OK. It’s been a frustrating month for me (and all the prospective Novell testers). I’ve been in regular correspondence with Dean Giles at Novell with very little progress. The frustrating thing is that we have a copy (under NDA) of the “new iPrint”, fully working and running fine in here. However due to internal politics on the Novell side it has not been possible to make this publicly available to others (i.e. our test sites) because of an NDA. Instead we’ve had to wait until OES2 SP1 was publicly available. It finally looks like there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I receive an email from Novell letting me know that SP1 is not in a public (non private) beta period. Yet to see any post on their website but I’m sure it’s only a day or so away. Finally it looks like we can start official testing and we’ll all have a proper print management solution on iPrint!

Please check out this page for more information on the PaperCut Novell OES Linux testing program, download information, etc. I assume the OES 2 SP1 download will be located here when live. Fingers cross the train will be rolling again soon.

Update: The word from Novell, “The beta has been approved by the core team, but may take a day or two to get posted.”

The Dev. Team here at PaperCut recently did a presentation about Apache Derby at the Australian Java User’s Group (AJUG) meeting in Melbourne. Apache Derby is the default database option supplied with PaperCut. Even thought we offer a choice of MS SQL Server, Oracle and Postgres within PaperCut, we find that 90% of our 10,000+ users stick with Derby. It’s a great choice for most of the medium to smaller sizes organizations as it’s a self-managing database. This means that you as an administrator don’t have to get involved with traditional DBA management tasks such as off-line backups, indexing, and performance tuning. The application and embedded database handles this all for you!

Many will have heard about databases like Oracle or MySQL. Apache Derby however is a little more discreet. The reason for this is that it’s an embedded database. That is, it’s designed to be pre-packaged with applications as a library rather than being deployed as a separate standalone component. However just because it’s has a “low profile” doesn’t mean its not good. It our opinion it’s one of the best databases around. Its performant, packaged full of features, and has a fantastic pedigree being born out of the database development teams at IBM, Informix and Sun. Apache Derby was open-sourced in 2005 when IBM donated it to the Apache Foundation. In now continues to be activly developed under the stewardship of the Apache Foundation along with many other world-class projects such as the Apache HTTP server.

If any are interested in knowing more about Apache Derby and its behind the scenes use in our print monitor application then please check out the slides from the presentation (PDF or HTML).

My first son William arrived yesterday. Unlike our planning here at PaperCut which usually run a few weeks behind schedule, my first child has decided to buck the trend and run ahead of schedule. William weighed in at 1.795kb (just under 4 pounds) - very small but strong and healthy. Both Mother and baby are doing well and Dad is very proud.

William’s bound to be a “tech baby” and I’m sure will be writing computer code in a few years. I was meant to be presenting at the Australian Java User’s Group the night he arrived. He was obviously very keen to get out and attend (also thanks to Matt who stepped in and did the presentation for me). He’s first taste of technology was his photo being sent out to everyone a few minutes after his birth courtesy of a 3G iPhone!

I’m sure to have my hands full over the next months. Lots of time looking after baby and working on print control software between feeds!

Another update for the sites participating in the Novell OES Linux beta program. It looks like we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to get proper print quota on iPrint. The iPrint update required to run PaperCut will now not be available until next week. Novell will be undertaking the last validation tests on Friday and assuming they all pass, they’ll be looking at supplying us with the update on Monday. The build is going to be based on the iPrint Beta 4 release. I’ll keep you all posted and let you know if there are any further delays.

Last week we announced the start of the official beta testing period for PaperCut on Novell. Novell is our last remaining platform so it’s great to see this finally in beta. We already have close to 50 sites that have contacted us expressing eagerness to participate in the beta testing program. There is a lot of excitement out there and a lost of organizations are happy to finally see best of breed print auditing and print control on iPrint.

As discussed in this page, I am going to post updates, news and announcements in our developer blog. One of the immediate announcements is with respect to the availability of the new iPrint release from Novell. PaperCut targets a yet-to-be-released iPrint version. This is a new version of iPrint scheduled for official release in Novell OES Linux 2 SP1 and includes the API hooks we required to get PaperCut working and cooperating with iPrint. Dean and Devon at Novell are working through the internal procedures at the moment so all beta test sites have early access to this iPrint update. The plan was to have this available last week but it’s been delayed. Dean is aiming to have all approved and available on Thursday the 21st.

In the meantime please regularly check this Blog for any news. Also if you have any questions or what a sneak peek, please check out the announcement and/or feel free to email me at support.

Many companies have a Jobs/Employment section on their website. We’re a small company with very low staff turn over and hence rarely advertise positions. We do however have one going right now! Quite a few people subscribe to our blog, so I thought we’d do some shameless self promotion and post the position here:

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Since we release our free print logging program a few years back its been a hit with hundreds of thousands of downloads. Every now and then we receive a thank you email or a short story about how people are finding it useful. One user recently wrote to us to thank us for helping him track down why his ink was disappearing. He had no explanation as to why his home printer ran out of ink every few weeks. Print Logger to the rescue! A quick audit of print activity shows that his kids did a lot of printing before he got home from work. Now printing in his household is restricted to homework use only and he’s happy again!

There are also plenty of other examples at the big end of town. Today I received an email from PepsiCo and HP outlining their use of PaperCut Print Logger. It’s great to see that this little free program has uses ranging from small homes to the largest corporates.

For us, PaperCut Print Logger serves two purposes:

1) It’s a great test bed for our printer page analysis technology. With hundreds of thousands of users, we quickly get reports about incompatibility with new drivers. The program actively encourages users to report incompatibilities and in turn this ensures that all our applications offer the widest range of support.

2) It’s also a fantastic way to get a “taste” of our applications. Many schools for example will install PaperCut Print Logger to get a quick view of what’s going on on their networks. It’s then only a small jump to move to PaperCut to implement print control, quotas, reporting, and of course monitor the environmental impact of printing.

If you’re running print logger, please take a few moments to send us an email and share your stories.

The other day I sent a quick email to the Jetty HTTP Server development team thanking them for all their hard work. We struck up a bit of a conversation and they wanted to know more about how we’re using Jetty in PaperCut and asked us if we’d like to write up a short Case Study for their website. I’ve decided to post this on the blog as it will also give some of our users an interesting look at the “internals” of PaperCut.

Our use of Jetty is quite a bit different to most. Instead of treating Jetty like Apache or a stand-alone server, we’re using Jetty as an embedded component. It’s deployed with our print accounting application, PaperCut (tour here for those interested). As a result, Jetty is running on tens-of-thousands of servers in over 60 countries and the vast majority of users are completely unaware that it’s there. The measure of a good embeddable component is not who’s using it, but who’s not aware that they’re using it! Jetty is fantastic in this regard - zero config and zero maintenance, working away flawlessly for years on end.

Jetty is hosting PaperCut’s web application interface. This is a web application based on Tapestry, Spring, Hibernate and Apache Derby. Jetty’s embeddability has allowed us to deploy this stack in a standard setup.exe type installer targeting all major platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac). Our users don’t need to know anything about web servers or their setup and configuration. All they need to do is run the installer! Jetty’s scalability has also been an advantage. In some cases PaperCut is installed on a small business server supporting 5 workstations, while on other sites it’s running in University environments on clustered servers supporting 100,000+ users. Jetty has prove equally adaptable at both ends of the scalability spectrum.

Choosing components for a project is always difficult - often too much choice! Obviously Jetty has been a great choice but was one we carefully considered back in 2005. Technical functionality was one criteria, but another important consideration was the strength of the team behind the project. We’ve seen too many Open Source projects start out with enthusiasm only to run out of puff and “age” early. What grabbed us about Jetty was the future looking team. In 2005 AJAX was very new and there was big questions about how to handle server-push events in a scalable fashion. We had an immediate need for this, not with AJAX, but with our web services API (client software receiving web-services push events from the server). The Jetty development team members such as Greg Wilkins, were openly discussing “long polling” and the issues around this. Jetty was one of the first servers to present working and more importantly “workable” solutions to the scalability problems.

We can’t recommend Jetty more highly. It’s a great web server, a great component, and is backed by a switched-on forward looking and innovative team - make sure you check out the open source Jetty and the team!

Wow! On the back of the Italian translation of PaperCut Print Logger, Alessia and her team have translated PaperCut Print Logger into Spanish. The translation has been done by a Spanish girl in her class under the supervision from their teacher who can also speak Spanish. On behalf of all the Spanish users of PaperCut, we’d like to send a big thank you to Alessia and her team at San Pio V University in Italy.

A PaperCut user recently reported an unfortunate situation. The PaperCut Pre-Paid/TopUp Card Wizard generated a card with an inappropriate random card number. The first reaction of our developers was to have a bit of a laugh – what are the chances of that? – followed by some serious discussions on the best way to fix the “bug”.

The offending card censored to protect the innocent!

The situation reminded me of the Infinite monkey theorem. We calculated that the probability of this, or any other four letter work appearing in any one card, is approximately 1 in 800,000. That’s very low, but given a large enough number of administrators generating a large enough number of cards, it was bound to happen some day.

We considered a number of solutions including Black Listing words. The only problem with this approach was that it’s hard to know what constitutes a “bad” word in all the 9 languages we support. Also, maybe some legit words may be inappropriate in some cases. Our final solution was to simply drop vowels which in turn prevents word formation - a simple but elegant solution. Anyone know any bad four letter words without vowels?!