You'll never break the build again!

At PaperCut we use continuous integration to monitor the quality of our codebase. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally someone makes a mistake and the build gets broken. It’s important this is detected and rectified early so other members of the dev team are not inconvenienced.

Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify a team that the build is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don’t really fit into the culture here at PaperCut. We thought we could do better, and so a new open source project called Retaliation was born!

Retaliation is a Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey. Check out the video to see Tom take one in the back of the head all because of a missing semicolon!

At a deeper level Retaliation is more than just a “simple python script”. It’s a radical rethink into how to manage software development teams and the software development lifecycle. It works on a deep psychological level to offer vast productivity improvements. The primal threat of mutually assured destruction lurking in every coder’s psyche ensures that even your sloppiest developers will never forget to check in that missing file again!

Like all good apps Retaliation has testimonials that sing its praise…

It’s great to see that Chris’ skills in reverse engineering printer binary protocols has not gone to waste. He’s been able to apply this skill to a new field in reverse engineering Foam Missile Launcher system USB protocols! Coding print management software may not be the most glamorous job, however it just got that bit more sexy now that Retaliation is involved!

Writing blog posts are hard for us “computer geeks” in the PaperCut development team. We’re able to string together lines of source code like we’ve been doing it since we were born, but asking us to join enough English words into sentences and paragraphs to construct a blog post… now that’s a different story. All the grammatical rules, spelling, making things interesting… it’s bound to end in disaster!

So like all good software developers we decided there must be a better way. After some use-case analysis, story boarding and excessive coffee consumption we’ve determined that the answer is twitter – also known as micro-blogging. Twitter limits us to 140 characters. Surely we can’t write anything boring or grammatically incorrect in such short posts (ed: we do our best)

Yes, we’ve decided to take the plunge start tweeting. In the spirit of twitter we’ll keep you updated on all things PaperCut: The important (new software releases), the relevant (which features we’re working on), and the not so important (what we’re having for lunch on Fridays!).

If you’re on twitter, follow us on @PaperCutDev and join in the fun. Oh, don’t worry, we’re not abandoning macro-blogging just yet. You’ll need to put up with computer geek grammar, spelling and exciting posts about the 10 benefits of print audit software in business for a little bit longer!

… now I assume I should tweet this blog post?

Image “Male Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana)” by Kevin Cole / CC BY

Priyanka transitions from Java code to Java drink!

The regular readers of our blog will have noticed a few off-topic posts slipping in from time to time. The common theme is coffee and beer. As a group of passionate computer programmers and tech geeks it’s no surprise that we have developed a strong corporate coffee culture. Coffee is our secret weapon! Over the past 10 years we’ve changed programming languages, compilers, and development practices, but one factor has remained constant: Coffee. It must be the pillar for PaperCut’s success.

Coffee is very much part of our culture. The company funds a continuous flow of lattes, cappuccinos and macchiatos (Hendrik’s favorite) all arriving from the coffee shop directly opposite the office. Most of us have espresso machines at home (e.g. Rancilio Silva) and discussions on brewing techniques seem to pop up in developer meeting agendas unannounced.

Recently management decided that attending a formal coffee barista course would be a good idea. Traditional businesses would have called this a “cooperate team building exercise”, however for us it’s “core competency training” The whole Melbourne development team (minus Tom) spent a day at a coffee training academy learning the finer points of coffee production.

Lessons included:

• The art of wasting lots of milk perfecting the perfect froth.
• The amount of coffee one must waste to calibrate the ideal 25 second espresso pour.
• Latte art: The art of convincing someone that the shape on the top of their coffee was deliberate.
• How to make beverages unknown to computer programmers (chai lattes, and hot chocolates)

The day finished off with a competition. We paired up into teams and had to make 8 coffee variants in 8 minutes. Congratulations to Matt and Jason who took out the title.

To take a slight deviation, my favorite pieces of coffee trivia:

• The magic number on Java .class files is 0xCAFEBABE
• The embedded framework we target for our HP embedded MFP development is called Chai

Overall it was a very fun day. We even got to walk away with a formal certificate – we’re now qualified Baristas! If we all get sick of writing print management software we now at least have a fall back option – open a Cafe!

Thanks to Jason for the great images!

For the past month Tom and I have been quietly working away on our new website. It was satisfying to push it live today (Sunday night US time). The new site is quite a change for us. It’s the first time we’ve used an external designer. Here are a few screen-shots showing how our site has evolved over the last ten years:

PaperCut Circa 2000

PaperCut Circa 2004

PaperCut Circa 2009

PaperCut Circa 2010 (Today)

Historically all our web design has been done in-house. As a bunch of computer programmers we are very proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, however when it comes to artistic flair we finally conceded that we were hitting our limits. It was time for some outside help! After some searching we found a web designer (Pollenizer) we felt was able extend our own culture and style rather than impose their own.

I see that the Internet has two quite different styles:

1. The “Corporate Look” – conservative sites painted with fancy stock images (often from istockphoto.com). If we were to adopt this style I suppose we’d have some attractively dressed person standing smiling next to a printer )

2. The “Web 2.0 Look” - punchy colors, wide open spaces, and a focus on content / message rather than visual gloss – like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

As PaperCut has grown over the years, we’ve expanded from being a solution exclusively for education to one focused on all areas from schools, to SME, to large business. Increasingly PaperCut is presented at management-level in corporate organizations. Despite this “enterprise shift”, we still felt that the Web 2.0 look better fitted with our technical-focused culture. We felt it was important to have a website that reflects who we are and the way we work. We’re quite proud that we’re an engineering driven organization run by young developers and want to make this clear through our website.

The visual design of the new website was done by one of the lead web designers behind Kazaa – in its day one of the Internet’s most popular sites (and one that will undoubtedly also go down in history for notorious reasons!). He’s done lots of work with leading Web 2.0 companies and I think has done a great job for us. We hope you like the new design. We’ve kept with our green theme (in both color and environmental impact aspect), and also put more focus on our name rather than our starting-to-look-dated XP style icon.

At a technical level the site is also a departure from the norm. We’ve decided to cast away the shackles of IE6 (darn Microsoft!) and now target the last web technologies (It still “works” in IE6 but is not visually ideal). We’ve also making extensive use of CSS and JQuery. One of the design goals was to have the home page load as fast as our older site. We’ve come close to this with the help of a few tricks. For example you’ll notice the progressive image loading on the home page – the content renders really quickly, while the glowing tree loads in later in the background (this tree constitutes about half of the page download and is done last and faded in with a JQuery effect). Some other technical highlights include:

• Designed for larger screens (not many system administrators are running 1024 monitors on their desktop these days!)
• Leverages CSS font kerning and shadow
• Enabled GZip server-side compression on selected resources. e.g. compress our CSS and Javascript files. (If this works well we’ll consider enabling on other resource types.)
• We’ve used cutting-edge CSS styling attributes available in Firefox and Webkit based browsers such as rounded corners on DIV elements (emulated in IE using curvycorners.js)
• JQuery is downloaded off GoogleAPI’s CDN. Many sites are now using this so these resources are already in people’s local cache.
• Some Apache .htaccess tweaks to more effectively leverage local browser caching.
• Renders on the iPad and iPhone!

Hope you all enjoy the behind the scenes story and welcome the new look! I should also mention that the blog/news section which you are reading now is not yet skinned in the new style!

We’re working on a new website design and the moment and I’ve been crafting some new content for the home page. We’ve always proclaimed that PaperCut is in use in over 60 countries, but this was based on figures back in 2006. I was wondering if we’d add any more to the list over the years. So during a cup of coffee today I jumped into the license system and with a bit of UNIX command-line magic and came up with the new list. We’ve now cracked 100! As a computer programmer, it’s great to know that your software is helping save paper in so many countries.

I was pretty good at Geography in high school but one name on the list stumped me. Where is Benin? Well, now I know! Thanks to Africa Rice in Benin for helping us add one more to the list.

Many of these countries are supported under our Developing World program. If you’re an education organization in the developing world, please contact us to discuss options.

As you all can tell from reading our blog, PaperCut is very much an engineering driven organization. What does this mean? Well, in short, our company is stacked full of engineers and computer geeks! We love computers, love programming, and love working with smart customers. Our engineering team (as opposed to a marketing team) controls our company direction and priorities.

Marketing, although still important, does take a back seat here at PaperCut. We don’t have any marketing staff at all! Over the years we’ve found that nothing has helped sell PaperCut more than simply “making it better”! Instead of spending money on glossy magazine ads, we re-invest into a better PaperCut. Having the best technology and relying on word-of-mouth is our model. Our advertising is you.

Most of the word-of-mouth support is just that – you talking to fellow IT system administrators. Occasionally however it takes a different form such as this this great article on Tech Republic, or this blog post by Ken over at ChangeForge. We also can’t forget the EduGeek tribe.

We also love reading about how our handywork is used. It might be:

• talk about the environment
• going green and being responsible
• feedback on how students respond to PaperCut
• a frank college magazine editorial
• pictures of our software on copiers
• proof that PaperCut makes a difference
• or attempting to read about PaperCut in languages I don’t understand!

And as an engineer there is also nothing more rewarding than seeing your latest work being appreciated. In 2009 we began a formal voting process to prioritize our development. Thousands of our users voted and Web Print quickly hit the number one spot. We pushed it up the priority list and got it does as quickly as we could. It’s great to see  so  many  people  now benefiting from this work! (Print scripting is our latest feature, so if you have any good ideas or feedback here, please share)

From all the engineers here at PaperCut, a big thanks to our marketing team – YOU!

I’ve just arrived back from the USA where I spent a week at the Novell Brainshare conference – Novell being the newest platform PaperCut supports. As the main Linux & Novell developer I had the task of tripping over to Salt Lake City in the USA and manning the PaperCut stand. Rick also joined me from PaperCut’s US office. Novell, both the the company and the user community, is an interesting environment. Many people think of Novell as an “aging platform”, however it’s very different today. Novell today is more focused on services sitting on top of the OS. The base OS is now Linux and the focus on open source has really changed the environment. The community today very much has a “Linux feel” – full of lots of smart forward looking administrators and managers.

As a developer I loved this conference. Because the crowd was so technical all discussions were very interesting. Less time talking about how glossy the brochure is, and more time talking about “tech stuff” like, clustering, the process-level isolation design used in PaperCut’s OES Linux version, and how cool PaperCut’s new advanced scripting feature is! There were lots of organizations on legacy Netware and PCounter installs looking for more modern alternatives. I think we impressed lots of people here. I regularly heard comments like, “PaperCut is the best 3rd party application to come the Novell platform in years”, both from existing and potential new users.

I also got the opportunity to catch up with many of our Novell users from around the world. It was great to put some faces to some names and speak to people using our German, Korean and Portuguese versions. Fortunately everyone spoke English! Many also came with lists of ideas for future releases, some of which we’ve already started work on.

One story that I think summed up the conference occurred on the third day. I’d been flat out on the stand talking to people all morning. Finally there was a lull so we took the opportunity to pop out and grab a quick coffee, only to return to the pavilion to see a group gathering around the stand. I thought, “Typical. Everyone decided to arrive at the exact 10 minutes we’re not there.” As I got closer I noticed they were all looking at the computer and playing with the software. It turned out that one in the group was already a PaperCut user, loved the software and wanted to show a few others he’d met. No one was on the stand so he decided to give his own demo. Wow! If I had of known it was that easy I would have just set up the stand and went skiing for a few days instead

And yes. It briefly snowed while I was in Salt Lake City. A interesting experience as an Aussie coming from a long hot summer!

“Mr iPrint” and Chris
Ted (Novell’s main iPrint developer from Provo) and Chris at the PaperCut stand.

PaperCut on Novell users from the UK
Me with Simon from Cambridge University and Richard from Brighton & Hove College.