Aidan Delaney’s weblog

I have a requirement from the boss. She’s used both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office to produce forms that she can fill in electonically, print off and hand-out to parents. The forms are generally end-of-year reports which she creates electronically and posts out to parents. Both office suites suck for various reasons, most importantly because she says so. So we are looking for some solid software which will allow her to

• define a form structure,
• fill in the template structure,
• print off and look good.

Ideally the software would be Open-Source but because it’s to be used in a school the overriding concern is that it’s free-as-in-beer (I completely disagree, but you can see who wins the arguments round here). Dear lazyweb, does such a solution exist.

As I sit in front of a matrx of 24 monitors trying to convince the eight dual-core Athlon64 boxes to share a single OpenGL context I remembered a rainy day in Orlando, Florida. Lori (the girl I’m marrying in 4 weeks) and I were walking home from work when the usual midday thunderstorm started. It beatdown faster than the earbleadingly loud NOFX track on my headphones. Faster than the fastest punk and heavier than the most satanic death metal those crazy Scandanavians can throw at us. Some person; I don’t know who. Pulled up in their SUV, rolled down their window and handed us their umbrella.

I have no idea why I thought of this. But it seems that even when our dear leader (I live in the U.K. and by law we have to call Mr. Blair our dear leader) decides to invade the entire world with our simian overlord, when we’ve got to resort to a questionably corrupt politician and a monopolist businessman to sort out Africa – a whole continent that we’ve screwed or when we’re heating up the whole planet to melting point; Maybe. Just maybe, someone will hand you an umbrella.

I’ve been playing with packaging OpenSG. My first attempts are here. They’re obviously not perfect or finished. But it was surprisingly easy to make the deb.