June 2012 - main - earth.li

How would the team produce a simple web page with a running balance/total on it?
by Chris Green 12 Jun '12

12 Jun '12

I've wanted to do this at several different times and places, some of my solutions are OK'ish but I've not really come up with something neat and tidy for doing it. I want a simple (for the user, and preferably for me too in creating it) web page where a user can enter an amount, probably with a date and a description, that gets added to (or subtracted from) a running total. The user can also see the list of transactions that contributes to the current total. I.e. I want something that looks like a bank statement but can be changed easily on the web page itself. So we'd have something like:- Date Descritption Credit Debit Balance 2012-01-01 Start of year 1234.00 1234.00 2012-02-14 Valentine Pres 12.34 1221.66 2012-03-01 Paid for joke 99.00 1320.66 etc. Plus either a blank line at the bottom of the table to enter new values, or some edit boxes to add new values. There's lots of online spreadsheets out there but since they all tend to be Excel lookalikes they don't do running balances very easily, you have to keep re-entering the balance calculation in the balance column, there doesn't seem to be any easy way to say a column is a calculated value that is always the same calculated value (or at least I've not found it). My implementations so far have either used a database with a very nasty complicated calculated value in the Balance column (that depends on the ordering of the date column which isn't always a good idea if there's more than one entry on the same date) or uses a plugin I have developed for my Wiki which requires the user to edit the wiki page - OK for me usually but not very good for other users. Any bright ideas anyone? Doesn't actually have to be web accessible as it will only have one or two users for each instance so could be done with a dedicated application and a shared file for example. -- Chris Green

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Email clients! - Alpine... anyone use it?
by James Freer 04 Jun '12

04 Jun '12

For a while i've just used the browser for email having found Thunderbird, Evolution and similar so slow on imap. Mutt i managed to set up but being so configurable wasn't to my liking. Alpine seems the fastest of any i've tried... easy to setup - just wondering if anyone else on here uses it. If they do any problems? jmaes

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Multi-VPN configuration
by Mark Rogers 04 Jun '12

04 Jun '12

I always get into a muddle when I try to set up VPN connections but I'm going to have another go.. What I have is lots of Linux "devices" (typically ARM boxes running Debian) which will be plugged into networks giving them Internet access. What I want to achieve is to have them auto-connect to a VPN, such that I am able to access all of them, but also that the end user can connect to their own devices but nobody elses. Ideally I'd also like other VPN capable devices, such as Draytek routers, to be able to join in the party. My starting point - which may well be wrong, is to assume that I want a server running OpenVPN somewhere on t' Internet. (Is that the right place to start?) I find the OpenVPN documentation to be very detailed but hard to narrow it down to any particular usage case unless it's a standard config (eg "road warrier"). What I don't want at my end is to *have* to connect separately to each VPN. Doing so optionally would be good (but would be possible in the same way an extra device could), but it could be I end up with dozens or hundreds of separate segregated VPNs. Furthermore, it's likely that I will want all of the VPNs to have access to certain facilities (eg databases, FTP) on other servers without having to make the other servers join multiple VPNs. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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How to print stupid Royal Mail price list?
by Chris Green 01 Jun '12

01 Jun '12

The Royal Mail used to provide a neat PDF file which fitted A4 to show their postage prices. The latest version though is a 'booklet' so I can't see any way to actually print it on an A4 printer. This is the link to the PDF:- http://c435158.r58.cf3.rackcdn.com/Royal_Mail_Our_Prices.pdf Can anyone tell me how to split it up into printable pages? I've tried ImageMagick's convert but that didn't default to what I wanted, maybe I need some more options to tell it what to do. -- Chris Green

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