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!

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!

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!