The blog of Mike (such as it is).
Archive for April, 2010
We are glad to have great suppliers
Apr 13th
Our raw materials supplier, which also has a service and technical support division, happened to request and offer to come by today.
The meeting was a great conversation, and we very much enjoyed their insight. We figured out pretty quickly that our sales rep was a great one. And our tech (when we need him for advanced service needs) is also very, very good.
What a great day. We definitely realized that we chose the right major supplier.
Can’t post our supplier name here unfortunately, but please private message me if you are in the banner printing business and need a suggestion for who to align with. They provide sign industry inputs (inks, materials, and other such items).
Maintaining the manufacturing equipment
Apr 9th
This is all done on the Mutoh ValueJet 1204AS we use in one of our businesses. The print feed motor failed, and for good measure, we intended to replace the print feed motor’s encoder (which provides feedback to the machine about the movement the motor generates).
-
- The big expensive printer broke down yesterday. Oh no!
-
- But fear not! The replacement parts were overnighted, and the problem is user serviceable.
-
- Here is a mugshot of the culprit: the “Print Feed Motor”
-
- The old motor is removed, and fortunately the new one looks just like it.
-
- There is a related part (called an “encoder”) that also should be replaced. But they sent us the wrong part and it won’t fit!
-
- Since our supplier sent us the wrong “encoder” wheel for our machine, we had to clean up the old one and hope for the best. That’s a combo of ink powder and pulverized rubber from a motor belt near it in the machine.
-
- The new print feed motor is installed!
-
- Everything is installed back and working great! The print jobs continue.
So I did all this earlier today, pausing only to shoot pictures for the blog (and just in case I had to show a real technician what I had done to it later). Naturally this is pretty scary because the machine way expensive to repair or replace. But it went really well.
Next I plan to try some home surgery. There’s a kit for that called “Suture Self”. (thanks to my dad for telling me that joke when I was a kid)
It was the extra “space” that killed it.
Apr 8th
Just finished troubleshooting a bug in a customer system. It’s a piece of custom software, run from a website, and written in PHP. This software collects orders from customers online, and transfers them into QuickBooks via a custom XML service and the QuickBooks Web Connector. And the other day, after a simple update, it stopped working.
Guess what the problem was? Heinous code changes? Chinese hackers? Faulty QuickBooks update? Nope. It was a single ” ” (space) character.
Several functions of the system require that absolutely no output be sent to the browser screen for various redirect functions, especially surrounding SSL and initiating a SOAP session with QuickBooks. Well, the extra character had been accidentally typed into the visible part of a PHP script file filled with common functions.
I finally found what the problem was after pulling the backup version of the recently changed file out of our Amazon S3 cloud backups (performed via JungleDisk automatically on our affected server at The Planet). Restoring the old version of the file fixed the problem, so I used Komodo code editor to compare the files (results attached).
It turned out that there was an extra ” ” (space) at the end of the file that got sent to the screen too early. And the browser got really confused about the content of the page as a result.
Just more evidence of the complex nature of these systems that make the web go round. Good thing we have solid processes for tracking and fixing! Yay for automatic backups into the cloud.