Another successful PaperCut Constructival hackathon has come and gone. Around 120 PaperCutters huddled together in busy little groups for 30-odd hours and hacked to their collective heart’s’ content.
Why have a hackathon? What’s the value? How do I run a hackathon with my own team? These are the questions we’ll solve today.
When you’re responsible for software updates and upgrades, it’s best not to jump in without checking what the repercussions will be.
Systems architect Matt Lee shares his personal formula for ensuring a safe software update. As a bonus, Matt shares the horror story that led to his formula.
Flinders University CIO Kerrie Campbell shares three IT lessons she’s picked up over the years that keep her ahead of the pack.
I recently spoke at Linux Conf Australia about the differences between five programming languages developed over many decades. It was a five minute talk, which didn’t give me enough time to do the topic justice.
I found it an interesting enough exercise to warrant exploring more in a blog post, as it’s a handy way to see how different languages work.
The XML-RPC network protocol is popular, small, and lightweight. It’s designed for clients to make function calls to a server and receive the results in a simple and language-independent manner. Recently developed servers will probably offer remote procedure calls based on more modern technology, for example gRPC. However it’s very possible you will still need to […]
Our team has been using Google Cloud Datastore extensively as a part of our PaperCut Views product. We have found ourselves needing to migrate data from Datastore to BigQuery periodically so we can analyse them better. Unfortunately, the process of migrating this data is quite painful, as it requires manually exporting and importing the data. […]
After rolling out PaperCut Views on the Google Cloud Platform, we realised that the operation cost was more affected by the instance running time than by the number of IO operations, storage, cache, etc. In this article, I will show the problems we found in our original architecture and the changes we made to reduce […]
If you think going to a printer to clear a paper jam is painful, imagine having to do endless tests to trigger error statuses on printers. Pulling the tray out, waiting for an error to appear in the UI and then pushing the tray back in again. There’s got to be a better way. Luckily […]
Often when I use a different computer, I’m initially a little lost because the machine doesn’t necessarily have all the custom bits and bobs that I have set up to save me time. Everyone has shortcuts, ways of working, and preferred apps that they like to use – so I thought I’d outline a few […]
I am happy to be a new addition to the team here at PaperCut. I come from a large Pacific island where aging infrastructure and high prices are the norm. Farming is at the heart of the economy, without it we would surely fail under the economic pressure of having strong economic neighbours. I often […]
I sometimes find myself sitting on the fence between ‘customer’ and ‘technical support’. It was not that long ago I was an IT manager for a reasonable size high school here in Melbourne, Australia. One thing that was always on my mind was the quality and timeliness of support available from software and hardware vendors. […]
Hands up if any of this sounds familiar: You’re at your desk. Your headset is plugged into your cell phone to play music. The desktop phone rings. You take off your headset to pick up the handset. Then someone calls on Skype. You unplug the headset from the cell phone and plug in into the […]
I was recently helping a customer with a couple of reporting questions they had and they mentioned that they were going to be rolling out 20 new printers in the near future. I commented that this would require quite a bit of work, lugging hardware around, changing printer drivers etc. They agreed and then said […]
