Happy Friday & Updates

I haven't blogged for a while but have certainly been busy. Things I worked on this week:

Print Job Data
The project to generate print job costs is finished and running nearly unattended. I have been QAing the files before the load into the sqlite3 database each morning, but should be able to cron that process in the next day or so. It'll just email me the exceptions if there are any. Printing costs are way too high, now comes the hard part of trying to break 20 year old habits and changing the culture.

GNOME Desktop
I'm adding more and more users and testing features and making tuning changes. There is some lingering NFS oddness still and I have some ideas of changes to make on the NFS remote server. I also found that /tmp/orbit-gdm was holding 1 million temp files, and now implementing a cron job with linc-cleanup-sockets running as gdm to remove the dead files. We are getting some odd delays at the point of XDMCP connect and the screen fully appearing, checking into that too. I have been updating artwork and icons and testing to make sure that the software packages are launching as expected. We are running about 40 concurrent users now and things are working well.

Password Protected OpenOffice Files
We have a City policy that if you password protect files, that you have to fill out a form and give it to your Director. It seems like that wasn't always happening so I was asked to write a script to find the files that were password protected. I found that unzip -l lists the .odt archive regardless of password protection...however the Thumbnails folder was missing in the case of a password. Makes sense, generate no thumbnail for a document that is locked..otherwise people would see the first page. So a scan found about 20 documents that were locked, not terrible.

iPad VNC Testing
NX still hasn't released version 4, so I started testing VNC over EVDO on the iPad. It's really really slow and not something that could be deployed. It only works in 8 bit color and that gives them a pretty messy experience...but even at 8bit color it's too slow. 16bit color took a full minute for the GDM wallpaper to even appear, and then GDM timed out and the connections drop. Completely not usable. I'm going to poke around with other ideas, and hope that a NX client is released at some point.

Happy Weekend!