A Simple Business Gift You Can Use on Your Web Site

GREENVALES CLEVER IDEA FOR PROMOTING THEIR BUSINESS

Greenvale Produce Ltd are the UK's largest provider of potatoes to leading supermarket chains. Their idea is a company calculator to be distributed freely to customers and from their web site. Well there is nothing new in that - but the neat wrinkle they have come up with is to make the calculator industry specific. The calculator will include special functions for calculating yields per hectare and doing hectare to acre conversion and so on.

Now is that a clever idea - how would you like a industry specific calculator to promote your company?

There must be hundreds of variations - each giving you an added value to your website and your customers a constant reminder of your name and position in the industry.

Try our sample Free IT Calculator for yourself and see whether this could work for you.

HOW DO YOU PRINT YOUR OWN POSTERS?

OK, we are now all graphics artists, sitting here fully equipped with our scanners, and paintshops, and demos from CD's and the Net. You've scanned in your holiday snaps, removed the unfortunate looking gentleman with the ice cream dribbling down his sun-burnt chest and zapped the oil-tanker on the horizon. Now you want to print a poster!

Well, Prontaprint have been running a giant colour printing service for some time, only now prints are even larger. They can take almost any PC or Mac format graphic file and print single copies. Prints can be laminated or mounted.

It's not cheap, but then what do you expect for one-off posters? Price for an A0 sheet (that is about 32 x 44 inches - a big poster) starts at £80.00. But you can now go up to a staggering 5 feet by 10 feet (a seriously B I G poster) for £290.

What could you do with these? Well, how about:

Of course, there are some alternatives, you can buy A2 printers (16 x 22 inches) for under a £1,000. Personally I'm waiting for the new 1400 DPI Epson to come down in price a little.

Or, print out an A4 sheet and have your local colour copier shot enlarge it in their photocopier (costs about £2.50). If you have a product like Corel Paint or PhotoShop these will print you image to an A4 printer in tiled pages to whatever size you like. Leaving you to match the sheets up yourself. I've had some success making framed prints this way.

Incidentally, for those of you without scanners or digital cameras, Boots still run their excellent PhotoCD service. This transfers from negatives direct to a CD which is readable by nearly all graphics packages. Costs are around 60p for a single negative, or about £15 for a whole roll of film on CD and with regular prints. The big plus of the format over scanning is that PhotoCD goes up to very high resolution - just what you need when printing a poster.

Apologies to international readers for UK prices and traders - I'm sure you have your local equivalents.

UNIX TECHY CORNER A SIMPLE MENU SYSTEM FOR UNIX BOXES

If you are a system admin then there always comes a time when you want to present users with a simple menu choice of options. Now if you have a product like Uniplex you can generate your own menus simply and quickly, but suppose its just a vanilla Unix box?

Presented below is a short shell script which will work on any (most...) Unix variations to provide a simple menu script.

It is invoked with the command

        menu [menufile_name]

and it looks like this

=================== MINI MENU ==================
===============================================

1 - Check last night logs
2 - Check tapes ready for next backup
3 - Backup Applications NOW
4 - Check Database Status
5 - List last 20 errors from error log
6 - List last 20 superuser calls
7 - List last 20 failed logins
8 - Call security menu
q - quit

Enter menu number :

The menu is controlled by a simple data file which contains paired lines, the first is the description of the menu on screen, the second is the actual command to be executed.

The version presented below is pretty simple, does no error trapping and minimal screen formatting. Of course, those with shell skills can quickly add to this script to enhance it.

#!/bin/sh
#
#	TITLE:	menu
#	DATE:	13/12/97
#	(C) 1997 Centreline 2000 Consulting
#
#	DESC:
#		Provides a mini menu system for unix


MENUFILE="./menufile"
[ "$1" != '' ] && MENUFILE="$1"

export mnum

while true
do

	#	Output the menu header
	echo
	echo '================== MINI MENU =================='
	echo '==============================================='
	echo


	#	Read the menu file and display each menu line with
	#	a selection number to the left of it
	export mnum='1'
	while read menu
	do
		read cmd
		echo "$mnum - $menu"
		mnum=`expr $mnum + 1`
	done > $MENUFILE

	#	Always add a 'q' for quit option
	echo 'q - quit'
	echo

	#	Ask for their selection, instead of 'c' you may
	#	need to use echo -n, depending upon your unix system
	echo 'Enter menu number : c'

	#	And read their input
	read msel

	[ "$msel" = 'q' ] && exit 0

	#	Check the input is within range
	[ "$msel" -lt "1" ] && continue
	[ "$msel" -gt "$mnum" ] && continue

	#	Then re-read the menu file until we find the command
	#	line that matches the users selection
	mnum='1'
	while read menu
	do
		read cmd
		if [ "$msel" = "$mnum" ]
		then
			#	We've got the command,
			#	Now run it.

			echo '============== RUNNING COMMAND
================'
			echo
			eval $cmd > /dev/tty

			#	Then show the end of command message and
			#	wait for the return key before
			#	re-displaying the menu
			echo
			echo 'Mini-menu: Hit >RETURN<:c'
			read ans > /dev/tty
			break
		fi
		mnum=`expr $mnum + 1`
	done > $MENUFILE
done

exit 0

And the controlling menu file looks like this:

Check last night logs		>- The displayed line
/backup/checklogs		>- The unix command
Check tapes ready for next backup
/backup/checktapes
Backup Applications NOW
/backup/backup.applications
Check Databases are running
/backup/dbcheck.sh
List last 20 errors from error log
errpt | head -20
List last 20 superuser calls
head -20 /var/adm/sulog
List last 20 failed logins
/usr/sbin/acct/fwtmp ^gt; /etc/security/failedlogin | tail -20
View big jobs (using lots of processing time)
bigjobs
Call Security Menu
menu menu.security

(This menu file is from an AIX machine, so you may need to alter some of the shell calls if you want to use this exact template).