Adventures in computing

I’d heard dicey things about Fusion and TRPC in the past, although nothing specific. Now that I have thrown the dice myself, I understand.

The thing is, Fusion (and the version of XP I’ve put on there) has certain ways of communicating with OSX. It will automatically use attached printers, for instance, which is pretty important since, at most tournaments, I tend to print stuff like ballots and schematics and the like. Marginally useful, you know? And it will grab data off of disks of various persuasions, connect to specified folders, that sort of thing.

So this weekend I brought up last year’s Pups in aid of getting a file together of the rooms at the high school to remind myself of what we had and eliminate the need of all that reentering. I carefully culled the file down to the right rooms. No problem so far. Time for hard copy. All the settings were correct in Fusion for sending print files to the printer attached to Bigger Elvis via OSX. And every time I tried to print the room list, TRPC crashed.

Some tests were in order.

The natural assumption is that the settings were wrong, but they weren’t. But no way, no how, could I send data to the printer from Fusion to OSX. So, I reset everything and loaded the printer drivers to the XP partition. I set it not to send to OSX. Now everything printed in every program I tested except for TRPC, which of course is the only reason I have Fusion in the first place. One last idea. I kept the printer attached to XP but told the program to send the data to OSX. Henceforth, TRPC worked like a charm, despite the fact that, as far as OSX was concerned, no printer was online. Which means that as long as you tell the data not to go where you want it, TRPC will ignore that instruction and print just fine, thank you very much.

Another two hours of my life shot to hell.