There is a rather nifty piece of open source software called Ghostscript, that allows you to do various cool things with postscript files.

Working at a newspaper we use postscript files a lot, so I have used Ghostscript for various purposes in the past, along with the printer port redirection application Redmon. Redmon lets you create a new printer port, then re-directs the output of the printer to where ever you want. Using this you can call Ghostscript and create a PDF printer. There’s a good how to of this at http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

If you follow this walk through, it will work fine for most situations. The only problem is it prompts for a file name after every file is printed, so if you have a process that generates a lot of print files one after each other, you want it to name the files on its own. This was the situation I was in.

I went on Holiday to the German Beer festival, Oktoberfest and wanted to be able to upload photos from my camera phone onto Flickr, so I can put them onto a website I run. I also wanted to put the pictures onto a Google map. There were quite a few things that would allow me to do this, but none met my criteria:

• Most of the scrips i found were PHP or .net, I needed an classic asp one
• I needed to be able to tag the GPS co-ords into a tag on the photo. My camera phone did not have GPS built in, so I wanted to add two tags to them containing the info, called geo:lat=[xxx] and geo:lon=[xxx]

So, I came up with this script, you can see it in action at http://www.oldmanales.co.uk/feat_OktoberFest07.asp

In order to use the script, you will need a couple of things:

• An account on Flickr with some pictures tagged with valid geo:lat= and geo:lon= values. These are used to display the picys on the map
• A Flickr API key (mine is in the example file but please use your own) get it at http://flickr.com/services/api/keys/apply
• A Google maps API key (again, mine is in the script but please use yours) get it at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
• Your Flickr ID. This is not the same as your username, find it at http://idgettr.com

Once you have these, change the API key values to yours in the script, then upload it to your server. Now, call the script something like this:

FlickrTags2Google.asp?lat=11.511955&long=48.129893&tags=Oktoberfest_07&flickrID=7389734@N03

The lat and long parts of the string are where in the world the map will be placed when the pages loads, the tags are a comma separate list of tags to show on the map, in this case everything I have tagged as Oktoberfest_07. The last parameter is your flickrID.

Hopefully, when your call the page now you should get something like the screen shots below, the photos are indicated by the little camera icon, when you click on them you should get a popup preview of the image along with some info on the photo:

Hopefully when I get time I will document the code a bit better. If you find problems with it, or have any good ideas for enhancements let me know.

Images. They can make your reports look great, but sometimes they are a bit tricky to show where you want, and when you want. Even something as simple as showing an image or not, or showing a different image based on the condition of some data.

Well, it might not be rocket science (or rocket engineering) but its not exactly well documented, so here are a couple of real world examples of how to handle images in your reports.

Showing/Hiding Images

First of all this is how to show or hide an image in a table, based on the condition of filed in your data set. This could be used to indicate (for instance) if an order is stopped. The first thing to do is add an image holder into your table. When you drag the image holder onto the cell of the table the image wizard will open. Follow the Wizard through and embed the image in your report. When its done you will see the image in the table cell.

Now, on the properties of the cell, drop down the Visible -> Hidden property, and click in Expression in the list, this will open up the expression editor. In here we are going to use an IIF statement to check the condition of one of our fields. We can then set the Visible state to true or false depending on the outcome. The statement will look something like:

=iif(Fields!Stop_Stat.Value = “Stop”, False, True)

With this now in place, when you run the report it should now only show the image when the value of Stop_Stat is true.

There has been a new beta version of Spiceworks 2 released this week, so i’ve decided to put it to the test and see if the improvements are as good as they are

I am going to look at a couple of areas for the test:

• Hardware Inventory scanning. Is it any quicker and does it recognize all the devices?
• Software Inventory scanning. Does it find all the software you expect, and does it know how to classify it
• Is the interface any faster. Version one was quite slow, this version is meant to be more responsive

To try and make the tests fair, I ran the old version and the new version on the same hardware (a Dell poweredge server) , and at the same time of day, so both versions should have the same amount of work to do. The Server was also scanning 3 different vlans on both tests.

Test Results

Test Conclusions

So, the initial clam of Spicworks 2 being a lot faster in the scanning stakes is indeed true, and I have to say the speed increase was very impressive. Now onto what it actually found.