psMonitor: Make PDFs without Adobe Acrobat
At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.
My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.
What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!
ArcGIS 9.3 Features
The All Points Blog has a short post highlighting some of the features slated for release in the next version of ArcGIS Desktop, 9.3:
- Better printing support
- “Map Tips” - for adding information to maps
- Enhanced interoperability - will support Web Feature Service, Web Cover Service for raster, KML, and GML
- APIs for REST and JavaScript
- Caching and performance improvements
- Security for web apps and services
- ArcGIS Server 9.3 will be packaged with Windows Mobile-based client
[link]
Compress Them PowerPoint Files
I just ran across a post by Amit from Digital Inspiration detailing how to shrink down those obnoxiously large PowerPoint presentations. We all know that the root of all size problems when it comes to documents (Word, Excel, PPT, PDF) are images, and to a lesser extent, audio and video.
There’s a simple, supported way to compress images from within PowerPoint. By selecting the Picture Tools ribbon (in 2007) or highlighting an image and exposing the Picture Tools toolbar (in Office XP and 2003), click the Compress Picture option. You’ll see something like this:
By selecting the sharing and email option, you can sometimes decrease the filesize by about 60-70%. Pretty cool if you ask me. And most importantly, simple. Just this morning I showed a user how to do this and she decreased her .ppt file from 10MB to 3MB, with no discernable change in quality. Now if only I knew about this when I worked for the University where 100MB presentations were routine, and often crammed on 10 year old ZIP disks. This simple solution would have saved us all a lot of grief.
Setting Up a Jabber Server
At our office we’re in the process of a migration to Exchange Server, which meant the decommissioning of our old mail server running MDaemon. Unfortunately, this meat that I had to come up with a new method for instant messaging, because Exchange no longer provides a way to set up an IM server short of their full Live Communications Server product. As I started searching for alternatives, both proprietary and open-source, I realized my main feature concerns for a new product were low cost, manageability, and server-side controls over the whole system. With Jabber open format, I found exactly what I was looking for.
MediaWiki!
So I installed MediaWiki a few days ago on my site to try out. I plan on keeping track of documenting various IT/development/everything things that I’m messing around with. For example, I’ve been reading a great deal of documentation about Exchange Server and also Ruby on Rails, and I feel this wiki would be a good place to take notes on things. Anyone else I know can add things, too. Zac would probably like to make notes on programming, and we could document projects and ideas easily here. We’ll see how it works out…
Guide to Hamachi
I’ve recently started using Hamachi (as in, 3 days ago), and I’m now addicted. I haven’t seen such a useful app in years. Hamachi is essentially a personal VPN solution for putting any computers on a sort of VLAN configuration across the internet. You would install Hamachi on any computers you want to have access to one another, create a network with a password, and join the computers to that network. The magic of Hamachi really comes from the fact that it’s a UDP-based peer-to-peer system in which the connections are secured via the main Hamachi server(s). However, the third-party server is only used to secure the connection; no data passes through the Hamachi servers. Dead simple.
Here’s a complete guide on the basics of Hamachi.
Read more
Windows Live Writer
This is my first experimental post with the new Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. Seems like a neat tool, kind of reminds me of the old LiveJournal desktop writer from about 6 years ago. I’ve thought for a while that the Wordpress interface (though very slick) is pretty clunky for adding images and HTML. Though this thing appears to not be able to categorize the posts… guess I’ll have to login to Wordpress for that. I’ll keep messing around and see how I like this guy.
New MeeboMe Widget
Today Meebo, the folks that have created one of the coolest web-based instant messaging systems, unveiled a embeddable Flash object that allows users browsing your site to contact you in real time (see the lower portion of the sidebar). 
I’ve been an avid Meebo user for a while because they provide MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and a Jabber/Gtalk protocol all in a single system. They also allow you to create an account that will act as a single sign-on for any of the protocols you like. One downside to Meebo versus desktop clients is the memory leak caused if left open for extended periods of time inside the browser; but I assume this would be fairly difficult to get around due to the slow, cumbersome nature of large amounts of Ajax and Javascript. But now with MeeboMe, it gives me a whole new reason to use Meebo. I can see users browsing my site and have real-time communcation with any of them! Can’t wait to see how it works out.
Writely and Google Spreadsheets Invitations
If you want to try out these two latest “Google Office” products, head over to this site. This person is apparently offering invites to anyone manly enough to give out their email address at random. 
This is interesting, however, considering both of these services have been closed to new user registration for a long time (Writely since they were acquired by Google in early March, and I think Google Spreadsheets was only open to beta testers for a few days) And Adam from Lifehacker says he tested this and got his invite in an hour!
As an aside, I also have accounts for both of these… so if I know you, maybe I’ll send you an invite.
[Via Lifehacker]
File Sharers Kazaa Settle Out Of Court
The online file sharing company Kazaa (Wikipedia entry; real Kazaa site hosts malware, surprise, surprise!) just settled out of court for a cool $115 million. 
They were simultaneously being sued by Warner Music, Universal, Sony, and EMI. One now has to wonder where all that money came from, since the spyware-riddled Kazaa wasteland could not possibly be that profitable. I guess one thing to remember is that Kazaa used to be run by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who just flipped Skype to Ebay for $2.6 billion… So you’d have to assume that offing Kazaa to Sharman Networks (a company headquartered in Sydney but incorporated in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu) would have given them enough money (and remoteness) to fight the RIAA/record companies/et cetera that wanted them dead. Oh well, hopefully that just means fewer zombie, spyware-infected machines souring the internet for everyone.