Asking for (USB) trouble

I was doing some testing today and had to re-arrange my USB hubs to put certain devices at the beginning of the chain. Hubs, you ask? Yes, I have 3 powered USB hubs and a ton of devices. Does it all work? For the most part, yes. I really wanted a 14-21 port hub and not have to chain hubs together, but I've been unable to find one, except for one that someone hacked together. Am I that unusual to have so many devices? OK, I may have a few more devices than most people, but aren't people collecting more devices? Here's my current list of what is plugged in:

• iPhone
• iPod Nano (2nd generation)
• Fujitsu ScanSnap
• DocketPORT 465 scanner
• NEAT Receipts scanner
• Playstation 2 headset (actually a Logitech headset)
• Garmin Forerunner 305
• DYMO LabelWriter 330
• Generic Flash Drive
• EVDO Rev. A modem
• EPSON CX9400
• Sewell DisplayLink
• MacAlly Keyboward
• Logitech Trackball
• UPEK Fingerprint scanner
• WiebeTech TrayDock

Hacking ICA - NEAT Receipts scanner working with ReceiptWallet

After a lot of work today, I managed to get the NEAT Receipts scanner to work with ReceiptWallet. It wasn't easy as there are issues with ICA and the driver that NEAT Receipts ships is quite buggy (if I tell it to scan the entire width, it fails; I have to divide by 3 to get it to work). I suspect that they just got the scanner working with their software and called it a day. Some comments in their forums seem to back this up as the scanner works quite poorly in Image Capture. I'm only going to be supporting 10.5.3 (which was just released) and higher for using Image Capture and this scanner. A large number of ReceiptWallet users are using Leopard, so this isn't a huge problem.

I'll be posting a beta probably tomorrow with preliminary support for the scanner. I'm sure I'll have to keep tweaking the support when they fix/change their drivers. If you don't have a scanner, I wouldn't recommend their scanner as the drivers still need work; I'd recommend the Pentax DS Mobile 600 or the ScanSnap S300M. If you already have the scanner, now you can use it with a stable, mature product.

Ouch

I read the following in a forum about a new product:

Calling something "advance release" instead of "beta" isn't the greatest way of garnering a loyal customer base. Especially in light of an absence of tech support...

Wow, almost seems like this company tried to rush something to market just to appease users.

Nice work Google and Microsoft

My wife sent me email (yes she sends me email even though she is in the next room) asking for help with a rejected message. She was trying to send to a hotmail.com address; since my domain is hosted on Google for domains, the rejection message was from the gmail postmaster. The error message was:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Gmail tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient
domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about
the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 SC-004
Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed
against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming
from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your
E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, we recommend
enrolling in our Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP), a free program intended
to help senders remove unwanted recipients from their e-mail list:
http://postmaster.live.com (state 13).

So basically this means that Hotmail is rejecting all email from Gmail. Wow! This is going to be a huge mess. After a bit of searching, I found that my wife wasn't the only person having problems. In the comments of a year old post, I found 2 references to this issue.

I hope that Microsoft and Google can work out their differences quickly as both are major email providers and the rejecting of email is going to confuse a lot of novice people and piss off even more.