping up.

gmail pop3 captcha

Found an issue with pop3 not working on our automated bounce processing - fetchmail could not fetch mail from gmail and gapps accounts. At first I thought it was the problem with the issue reported here, and that I had to go to http://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

Did all that, but actual problem was a change in password from sssbpt.org. Fixed that, and everything started working again.

cyberoam failover tweak

By default, cyberoam failover rules checks pings to the default gateway and fails-over if the pings fail. But in our case, the default gateway itself is ususally fine, it is the link to Bangalore which fails. So, it needs to ping the Bangalore end of the link and if that fails, failover. Changed the rule accordingly in cyberoam, works well now.

upload through cyberoam - problem solved

In a previous post, I'd mentioned that the Studio people have problems uploading stuff - ftp / yousendit / vimeo et al. Found a workaround - disable virus / spam scanning in the firewall rules. You can, of course, do this for only the particular host you are uploading from.


That is, clear all the check-boxes in the last line in the image above.

problems with kindle not connecting to wifi - solved with static ip address

K had some issues with his Kindle not connecting to his wireless router at home. He tried many things including changing the security settings to WPA and even to unencrypted. Still did not connect. Finally he put in a static ip address instead of getting the ip address from the router, and this worked like a charm. So, don't rely on the DHCP server running on routers for connecting mobile devices. I did not even try to connect my Windows mobile to Airport at home with DHCP, since even my Windows laptop had problems with the Airport's DHCP. Static IPs work with no problems.

K was initially turned off since a DNS server IP address is required. You can always give the google public dns ip address of 8.8.4.4 or 8.8.8.8 if your router itself does not do a good job of providing a stable dns server. OpenDNS is also available, 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

uploads problems with Cyberoam

The Studio people have problems uploading stuff - ftp / yousendit / vimeo - using the Cyberoam 50ia as the gateway. For all of last month, P was directly connecting a laptop to the gateway directly for uploads. So is there a solution with Cyberoam support, or do we have to make a workaround with another router etc?

thumbnail images for saicast

Ran a thumbnail factory this morning for saicast, generating 15 thumbnail images. On DG's guidance, this was my procedure.

Saved http://saicast.org/images/gangacanal.jpg on my system as saicast4x3.jpg

Opened it in Gimp and found the dimensions of the image alone excluding the frame to be 171 x 127

Then, opened the vimeo videos one by one, played them till a suitable frame, paused and hit printscreen, pasted into Gimp, cropped to a suitable 4x3 frame, resized to 171x127, pasted into the selection on saicast4x3.jpg and then exported as whatever.jpg.