Jonathan Franzen’s I Am Spartacus moment could have been avoided with a decent doc management system

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 6, 2010

Franzen-KindleJonathan Franzen’s UK imprint of his latest novel, Freedom, was sent to the pulper at a rumoured cost of over forty thousand pounds after finding out that the wrong version had been printed. The moment where Franzen realised disaster had struck was caught on camera, as it happened in the middle of recording a reading for Kirsty Wark on BBC2′s The Review Show.

sorry, I’m realizing …. to my horror, that there’s a mistake here that was corrected earlier in the galleys and is still in the fucking hardcover of the book

The Guardian’s ever-hilarious Charlie Brooker speculated this might have been down to opaque document naming on the part of Franzen:

Like anyone who’s ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I’m writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as FINALSCRIPT2a.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1b-IGNORE-ALL-OTHERS-AND-USE-THIS.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1c-I-AM-SPARTACUS.DOC

This is probably not so far from the truth. The mistake is more likely to have happened within the publisher’s offices or one of their suppliers from typesetter to printer. Of course, what they all need is a simple document management system. These sorts of basic human errors happen all the time and cost businesses and organisations untold millions.

But maybe it’s one thing to convince responsible office staff to use a document management system, quite another to get artists to do it.

Oh, if you don’t get the I Am Spartacus reference, you need to watch the clip from Kubrick’s movie. Charlie Brooker is astonishing. He even manages to slip in a nod to Tony Curtis in the week of his passing.

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Print large pdfs over multiple pages easily in Linux with pdfposter

By Paul Syrysko | Published: March 25, 2010

pdfposter-eng-drawingEngineering and architectural drawings come in colossal sizes and most design offices have large plotters or roll printers to let them push out paper copies with ease. We have a printer that will take A3 rolls but since use is fairly sparse, I needed a way to expand a strangely sized pdf across multiple A3 sheets instead. Rather than staring at the monitor and zooming, I wanted to see the deep detail on paper.

The answer is the wonderfully simple pdfposter, written in python. Originally designed to let you print wall sized images from A4 sheets, it’s just the job for our engineering needs. It’s command line driven and is very easy to use. It even has autoscaling and automagically overlaps each sheet by a few millimetres so you can subsequently trim them and get a perfect fit.

pdfposter -mA3 -p999x2a3 in.pdf out.pdf

This was all I needed to get the drawing out at a legible large scale. The final product spread over 16 A3 pages, arranged 8×2. The office floor was duly cleared.

We often do A0 scientific posters and pdfposter is a great way of printing these out at real final size before getting them over to the printers.

Posted in Design, Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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Rapid development of a document management solution

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 11, 2009

documentWe’re on a quick development path to deliver some fairly simple document management solutions. It’s an all too common requirement:

“we’ve got a bunch of documents in building one which need seeing and signing by various bods in buildings two, three, four and five as well as here in building one. We all use different networks so don’t have a LAN connection to each other. Emailing things is driving us mad.”

OK, the request was a little more formal than that but you get the gist. The classic solution for this issue has either been leave as is with masses of messy emails and dumps into disorganised folders on a Windows server. Or big proprietary back end databases with huge deployment and maintenance costs. Not to mention development costs and seat licenses etc. Until fairly recently, that was your only option. And it’s an option that has saddled many a corporation with legacy costs.

Our solution is going to be rapid deployment of open source solutions. Being open source, the code is stripped bare so you know what’s happening. The installation base for these solutions is large and robust, covering everything from corporates to public bodies around the world. And support communities are very active. We know we can quickly skin (wrap the right visual identity on it) and implement the relevant modules without too much tweaking. If we apply the 80/20 rule we can soon get productivity gains and build from there.

The best thing of all is that it’s going happen more quickly and cost the client much less than a proprietary solution. Open source development is based on computer languages that develop slowly and strongly over time. Proprietary languages often bounce around. The learning curve is steep and then before you know it, becomes obsolete as a new version arrives. This is frustrating for the coder but lucrative for the software company. Which, of course, means expensive for the customer.

Alfresco is our chosen open source document management system. In future posts, we’ll be highlighting some of our process steps from a non-technical point of view.

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Google Docs as a collaborative space: the pros and cons

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 10, 2009

googledocsWe’ve been using Google Docs together with Chat and Mail for a while now and it’s useful enough (we’re still using it which must count for something). But it’s not perfect. Here’s my list of pros and cons (which will change over time, I’m sure)

On the Upside for Google Docs

  • It’s very easy and intuitive to use, especially if you already know G-Mail
  • The folders are relational, so you can dump the same document in many places and it’s always the same copy. It just has a virtual link.
  • There’s a good little chat client and you can record all the conversations. So we can have a virtual text meeting and keep notes.
  • Nearly real time online collaboration on documents is possible – and with it comes no need for bothersome check in and check out.

On the Downside for Google Docs

  • There are security issues for us in the UK. Since Google Docs is in sunny California, we are effectively exporting our data out of the country each time we use it (and that includes Google Mail). Any sensitive data has to be registered with the COI and it’s a bother. A no-no for many health sector applications. They should open a branch office of the GooglePlex in the UK somewhere and we’d be sorted.
  • You can’t load pictures into the folders. Only pictures within documents. Since we work with images a lot, it’s a real bother.
  • It messes up pretty basic formatting if you upload existing documents. The best way to use it is to originate the docs themselves within Google Docs

The most difficult part here is to do with export of health data to the US. We’ll be returning to this issue in a future post.

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NHS patient records project drops £600 million. Development should have been local and organic.

By admin | Published: December 8, 2009

yard_pcBuilding a huge database of patient records is a titanic task that takes a huge investment. But the NHS has come unstuck with Health Minister Andy Burnham pulling the plug on £600 million for the project. Out of £12 billion planned. How has it come to this? Was there a better way? Probably.

I think any large scale IT system is best grown organically. Take the internet. It started with a few interconnected US military computers, went on to encompass academia then the public and then all of us with the web. But when you’ve got a huge legacy paper system to convert that’s already in disparate formats, what do you do?

What you don’t do is rope in an enormous inefficient old school tech company and manage it with mandarins who don’t know how to control function creep. Things move creakingly slowly. Too many jobsworths get involved. Too many people who know too little get in the way and the whole thing grinds to a halt with spiralling budgets and spiralling scope.

It’s something that isn’t unique to a national health service. Even in the advertising business, I’ve twice seen over-ambitious software plans go to waste because too many were involved in producing software without the talent to manage it properly.

Far better to let each trust develop the systems they need quickly and cheaply

Thankfully, Andy Burnham has said it would now be up to local NHS trusts to decide how to be a part of a national system. And the Tories also feel that local development is better. Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley supports decentralisation and local procurement. Great. Both Labour and Conservatives agree, and it’s a point of view I fully support. Far better to let each trust develop the systems they need quickly and cheaply. If trusts talk to each other on a regional basis, the best systems will catch on and soon get adopted organically. In the end, it saves everyone a lot of money and time and patients get a better product. A competitive internal market.

Burnham said:

“Our aim is to give trusts more flexibility and choice of IT systems … enabling local innovation by linking national systems with those provided by local service providers; allowing the NHS to design IT systems to fit their local needs.”

Sometimes centralisation can be a good idea, giving huge economies of scale. But sometimes it saddles you with uncompetitive, inflexible processes. Let smaller projects compete for attention on their own merits, awarding performance and value for money points using local and regional innovation competitions. Then let them get adopted organically. Ring fence the organic growth. Don’t let anyone take charge and demand it tomorrow, nationally. That’s the tricky bit. But that’s also the way to get leading edge good value software.

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Leaked government report reveals strong support for Open Source in public services

By admin | Published: December 2, 2009

ossPropheris is very much committed to using open source software wherever possible. We firmly believe it’s the future of ICT. So I was delighted to see solid government backing for this stance in a document leaked yesterday by the Tories, called Government ICT Strategy: New World, New Challenges.

The section on Open Source opens with:

Traditionally, the public sector, in common with most large organisations, has relied on commercial off the shelf (COTS) software to run ICT systems and processes. In most instances, this comes from global commercial enterprises such as Microsoft and Oracle. This COTS software uses proprietary code and cannot easily be reused across the public sector – reducing value for money, flexibility and agility. Importantly, this also impacts our opportunity to reduce risks to service delivery.

and goes on to recognise the many barriers in place that have prevented widespread adoption of the government’s original 2004 policy on open source that looked to implement open source wherever it could deliver better value. More recent successes with open source are noted, particularly when it comes to web services.

The Open Source, Open Standards and Reuse Strategy, published in February 2009, pushed harder to get the public sector to adopt more open source software. It stated that the government would, wherever possible, avoid getting locked into proprietary (COTS) software solutions. It wants a level playing field and wants only to use open formats for documentation. There’s a good collection on Netvibes of comments, news articles and blog posts revolving around the strategy.

Even if we have a change of government next year, it looks very likely that the Tories will continue this push. The site for the leak is written using the wonderful Open Source WordPress CMS framework. Although within an hour or so of the leak going public, the database seems to have fallen over. I hope it’s through overload and not through poor construction.

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Installing LAMP using SSH on Ubuntu server is so easy

By Paul Syrysko | Published: December 1, 2009

lamp_taskselWe’re setting up an extranet for a client and have a installed dedicated box running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I’m going through the simple setup procedure to get a LAMP stack going via the command line. We’ll then go about setting up postfix for mail services.

First thing’s first; we have to ensure all updates are on the box. We do this by using (logged in as root or using sudo)

apt-get -u dist-upgrade

You’re asked if you want to change the grub loader at this point. Don’t touch it unless you have good reason to.

The next bit is dead easy. Instead of going through the rigmarole of installing and setting up individual Apache, MySQL and PHP services, just use:

tasksel

It gives you a sweet little window where you can choose to install a whole host of things, a LAMP stack being one of them.

The only additional thing you need to do is to decide on a password for your MySQL server. Make sure it’s a good one.

In seconds, we were pointing browsers to the extranet’s IP address and got the gloriously ugly Apache welcome:

It works!

Next we’ll set up WordPress and get some authentication going so we can safely work behind the scenes.

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Google Apps for your domain’s email virtually eliminates spam

By admin | Published: November 30, 2009

email-spamA client recently complained that each back office staff member spent 10 minutes a day eliminating spam from their mailboxes. Not only is this 10 minutes of unproductive work time, it has a knock on effect by putting office staff in a thoroughly grumpy negative mood. Every day.

Google possesses the world’s best spam blocking software, so even if you don’t use GMail it’s worth running their mail services in the background if you’re an SME and have no time or patience to deal with spam. Best of all, it’s free.

As soon as we installed the service, our client phoned within hours congratulating us on a miraculous reduction in spam.

Follow this great Google’s Knol guide written by Google Apps employee Steve and it’ll all run very smoothly. You’ll have to fiddle with DNS MX records and the like but the effort is well worth it. As soon as we installed the service, our client phoned within hours about the miraculous reduction in spam. That’s what I call an immediate ITC productivity gain.

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