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:
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?!
A number of visitors have suggested we implement an improved search system for the Knowledge Base and Manual. This project is now complete and we have a new unified site search that searches over the KB, manual, blog, and the site as a whole (check out the search link on the top right-hand corner of the home page). The search is AJAX based and works by overlaying the existing page – no popups, or losing your position on the site. For the technical people interested, it’s driven by Google Custom Search.
We have a rapidly growing KB and we hope this will help PaperCut users find answers they’re after. Please give it a test run and let us know if you have any comments/suggestions.
One of the students at Colchester Royal Grammar School in the UK emailed me last week to fill me in on one of their recent projects – making their school greener. One component of the project addressed printing and they used PaperCut and its environmental impact feature to draw attention to consumption. You can read a little bit more about their project here. It’s been very easy to convince school administrators about the need for PaperCut, but it’s always an up-hill battle convincing students that there are good reasons to control their printing. It now looks like we have a new generation of students that actually are embracing PaperCut!
The website also has an interesting survey (XLS file). Almost 40% of respondents didn’t use double-sided duplex printing because it was “too awkward”. Another good reason to deploy PaperCut – so you can enforce duplex on all printers that support it!
A big thanks to Alessia and her team for their work in translating PaperCut Print Logger into Italian. Alessia and her team undertook the work as part of a software localization course at San Pio V University in Italy. It’s great to see Universities focusing some of their attention on real-world projects. Practical projects where you can “make” something are so much more satisfying. Most of my course work during my University days was theoretically based. I acquired my practical skill” outside of course while working part-time as a system administrator and of course “playing” with computers at home. The theoretical skills in computer science are important, and more importantly for Universities with aging lectures, they never go out of date (e.g. algorithms, data structures, etc.). Practical skills on the other hand need constant updating - which Web 2.0 framework do you what to learn this week!
A number of Italian universities are using PaperCut NG for their print control, and they have coordinated to translate this application into Italian. It’s now great to offer our free print logger in Italian as well. Thanks again to Alessia and team.
We finally got version 8 out the door today and with it comes Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard support. The changes to support Leopard consisted of a sum total of 2001 lines – that is, 2000 lines of documentation and 1 line of code! Yes! That’s right. Only one line of source code needed addressing. Here is the offending line:
echo –n "${var}"
changing to:
printf "${var}"
For those interested, this is a line sits in a daemon startup shell script. echo –n is a way of suppressing the new line character. It was a real surprise to find that Apple had compiled the default shell (bash in compatibility mode) without echo –n support. I agree, strictly speaking this is not part of the POSIX standard, but it’s quite a bold change to drop something that’s become so entrenched over the years. I’m sure it will break many other programs, build scripts, and open source projects.
Only one line of code, but on the other hand a lot of new documentation. Leopard mandated documentation updates as buttons moved, menu options changed and it also brought with it a whole new list of bugs to “work around” 
Us software developers love code but hate documentation - hence I’d rate this as a painful project!
Version 8 also includes a number of new features requested by our growing team of Mac users. I look forward to hearing more about your Leopard experiences.
One of my projects here at PaperCut is the Apple Mac development. (Yes. To all the Mac sites, I’m working on Leopard support right now!). I received this email from one of our US Mac sites and thought I’d share it with you. It also addresses one of my other pet projects – the environmental impact reporting feature.
The student response to PaperCut, the software that helps students account for their printing while also limiting printing is phenomenal! The 6th and 7th graders I have introduced to love the way it graphs the amount of trees they have used, the amount of carbon dioxide they have produced, and the electricity they have consumed in the printing process.They are very excited that we have a program that is so forward thinking about our environment! Kids really are idealists! They want to do the right thing and now they have a way to self monitor! And they are even thinking of ways to use the data! Very exciting!
It’s great to see this enthusiasm. I never doubted the interest kids have on this topic, but it’s also great to see the older generation (i.e. the teachers 
) also share the same passions!
