January, 2008

Aah, la douce France…

Yesterday I spent one day in Paris at The Linux Solutions, Open Source & Free Software Exhibition for Business, Administrations and Communities. It was an interesting fair, but not as much as the ones I’ve gotten used to in Germany (and the Netherlands). It was like half a FOSDEM and half a LinuxWorld.

Funny thing happened though. I met Frank-Thomas Drews from Xandros, Inc. again. The first time we met was by accident on the bus in Nürnberg. Apparently, we both know Thomas Uhl, and both like him as a business partner. Who knows, maybe we get to do some business with Xandros in the future. That’d be great!

After the fair, I went for a drink with an old friend of mine, Céline Jérusalem. I was really wonderful to meet her again after more than three years. Céline and I followed the same Athens course in Trondheim, back in 2003.

And it cannot be said enough: France has a won-der-ful food culture. Even in some small, random food stand in the underground, they serve freshly baked croissants with chocolate. Hmmm….

Sometimes I want to know how many pages some user printed on some printer on the network from some host on the network. This script tells me just that.

It’s an awk program with a bourne shell wrapper to calculate the total amount of pages a user has printed on a host using cups.

Another addition to my [office] collection of scripts. And again one which deals with a scanner. scantopdf scans an A4 paper from any SANE device and stores it as a PDf with a given filename.

At the office, we have a scanner attached to a desktop (elisa), published as a :net device by SANE. Additionally, a network printer (gutenberg) is attached to the network. This script allows anyone on the network to combine both as a (basic) copymachine.

Remember it’s statically configured for A4 papersize (215mm x 297mm).

At our office we tend to document almost everything with LaTeX. This script is one which has saved us a lot of time already with creating high quality PDF documents.

Basically, it’s just an alias to simplify creating prepress quality A4 PDFs of a DVI file, typically created with LaTeX and hyperref with the dvipdfm driver.

It’s the “prepress” setting at the end which guarantees the quality of the output.

As I spend a lot (too much?) time in front of my computer, I tend to let my machine take care of boring and repetitive tasks. Or sometimes I just find some nice shortcuts for doing interesting tasks.

Either way, from time to time I find myself scripting in various languages like Python, Perl, Bourne or other Shells, Awk, etc…. Whenever I want to backup such a script online, I’ll post it here.

Obviously, dear reader, you can use them too. In fact, you are encouraged to do so, but then please let me know where improvements can be made. Thank you. :-)

END

Last week I came back from a three weeks stay at our office in Islamabad. I landed 6:40am in Frankfurt, and instead of going home, I took the train to the Open Source meets Business conference in the wonderful city of Nürnberg. Pretty tiring…

Anyway, I had a great conference. First of all, I met Bertrand Maugain again. Bertrand is a good friend of mine and was a fellow student when we were both studying at the NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Then, of course, I discussed a collaboration framework for expanding our customer base in Germany with Thomas Uhl. Then, I finally met Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer and Nico Gulden from LiSoG (Linux Solutions Group) in real life with whom I discussed our possibly upcoming membership of the group. And of course I bumped into Klaus Behrla (director of communication at LPI) and Reiner Brandt (President of LPI-Central Europe and OSC), as I always do on conferences lately. :-)

Of course, I should also mention that rapid-i won the Open Source Business award and that Bryan Cheung, CEO of Liferay, is a very nice guy. :-)

After these two days, I finally got home (after a train delay in Belgium of course). No time to rest now though, because next week I’ll be in Paris for The Linux Solutions, Open Source & Free Software Exhibition for Business, Administrations and Communities. Let’s hope it will be as much fun!

END

Two days ago, I was at the kick-off party of seenDesign, a customer/partner of us, when somebody asked me how we came to the idea to start a business in Pakistan. When I told him that we had had some previous dealings with Pakistan as UN volunteers after the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake, he said: “So you went there for a very moral reason and ended up starting something immoral”.

That kind of pissed me off. What’s so immoral about starting a company? What’s immoral about giving up your job, having no income for over 13 months while investing € 200.000 somewhere else? What’s so bad about paying 15 people in a third world country more money each month than you can spare for yourself?

The difference with ordinary third world development programmes might be that a business eventually wants to make money, but believe me when I say that morality and ethics are far more important than that. Even in most of today’s businesses. And now we’re at it, let’s not forget to mention that money is necessary for creating sustainability and the fact that NGO’s are not so different form ordinary companies after all…

When thinking about it, I guess going to Scotland to do “volunteer” work, paid by European tax money (so one can feel good after doing something “good”) is far more immoral then.

END

It finally happened. I have a weblog. My own, my precious.

Let’s see what happens. :-) END