I have an HP OfficeJet J6480 all-in-one printer. This is connected via USB to our Windows XP desktop machine. I also have a Linux (Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”) Laptop which connects to the wireless network setup by our router. The printer also connects wirelessly to that network. Thus, if I’m on the network on my laptop I have access to the printer.

This is the story of how I got the printer to work after having it stop working inexplicably one day. I consider myself a Linux novice; I am comfortable using it, but uncomfortable administering it.

Setting up the printer via USB on the Windows machine was trivially easy. I was unable, though to connect to the printer wirelessly either using Windows or Linux (my laptop is dualboot). Eventually, after spending far too long with HP Technical Support, I realised that the problem was simply that the router was using a channel with too much interference on it. By switching the channel to something else, we could confirm that the laptop (in Windows mode) could connect to the printer wirelessly. They hadn’t heard of Linux, though, and so I was on my own from there.

Setting up the printer initially was actually very easy. Simply running hp-setup as root did the trick. However, although this recognized the printer I never was able to get double-sided printing to work. And I saw no way to access the scanning features of Linux.

After a while, the printer would inexplicably not be connected when I booted up the laptop and I would have to re-istall it using hp-setup again.

In the meantime, I stumbled upon CUPS (the common UNIX printing system) which is a great way to administer your printers and even comes with a nifty web interface. All it took was setting the J6480 to be the default printer and I could run lpr commands. This was important to me because I had written a bunch of scripts to make text files print out nicely. I was also able to install CUPS-PDF and thereby get a “print to PDF” option from KDE.

Eventually, though, the laptop failed to locate the printer. And, no matter how many times I tried, hp-setup just wasn’t doing the trick. Not only that, but now my three printers (J6480, the J6480 “fax” machine that I never use, and CUPS-PDF) had disappeared from the KDE Printer Adminitstration tool.

So first I made sure that the printer could talk to the wireless network. I did this by connecting to it manually using the console on the printer itself. I then printed out a “wireless status report” (again from the printer console) to get me the IP adress of the printer. Trying to run hp-setup with that IP address failed. And trying to ping that IP address from the laptop failed. Now I knew that the printer could talk to the network, the laptop could talk to the network (because I still had internet access), but the laptop could not talk to the printer on the network. Weird.

I looked on the internet for help and found that the hplip utility might help manage my printer. However, I was (and had been ever since I first learned of this tool) unable to install it using apt-get because of conflicts with other packages: libxml-sax-perl. So this time around (having finished the Perl work that needed those libraries), I removed the offending packages, cleared my package install cache (sudo apt-get clean), and installing the most recent version of hplip. Wow! This gave me a nifty new taskbar application for managing the printer. It even seemed to handle scanning and double-sided printing.

I had to reboot the laptop, but then I was able to detect the printer using hp-setup. However, I still couldn’t print to it. I noticed the following message in the error log available from CUPS:


E [14/Apr/2010:07:27:45 -0700] Syntax error on line 10 of printers.conf.


and I noticed the following error when trying to print from lpr:


lpr: bad job-sheets value ""!


Based on advice from some more internet searching I edited the file “/etc/cups/printers.conf” by changing the line


JobSheets


to


JobSheets none


And that fixed things. Finally. I also messed about with CUPS to get double-sided printing enabled by default.

I was really happy, but soon realised that scanning wasn’t quite working. I could scan to images but not to PDF. So I re-installed CUPS-PDF using apt-get (it had dissappeared somewhere along the line). In doing this, I had to manually create the folder “~/PDF” as a location for CUPS-PDF to save files to (in theory I would have to do this to every user’s home file, but I am the only user of this laptop). Then, from within xsane (a Linux scanning utility) I made the CUPS-PDF printer the default printer to use when copying (details were found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XSane).

Things work better now. To scan a document I select the scan option from hplip, this brings up xsane, I select the copy option from xsane if it’s a single image, otherwise I select the multipage option from xsane being sure to specify the number of pages – when all pages have finished scanning save the multipage project to a file. I still need to mess about with the resolution of the scanner because the scanned image is consistently quite dark.

But at any rate, I have a fully-functional all-in-one wireless printer working with Linux and I love it. And it’s just that easy.

I’d just added the RSS feed to Goldenfeed, and saw a link underneath to another RSS directory, ‘readablog’. So I clicked on it and got this error screen:

Sounds like a perfectly normal RSS and blog directory so why has Alexa toolbar come up with this stuff???

For once I agree with Alexa: ‘Why am I seeing this page?’

Firstly, where did the ‘porn’ search come from? Going back to Goldenfeed, all I can see in the status bar is the URL.

Then, looking at the listings, where did Alexa toolbar get those from? OK Home Cinema could have some relevance. And maybe Royal Caribbean Cruises are trying to spice up their image (unlikely, but you never know). But ‘Christian Child Ministry’?? Is someone having a joke on this site, Google bombing them or something like that? And Cisco Systems – some lonely nerds with a networking fetish?

I can’t help wondering why Readablog has been lumbered with this. It has such a wholesome, non-X-rated name. Looking at its page in wholinkstome.com, none of the incoming links have adult sounding names, and it seems to rank best for keywords about marriage and babies.

Looking at its page on Alexa, it seems to have been related to other RSS directories. The closest to dodgy term I can find in its keywords is ‘swimsuit’. Which isn’t even dodgy.

Meanwhile, quantcast has its visitors as mostly male, in their late 30s, without kids and with college degrees. Ok, I’m starting to get a little creeped out about how much the net seems to know about us…

In any case, I can’t see any reason for these Alexa toolbar results (or Cisco Systems, etc for that matter!) Has ‘porn’ become another word for ‘website’?

Finally, I check up on Goldenfeed, and find it has let’s say more of a mixture of stuff. Oops. And there’s my feed, on the home page! Woo hoo!

Now I’m just wondering what the Adsense will come up with for this page…

So I spent a couple of years learning about robots, intelligent systems, evolution and natural language processing. Little robots will go to Mars, they told us. They’ll be Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. I thought it was strange at the time that no one seemed concerned with more immediate practical applications.

Shortly before I graduated, I met an ex-boyfriend of my cousin’s, who worked in marketing. “They’re just starting to use neural networks where I work now,” he told me. They used them to target direct mail advertising. So there it was, the first real life example of AI I’d personally encountered, and it was used for spam. I really should have known. By which I mean, I really should have known, and started Google. Then I’d be laughing.

Cybot by Macaruba

Adsense: not that kind of robot

Ten years later, after having the kids and so on, I went into freelance web development. Many of my former classmates do in fact do interesting and groundbreaking work involving artificial intelligence. They’ve invented guard robots, simulated the climate and ecosystems, programmed artificial lifeforms for videogames and invented Web 2.0 software applications. Wow, I wish I’d done that stuff. But when I look around on the common-or-garden Internet, I mostly see artificial intelligence being used to target contextual PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

And that, I am often told, is the way to effortless millions. So I thought I’d check it out.

Having tried some experiments with affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising seemed like the next logical thing to try out. The basic setup is this: you sign up for Google AdSense or a similar contextual PPC advertising program, use their online advert design process to create snippets of Javascript code, and then paste this code unaltered into the appropriate part of your web page. Google’s Adsense robot visits, processes the other text on your web page and/or website and selects relevant adverts to display in the colours and layout you have chosen. Then the Adsense code loads when your web page does. You’re not allowed to click on your own adverts, but if someone else does you make a small amount of money (often very small). So millions of people click on the ads and you make an effortless fortune. Right? Well, so far I’ve found the system works apart from the last part.

The first thing I was interested in was how the adverts were chosen to be relevant. Would it depend more on the content of the page, or the website as a whole? I also didn’t want Google ads for my competitors appearing on my home page, although I did see the appeal of taking some of their money. So I tested out the ad selection process by setting up my first Google ads on a mix of obscure and slightly odd pages to see what they came up with.

Check out how the ads appear on:

• my privacy policy
  
  
  This is a screenshot, not an ad:
  
  The text before and after the adsense block mentions privacy several times, but the adverts that appear are for general web design and backup security. A quick search on Google for ‘privacy site:uk’ gives me no PPC ads next to the search results, so that would be why the ads weren’t so relevant to privacy: no one was advertising with the ‘privacy’ keyword in the UK.

• my ethical policy
  This is a screenshot, not an ad:
  

  Not bad – these contextual adverts do all relate to business ethics and professional codes of conduct. However, it is obviously not a simple case of pattern matching, linking words in the text to words in the adverts, as my page does not mention the word ‘whistleblower’, for example. Previously on this page I’ve seen ads for sex offender registers, which are really not mentioned in my ethical policy! These ads probably came from keywords in the policy about my web hosting not allowing porn, and using the film rating standards as a guideline.

  Surely if Google used some kind of vast semantic network to link related words together, wouldn’t it be very slow? If that’s how they identify keywords for a webpage, perhaps they would store the results rather than do it every time the page loads. Perhaps they combine two approaches, identifying and storing keywords for the website as a whole (hence the delay in seeing ads when you first put the Adsense code on a website) and then checking individual pages for keywords when they load. Most probably, this is all on record somewhere.

  In fact, when pay-per-click advertisers bid for keywords they write the adverts separately from that. So in theory, they could bid for a keyword and write a completely unrelated advert, although there probably wouldn’t be much point!

• my copyright / credits page
  This is a screenshot, not an ad:
  
  Again, these ads are nicely relevant – perhaps there’s some lucrative legal work in the copyright field.

• my legal document templates
  This is a screenshot, not a real ad:
  
  This one surprised me, because there’s plenty of PPC advertising on Google for legal document services. So why did my web design business site get a whopping graphic leaderboard ad about building websites in minutes? This is the last sort of thing I want my customers to be told when I charge by the hour! Obviously this possibility is a major drawback in putting adsense on a business site. To some extent, competitors ads can be blocked out, and it’s also possible to block image ads if you want to, but it’s still likely that some contextual ads will be for competing services.

  Reloading the page a few times gives me a text alternative to the banner ads, which explains the situation better:

  This is a screenshot, not an ad:
  
  Looking at my page about legal contract templates, and the ads about building websites with website templates, it’s obvious that the Google Adsense code has connected the word ‘template’ to the general web design theme of the site, and taken it out of context, giving a higher weighting to ‘template’ in determining the advertising keywords, rather than the ‘legal’ and ‘contract’ keywords.

  It would be interesting to know how the adsense code manages these weightings (and probably very lucrative too!). Thinking back to how I wrestled with neural networks in college, it would be so ironic if Google had just gone and made one of my website.

Next I tried:

• my ‘Under Construction’ page, with free photos of diggers.
  This page gets some nice ads for sustainable buildings, green architecture and design engineers, possible picking up on the ‘ethical policy’ link in the footer, and the ‘design’ and ‘beach’ keywords used in the site name.

  Surprisingly, this page turned out very well, and for a while it was a popular resource for free photos of diggers! It even got some Adsense clicks – but why? Well, for one reason, I think although the button to click for more photos doesn’t reload the adverts, perhaps it encourages people into interacting more with the page in general. So once they’ve clicked something a few times, they look for something else to click. There’s also the consideration that the rest of my website is unrelated to diggers, so the easiest place for visitors to follow their interest in construction is out through the adverts: interaction design (accidentally) in action!

Then I thought of some types of work I was too booked up for at the time:

• Content Management Systems, which gets general web design ads, and
• Database Websites, which gets some nice looking ads for business database software and professional database development tools.

While keeping an eye on the Google forums and looking at how the Google AdSense code is used on the net, I discovered several gimmicky pages along the lines of ‘Find Your Hobbit Name’ that seemed designed to keep people reloading and seeing new ads they might click on. Reloading the whole page over and over again seems a little dodgy. So I wrote this page, similar to the free photos page, where different parts of the page can be changed by clicking buttons. It took a while to be indexed, but it was popular in February and gave a little boost to the adsense this year:

• Random Valentine’s Day Poems

How romantic.

I even tried it on a ‘Lorem ipsum’ page, before realising that would go against AdSense policies by placing them on a page with ‘content primarily in an unsupported language’. For the record, they were mostly about beach resorts, because of the domain name, and temp agencies, probably because of the ‘tempor’ word fragment.

Here’s a sample of lorem ipsum, for anyone who hasn’t seen it before:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. “

I guess I can see their point.

Finally, I signed up for Gmail (or Google Mail as it’s called in the UK because someone else already had ‘Gmail’ there), and I discovered the Adsense code was reading my mail, and putting relevant ads around it. What’s more, my Google inbox had a Page Rank of 7 (Huh? Who’s linking to it??) I wondered if this was all a creepy invasion of privacy, and then realised that Google would forget what my emails said almost as soon as I would, and I decided not to mind.

Today I read a post by Stephen Wildstrom on Business Week’s TechBeat blog that really sums up Google Adsense:

“I came across a curious item about a man whose family had placed his ashes inside the case of an old Sun Microsystems SPARCstation. Sure enough, beneath the item was an ad for Shine On Brightly cremation urns, plus offers for discount cremation, a San Francisco Bay ash-scattering service, and a company that will place your cremated remains in an artificial reef off Miami…”

Retro Robot by Sasan

Robots in the shed. Yup.

With all those Suns and SPARCs and artificial things, it looks like it should be science fiction, but in fact it really isn’t. It’s an urn full of somebody’s ashes, for people who needed somewhere to put them. Futuristic technology met real life and created something unglamourously useful.

So after all the exciting sci-fi promises of artificial intelligence, it could be that Google Adsense is its most widespread application. It watches what you read and write, and it can make you pennies! It may be a bit disillusioning, but I guess the trick is to make those pennies on a big scale, and build the robots in your shed.

I work from home as a freelance web developer while my kids are at school and preschool, and also when I should probably be asleep When I’m not working on customers’ websites, I develop and run my own websites to try out internet business ideas and make my effortless millions.

I’m curious about it too: I want to know how these ideas work, and how the internet is used in society and by businesses.

So this blog will be a mixture of the technical side of web development, interaction design and usability, internet business models and working from home with kids. I know there are many others out there, so I would like to hear from you!