OLD_README

This system was originally written by Kristofer Johansson
when he was working for Axis Communications AB
during his summer vacation in 1997.

After that no major changes has been done until I rewrote some
code to adapt it to an inkjet instead of the original Dymo printer.
I also rewrote the admin web page.

The rest of the system is still 'AS-IS', using tcl/tk as gui interface
and small perlprograms to interface it with the database, fetching, converting
and printing.
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How it works

The visitor starts by entering name, company and who to visit.
An Axis network camera (with PTZ) is used to take a picture of the visitor, this
is printed on the label and e-mailed to those that are visited.
The user can adjust the cameras height and take new pictures until
the result is satisfactory.

The badge is then printed (using gimp-perl in the background) on a normal
inkjet printer on labels in sheets. The sheets are reused, printing is done on
only one label at a time to speed up the manual printer administration.

The badge is returned to the reception when the visitor leaves and the badge
number is entered in the system using the admin page.

The reception (who manages the printer) can also view who is currently visiting the
company from the web interface.

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At that time (1997) it was not possible to do all this in a simple way inside
tcl/tk, that's why there are all these small perl programs.
Today, it should be possible to integrate it all, but there
has not been any time to do it. It works so why change it? :-)

Seriously, today it would be best to rewrite the user interface
as a web application. One other reason as to why this hasn't been
done is security, it should not be possible to use the badge station
to surf the internet...

Once again, today it should not be a problem to do this, volunteers
are welcome.



/Jörgen Hägg