Capturing printer data
Print Distributor is pretty flexible at capturing print streams, as well as handling Windows applications it's easy to setup printing from AS400, UNIX and mainframes.
I do occasionally get requests to capture data from a serial or parallel port, usually from some closed or embedded application. Often these closed systems have no mechanism to export data so people want to capture reports as a export mechanism.
Up till now I haven't been able to suggest a solution however I just came across Photologic run by Rick Hoffman, Rick has some interesting hardware "glue" which looks like it will help these customers.
New blog
My new blog is finally live written using Python and Django, more details to follow when I have a bit more time available.
Print Distributor 4.1
I just released Print Distributor 4.1 today, the main update is support for the 64-bit versions of Windows.
It was quite a substantial amount of work but relatively simple to do, I'm just glad I developed in C++ from the start. If I'd been using Delphi as some of my competitors have I'd be stuck at this point.
I can now get back to the Mail Print upgrade which has been taking much longer than expected.
VMWare Fusion - Virtual Processors
When you configure a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion by default it runs the machine with one virtual processor.
I was curious to see if running with two processors would make a difference so I ran a quick test using my software build time as a benchmark. Runing with a single processor the build time was 140 seconds, running with two it dropped to 118 seconds, a decrease of about 15%.
Mail Print 2.0
The beta release of Mail Print 2 is now available for download from www.mail-print.com/content/beta
Mail Print 2.0 is a ground up rewrite, no existing code has been used in the new version. This has allowed us to make some significant changes however it does mean existing settings will not be migrated.
Mail Print now uses the concept of actions to control the printing of emails, actions exist for printing messages, printing message attachments, playing a sound and deleting messages from the server.
Rules are more flexible and similar to what you would see in a traditional email client like Outlook or Thunderbird.
The main printing within Mail Print is now handled by a service which runs in the background. This means Mail Print can continue to work without having a user logged in or be run on a server in a back office.