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?!

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 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.

I’ve just uploaded another build with a few small fixes and changes, including:

• Allow the internal admin password to be changed from within the user interface (on the Options->Advanced) tab.
• In the Internet Usage logs screens, allow the results to be sorted by the “MB received (ex cached)” column.
• Fix error that can occur when saving groups if only the Internet Control module is enabled.
• Other small fixes.

You can download the latest release (Build 3858) from the Net Control module testing page.

Just touching base to let you know that we’ve released a new build that includes a number of changes (a number as a result of feedback from our testers). The testing has been going well. We’ve had no reports of any major problems. Most of the comments have been about feature suggestions or usability suggestions.

You can download the latest release (Build 3853) from the Net Control module testing page.
The latest build include the following changes:

• Allow the Internet usage for a single user to be disabled for a specific amount of time or indefinitely (time latches). This can be useful to discipline students who have abused Internet privileges, but you still want them to be able to print.
• Allow data costs to be defined “per gigabyte” in addition to “per megabyte”
• Allow the user client window position to be changed. This allows multiple user clients to be run when different PaperCut instances host Net and Print control.
• Clarify some of the terminology to make it easier to understand whether data includes cached data or not.
• Ignore machine accounts (e.g. username$) in proxy logs. These entries are recorded when a Windows machine downloads Windows updates.
• Improved LDAP support for large sites.
• Licensing changes to allow users who are registered for Print Control to be able to trial the Net Module for 40 days.
• Bumped the version number to 7.0.
• All the updates included in the latest 6.2 release (see here for full details).

Last week we released PaperCut Print Logger. This is a free print logging program. It works by tracking printing and writing a live log file in HTML and Microsoft Excel format. It’s based on the same page count and job analysis technology used in PaperCut NG. The program is very basic and aimed at the home user or small office – anyone who does not need the full blown features of print quota and print control, etc.

If all you’re after is a simple log file listing all print jobs, then gives PaperCut Print Logger a try.

Please send me an email if you have any suggestions.

One of the usability issues that’s popped up with the Mac server testing is the process used add a printer. The Configure CUPS script handles the process of hooking in PaperCut to the CUPS print process. To view the printer in the interface however, you first need to perform a print job to “register the printer with the system”. This is a little counterintuitive.

We’ll make some changes in this area. As an interim solution, we’ll change the Configure CUPS script to it displays a reminder message. In the long term, we’ll make this script perform the configuration registration process automatically.

Thanks for the Mac users who recommended that we list our updates and version changes on the popular Mac site, www.versiontracker.com. PaperCut NG for Mac is now up on the site here.

We’d like to know if (or how many) Mac users use versiontracker to automate updates. Should we look at pushing PaperCut NG Mac updates this way? Please email us with your thoughts.

Rob at Sheridan College Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning has been kind enough to contribute a PaperCut Dashboard Widget. It’s a simple Widget that allows Apple users to conveniently check their print quota without the need to run the full client. Rob has hooked into PaperCut via the XML-RPC Web Services interface using some clever AppleScript calls.

The preferences on the back of the widget provide access to user-definable username and server name fields. The username defaults to the output of whoami. The server name defaults to papercut. As long as the server is aliased in your DNS as papercut, it should work out of the box with no configuration.

We’ll looking integrating the widget into the standard PaperCut NG release over the coming weeks. We’ll address the server discovery issue (default name) using the same method used in the standard client – that is, write the server’s name into an embedded configuration file during the initial install.

Thanks again to Rob for his contribution. Rob has access to the PaperCut source code and is using it as a basis for some other enhanced Mac client-side tools.

Download the Widget

Please feel free to email through feedback and I’ll pass it onto Rob.