Things that keep me busy

Posted by toma on July 2, 2008; This entry is filed under English.
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I did implement a IPv6 network at home and since then I’ve been begging for some more Sixxs credits and received them. That way I could also hook in some servers at work for testing. To deploy it further I need another fight with ip6tables. Since the concept of NAT is gone in IPv6, I need to shield a segment of the network. Some forward rules should do the trick, just haven’t found the right set yet. After that I can do some checking if Mailody is IPv6 proof. I don’t expect any problems, but you never know.

I’ve also been busy at work converting our internal invoicing system to Latex. I never worked with it before so I need to learn a lot. Of course using Kile for that. We used to generate HTML and pressed on the print button of the browser, which worked quite well up to now. Only our current set of browsers can’t do the job anymore. Konqueror4 is the worst in that regard, it just places random bits everywhere, black squares in the middle, not honouring page ranges, and no way to select the paper tray. Does not matter much, will probably be sorted out in the future. Firefox3 is also not doing completely what I want, it puts some letters so close to each other that it turns out ugly, i remember that from kde3 printing days.

So I decided that the system needs a change, by using Latex, I can easily go to the printer, html-preview and to pdf, so I picked that one. But that means I’ve some reduced time for KDE currently and that’s fine. Stepping back a bit for some days isn’t bad. I spent to much time on KDE anyhow.

6 Comments

  1. Simon Oosthoek July 2nd, 2008 at 08:36

    Did you consider ODF instead of LaTeX? I’m a big fan of LaTeX, but ODF has some further advantages, like being an official open standard, being structured and editable in koffice or openoffice.org. The koffice libraries can probably be used to easily manipulate it and render it to printable pdf/ps or html.
    Also, you could consider a semantic XML for the invoices and transform them to ODF or PDF whenever you need a print or document…

    It’s just a thought ;-)

  2. Anoniemoes July 2nd, 2008 at 11:47

    Any chance that you would share the results of this invoicing system with the world? I would love to have something like that for my home-grown invoices.

    Thanks

  3. Tom Albers July 2nd, 2008 at 19:29

    The invoice is just a basic template, which get filled by a php script, which is than printed on company paper, so there is not much to share…

  4. Gerald July 24th, 2008 at 04:38

    Did you find a way for latex to print columns in specific locations? I tried converting a working latex invoice (which printed its own column lines) to print on a preprinted invoice form. I discovered that latex likes to float it’s tabularx stuff. Every invoice had different column positions. Not good when we have committed to a preprinted form with defined columns.

  5. Tom Albers July 30th, 2008 at 10:36

    You can make tables. That’s what I did…

  6. Gerald July 24th, 2008 at 04:42

    And here is the error:

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function drupal_submit_form() in /home/nl.omat/info/drupal/modules/akismet/akismet.module on line 707