This post is as much for me as for anyone else. We have one client who has quite a mixed printing environment and its sometimes quite tricky to get Koha printing to the many different printers around their branches. We are using CUPS to handle the printqueues, here are some links I found very useful in setting up the printqueues.

• Printing to windows PCs
• Adding your first printer
• man lpadmin

Perhaps these might be of use to someone else too.

The coporate serials module we have been working on for Koha is finally finished and has been committed to HEAD.

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I’ve been trying to get PHP to be able to make PDF documents – nothing big just usually a list of information that has been shown to screen – and I tried installing the PDFlib library but got confused part way thru as I couldn’t find simple enough instructions for me

But then I stumbled on FPDF at http://www.fpdf.org and found this to be easy to use and invloved no installing of libraries.

Instead it uses a class of functions to create the pdf document.

I’ve only had a little play with it but it seems to meet my basic needs of creating a document with data given to it via php database calls.

The best thing is it is free.

Every now and then I get an email with a winmail.dat attachment. Being a Mozilla Thunderbird user I haven’t been able to do anything with them. Trying to explain to the MS Outlook user who sent the email that I can’t deal with it until they change their settings has always been tedious.

I found this article on Dealing with the horror of Winmail.dat to be a really helpful guide on how to integrate Fentun with Thunderbird. The author reckons it works fine in WinMe and WinXP. There is a Linux version of Fentun so it may well work for that too.

I just finished hacking on RT’s SelfService interface to suit Katipo’s needs. For those of you not familiar with Request Tracker (usually referred to as RT), it is a open source ticket tracker app written in Perl with a very long list of features.

Several of the coolest features relate to how you can add custom code without touching your source distribution. This makes upgrades a much less painful process, but still gives you the flexibility of being able to fully hack the app. Yesterday I used a Callback to exclude certain types of transactions from a ticket’s display of history.

While digging through /usr/share/request-tracker3.4/html/Ticket/Elements/ShowHistory, I found a callback called SkipTransaction. It sounded like just what I needed, but how did it work? A quick search of the RT wiki’s FAQ gave me some simple example code by Oliver Oberlach.

Not much to it. Follow the directions about how to work with callbacks (i.e. create the corresponding file in the right place) and then all it boils down to is setting $$skip to 1 if some attribute of your $Transaction object matches whatever condition suits you. Here’s what it looked like for me:

Although I spend 90% of my working life in my office at home, occasionally I need to work on site.
Sometimes you can’t beat being there in person and talking face to face.
For example a week or so ago I spent about 5 and a half hours on site and got a lot of work done. It would have still been about 5 and a half hours work at home, but it would have taken me at least 10 hours to do. With all the waiting for emails and talking on the phone it adds a bunch of time to the task.

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So, I was tooling around looking for an easy way to get the 3Ware RAID controller utilities (3dm2) installed under debian, when I happened across http://debian-unofficial.org/. Not only does it have the 3Ware utilities in apt-getable form, it also has Opera v8 and v9, and various other good stuff (pine! woohoo!).