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!

PaperCut was originally started back in 1999 making it now 8 years old. The code written back in 1999 stood the test of time well and in fact remanent of the original code remain today in the PaperCut Quota. In 2005 we embarked on a project to re-architect PaperCut – the result being PaperCut NG. Today PaperCut NG is 2 years old! It’s amazing how time flies.

Last year I posted an article graphing our progress with PaperCut NG. As you’ll see from the updated graph, our progress has not slowed and we’re now up to 450,000 lines of code!

Some History

Here is a screen-shot of the original PaperCut website, circa 1998/1999 (very ugly… but we’ll call it “retro” to be nice!)

Here is a screen-shot of one of the first versions of PaperCut. Notice the cool “Windows 95″ style icons!

I rolled out a new release of the free PaperCut Print Logger utility today - version 1.2. The release includes support for a number of new printer models as well as improved page/plot size detection on some HPGL based plotters. I’ve also updated the URLs to point to the www.papercut.com domain.

You may have noticed our new top news story – PaperCut’s new home at www.papercut.com. It’s great to finally have the papercut top level domain. It’s bound to make us more visible (and also looks a little “cooler”!). We’re now redirecting everyone across to the new domain. The process is a little bit like moving house… lots of things to do like updating contact details… but also a good excuse to throw out some junk and do a clean-up!

From a technical perspective, working out the best “method” to conduct the transition was a bit of a challenge. We decided on going for an HTTP 301-permanent redirect as suggested by Google. The process is however a little hit and miss in terms of search results as discussed in this interesting Wall Street Journal article.

The 301 redirect was put in place using an Apache .htaccess rule like:


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^POST$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} papercut\.biz$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} papercutsoftware\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.papercut.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]


The first line prevents the redirect occurring on POST requests – an important requirement as browsers don’t handle redirects on POSTs very well. Disabling redirects on POST ensures PaperCut’s “Report Error” feature continues to work.

Welcome to our new home!

I’ve had a few Mac administrators ask for ideas on how to duplicate/copy printer configuration from one Mac desktop to another. It’s more of a general system administration question rather than an a development area we address here at PaperCut, but it’s an interesting related problem. I’ve written up a knowledge base article that proposes a simple script based solution. I hope some of the Mac admin’s out there find it useful.

We’ve supported running PaperCut on clustered servers for two years now and have some very large installations utilizing this feature. These range from large corporate and finance institutions to universities supporting 50k+ users. Clustering allows PaperCut to push into these really large sites.

Over the past two years I have learned that clustering should be considered as an investment rather than a solution. Purchasing a larger hard drive to fix a storage capacity problem is a solution. Implementing clustering may also be a solution but it’s far more of an investment. The pay-off is often not immediate. The real benefits come when the unexpected occurs. A power supply meltdown would usually make a system administrator’s heart stop, however to a cluster administrator it brings a smile as they realize all their hard work just paid off

While on the topic of clustering, any organizations looking at implementing PaperCut on a clustered Linux setup should take a look at the notes the guys at Zen Consulting have put up. If you’re in Canada and looking for assistance in this area, I can highly recommend Ryan and his team as they’ve done a great job with some challenging installs.

Fire has recently affected two of our customers. The first event hit one of our largest customers (a prestigious American University who shall remain nameless to save embarrassment!) running PaperCut in a clustered server array. Equipment failure in the server room resulted in a fire that took down the cluster’s shared storage. Fortunately the database server was still intact and we had their quota system up and running on a temporary box within a few hours. The second event occurred at Heron Island Research Labs – our “smallest” and most isolated customer based on a tiny island off the cost of Queensland, Australia. The fire there devastated the research labs at the world-renowned facility.

Both events highlight the importance of backup for both big and small. Now is the time to check your PaperCut backups and ensure that the in-built backup feature is complimented with a good off-disk and off-site (and off-island!) backup policy.

Wow! A customer in China running PaperCut Quota 1.0 (released 3 December 1999) emailed us today asking about upgrading to PaperCut NG 7.3. It’s amazing to think that such an old version is still out there and going strong. 8 years in the software world is a lifetime. A lot has changed since version 1.0 but it’s satisfying to see that our old code still has legs today!

We all spend a lot of time talking about environmental issues here in the office. I suppose partly because global warming is the “topic of the month” (really century!), and because we work on software designed initially with an environmental objective - that is cutting down on paper!

We find that PaperCut helps reduce an organization’s printing volume in a number of ways:

1. Monitoring: If users know they are being monitored and compared to other users, they tend to change their behavior.
2. Restrictions: Quotas, budgets, and limits on documents sizes help to reduce usage by addressing extremes.
3. Cost: If users pay for printing out of their own pocket (say in schools), they tend to always think before they print!

The next release of PaperCut will include a 4th method - that is, appealing to the user’s environmental conscience. PaperCut will now provide the user with information about the environmental impact of their printing.

Users can now view their impact in real-time. The figures present the impact in a number of forms:

• Trees: The percentage of a tree (or trees) used to make the paper.
• Carbon: The amount of CO2 (green house gas equivalent) that was released in the process of manufacturing and delivering the paper.
• Energy: Represents the impact in terms of the equivalent impact of running a 60W bulb for a period of time.

This has been one of my pet projects for the past few days. We hope that most sites will leave this option enabled and by appealing to a user’s environmental conscience we can cut paper even further!

When I next have some spare time, I intend to add a 5th factor - appealing to the user’s competitive nature. We plan to implement a star based ranking system where the system will issue a star rating to each users. The hope is that in a school/college environment students may compete for a 5 star rating… time will tell.

Make sure you all upgrade to the latest PaperCut release and get into an environmental mode!

You all have probably noticed the PaperCut NG 7.2 and PaperCut ChargeBack 7.1 releases by now. We’ve had lots of good feedback about the new scheduled/emailed reports feature. This was Tom’s project so he deserves all the credit. We’re planning another update in the next two weeks with some more new features including an easier method to schedule quota allocations on ad-hoc dates (e.g. start of semester).

Today we also released PaperCut Print Logger 1.1. This is a minor update to Print Logger including support for new printer hardware and translations in German and French.