software

I'm getting married in september, and we've been busy with our invitations during the last few days.
For certain reasons, we created them at my girlfriend's home where the PC is running Windows XP and Office XP. But Word is a pain to layout with, especially when it comes to vertical desings. We needed a picture above a block of text, but could not get it right.

In the end, I ended up printing things to PDFCreator, on separate pages: the picture with Photo Editor (at least I think that's what it's called), which allowed for exact on page positioning, and the text block in Word with page margins set to do the positioning. I used PDF output because I could thus print the invitations at home on a laser printer instead of the ink printer with my family in law.
Only thing is, I had to feed each page to the printer multiple times, unless I could overlay them with each other. The solution came with the help of LaTeX. When you set the position of the included graphics inside the AddToShipoutPicture blocks to (0,0), fullsize pages can be overlaid to achieve the effect I needed. A bit of a hassle, but in the end it's the result which matters.

I was looking for a GUI application to handle certificates, when I stumbled upon this. It looks interesting, but I wonder if it would be portable to That Other OS. That would make it even more interesting :)

When this made me look around again for more SIP information, I found a VOIP on Linux quick guide where I learned that the SIP protocol is in fact peer to peer just like a much hyped proprietary IP softphone. NAT issues aside, and looking only at home users at this point, this means not only that SIP offers an advantage over Skype because it is possible to switch networks, but in fact using dynamic DNS one should be able to eliminate registering with a SIP server altogether.