Install Going Well, Back To R&D

IT staff has been installing the new HP thin clients, and we haven't had any serious technical issues. Normally something happens during the install process that was completely missed, but I think our extensive beta period and testing resolved most of the issues beforehand. We are getting very positive feedback on the huge increase in performance. I guess going from 33Mhz to 1Ghz does that! :) It's my perception that the old thin clients will end up on E-bay, possibly in groups of 100. I'll alert everyone when they are available.

So with the thin clients moving out, I'm starting to work on some R&D again:

Evolution Printouts
Evolution really needs to have a plugin system for easily creating custom printouts. As I have mentioned in previous posts, printouts are the world to end users. A plugin system would allow end users to design and contribute xml files or something back to the project. Really all we would need is the ability to set column position, font, font size, fields, draw boxes, sort, assign colors and have a control-break. I have started to write my own custom printouts using ksh and the perl module PDF::CreateSimple to eliminate duplicate entry that was being done around the City. In this case I wanted to create a printout of all City employees, so I load them all into the Address Book view and then do a SelectAll and right-mouse and select "Saves as VCard...". All employees are then exported and placed into a single .vcf file. My ksh script then loops through and formats the information and creates a PDF file. I generate a regular listing, and wallet cards as seen in the shots below:



Sync With Fusion
I have about 20 users on Beryl with excellent results and today tried to sync with Fusion. Fusion is the future and I sure would love to help debug and test. However, compiz isn't running very well on ATI 9250s these days so I had to go back to Beryl. I entered a bug report. Something changed in Compiz after the Beryl fork, and I'll have to wait for patches. I'm on the IRC all the time as "dave_largo", if anyone wants me to try some fixes, hit me up anytime.