polaris

Hi, We just added the latest CCTV system offer on the initsys education website. Welcome to Initsys Education It's similar to the one that was popular in January. We also have larger servers in stock now.....various sizes up to 400 Analogue/IP cameras with video wall and links to our control room alarm management package. CB

I was offering it for free, not trying to sell you anything.....:) CB

Hi, What sort of camera? We did help a school a year or so back that used our recording application to do this. We loaned them three Panasonic IP cameras, these were displayed on a PC/Projector as small individual windows. Our application is Windows only I am afraid, but the "panes" with the camera view can be the only thing you see... the main window background can be whatever you like. You can also drag them around and also maximise/minimise from the main application which could be on a second or third monitor output so that's not seen on the broadcast image. We also loaned some clip on brackets so they could position the cameras on the set so to speak. The actors then acted to the cameras....it was a nice effect. The play was "journeys end" I think. If this is an idea then PM me. CB

Hi, I like lateral thinking...... We could launch a new service? Want great accomodation? three free meals a day? Entertainment on tap? Need a new boy/girlfriend? Send us your photograph and geographic location and we can "fit you up" within hours. I am sure we can "deploy" some CCTV cameras and get some great images......along with the GE image it would be a done deal. And I don't need any engineers travelling the length and breadth of England (- the MD would love it!) Just a copy of photoshop and a guilty plea from the client. Burglars could even be famous....we could place them anywhere - imagine the street cred for being caught at the Taj Mahal, or The Pentagon.....or? CB Police crime statistics to die for! Government cleans the streets.....unemployment falls. Everyone's a winner.

Hi, The theft of lead and other scrap metal should slow down a bit now. We used to sell a lot of rapid deployment CCTV for this type of thing. But with the price of scrap as it is its not so much of a problem. In fact we have had an example of where someone actually dumped scrap metal in a closed DIY store we look after......never had that before! When the price goes back up I bet they plan on returning for it. I suspect burglars will be breaking into prison soon - regular meals, heating, sky football (available in many prisons)..... CB PS - someone just reminded me that last year we actually had a local authority ask if we could spot burglars by using clever software on Goodle Earth - that Jack Bower has a lot to answer for.

All sold now thanks.... I have some Network Video Recorders on special offer from the 5th March, built for us in Germany with Azimuth software and with analytics upgrade possible also comes with secure remote client (SSL/SSH). ICO compatible! Will come possibly with AXIS camera package, if we can buy the stock at a good price. Education only..... More information next week. CB

Just two remaining at 12pm today. Thanks CB

Hi, Yup, the image will always stay the same size.... One way to make your page a constant look at feel is to use imagemaps if that is what you want to do. An image map is a "picture" of the screen, or part of the screen that has clickable areas which then take you to other pages. Normally, or used to be, the way that film websites were done. A really cracking graphic can be drawn by an artist and a web designer can then use his magic to make parts of the image clickable. The other way to see how this is done is to find a site that you like. Use firefox and firebug (as I described above). Or roght click and view page source. That way you can see how that designer crafted the page. And the previous writer was absolutely correct about dreamweaver code, so best steer clear of sites built by that! With the age of Joomla and the like the designers craft is getting lost a little. Our chaps are just as lazy nowadays...... or is that a cost thing driven by the marketing man (whoever he is?- oh yes its me!). CB

Hi, Not sure what you mean??? Cannot get good looking text? Can you explain. Images are a fixed size always. CB

Hi, I think the government are losing the plot on this. Once apon a time, schools were run by the local authority and all services were centrally sourced. When labour took over it promised to give schools autonomy in the same way that the local area health trusts have autonomy. That largely seems to have fallen by the wayside. BSF whilst being a political winner is not being delivered in the right way. Central resourcing does not work, never has done and never will. Almost all the projects that a local authority operate as a "central resource" fail to deliver. BSF money will be spent badly and inefficiently. For several reasons. 1. LEP managed centralised contracts are big so they can only be done by the bigger private organisations (the private partner). By its very nature the LA then lose the ability to contract with local smaller more intelligent and responsive companies and the local community spirit that engenders. The LEPs are distant, unresponsive in their approach to the Schools and the LA does not have the internal skills to control the public/private relationship. The LEP is like a godfather, with its preferred sub contractors and its blueprint. 2. Centralised contracts were the basis of the secondary school building program. At that time School fabric was intended to last 100 years - will we be doing this again in another 40 years because the larger contractors are driven by shareholder profit? 3. The scheme seems to be being steamrollered through without proper consultation at a local level. Opt in should be the norm, not opt out! 4. Way too many consultants. 5. LEP seem to operate a blackmail scheme, you are either all in or you don't get any of the dosh.... IT specifically - For the schools this means potentially losing its local ICT support and that being delegated to a centralised team. And we all know what that means, its a backward step. Let the school solve its ICT problems by using the local expertise that is all around us. For example a school IT department should teach a balanced view of IT, not weighted in one direction or another, this will not happen with a centralised scheme. The gains that computing in the UK have made in the last 10 years will be torn apart and lost forever. Will we centrally source religion? I think not. So why should a School's IT department be all MS or all Linux or whatever... Almost all the services a school has should not be centrally sourced apart from consumable supply (pens and paper), energy and legal. Building works and renewals can be driven by the local community....and that's what should happen. Forget about fancy public/private schemes. A bidding system like the one that runs successfully for lottery money with local managers and local private support is what is needed. That's my view. CB End of rant..... PS - And you can forget about PFI.

Hi, A good general rule is that a webpage should look good on no more that 600 pixels wide. One way that this can be achieved is by having three or two columns, one of the columns should be set a floating size, the other(s) fixed. Most Joomla sites are like this. That way someone using standard VGA 640*480 still gets a good screen. You can safely assume that if your site is a techy one or aimed at people likely to have a better computer system then you can go bigger. But for school websites I would try and keep at about the 600 pixels for the time being. If you look at this site for instance the menus are set to 600px so that someone with a VGA monitor gets the menus without overlap. Getting optimum scaleable html is an art, so for novices a fixed width is recommended. There is a wealth of information on here. World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards And if you want to do a sub page for mobiles then this site will help. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 In dreamweaver you can set the aimed for page size in the page setup part. If you are learning HTML/CSS/PHP/JAVASCRIPT I also recommend Firefox with the Firebug option. This enables you to look at other peoples sites and highlight areas that you think look neat and look at the code and dare I say copy? Or learn how its done...... You can change the CSS on the fly to see what affect it has. If I can help some more please PM me. Regards Chris

Hi, We have recovered from a distrubutor that has gone pop 5 boxed IP CCTV systems. These are for small shops but are also ideal for smaller schools. Built by us in 2008 (September) they were part of a consignment of 40 that we never got payment for! These will be checked and repackaged before shipping. Kit includes 8 cameras (4 internal and 4 external), IAF recorder, LCD and keyboard. They can be self installed by competent electrician or we can arrange installation by an Initsys SI. Professional equipment with 3 year warranty. And can be extended to a maximum of 16 cameras. £3900 exc Vat This is a "for education only offer", click below for more information. Special Offer (Edugeek 002) Regards Chris 0845 330 1445

Hi, Are you a keen cyclist? Do you know about Parkinson's disease (PD)? My friend Mike Smith has Parkinson's and is trying to raise money to help the fight against the disease. He is going to cycle from John O Groats to Lands End - with a difference.....he is doing it on an static bike on an old routemaster bus. Mike will not mind me saying that he has this disease really bad - we call him shaky. But! cycling is one of the things that helps, on a bike you would not know that he had it! The dates are 20th April to the 26th April and Sean Yates, the past Tour De France cyclist is assisting throughout the week. We are starting in Crawley (West Sussex) and travelling around Sussex/Surrey. The point is Mike cannot do this on his own, so if you are a keen cyclist and feel you could give an hour or half an hour on the static bike we would be very grateful. Or, if you know someone with PD why not show your support by helping us raise some money. Any help would be greatly appreciated. PM me if you can help! Web page coming soon. Chris

Hi, We provide a remote viewing service from our Manchester datacenter. The cost is £75 per annum for up to 5 cameras. You can set the cameras to send (Via FTP) images every 30 seconds as a sort of time lapse and the end users can go live on one camera at a time. The connection to the live camera is made by our server and multicasted to the end users so that one live feed to your location can be viewed by many hundreds of people at the same time -makes good use of the small upload on broadband. Plane That's an example. We had 2000+ people watching those cameras when the Vulcan first flew. Last year we did, sheep watch, lion cam (twyford) and a peregrine falcon. I also had the swallows at home online. We are working on a joomla component, but we can also help with PHP/HTML. Any IP camera or video server would do as the camera, Axis, Panasonic,Ycam etc. It's a sideline of our main job. Regards CB

Yup, you are absolutely correct, could go either way. With the prices that MS are offering now its almost Opensource anyhow! The history of computers is a fascinating mix of brilliance technically and brilliance in marketing. Don't get me wrong I am not a MS basher, I like the products. I used to hate Bill, but that was born from jealousy not from any rational thought. And I really like what he is doing with his money now.....wish I could. Let's put it this way, if a plane was crashing and I had one spare parachute and it was a toss up between Bill and a Bank Director! CB

Yes, I did say that I had left out whole chunks of history (how long have you got?)......And no my basis of argument about Windows and Unix is that the core of NT is VMS (MS paid over $100k compensation to Digital).... There is no accident that Dave called NT as he did - as he confessed a few years back. (I worked at Digital at the time on the first 11/780). Windows is just a GUI after all, the kernal is the important part and that is the point I am trying to make. The success of NT changed the face of MS, successfully and for the better and became the basis of (at last) a stable MS product. VMS undoubtably came from a UNIX(like) stable and so the genes can be traced right back. Irrespective of the name of the OS; most OS originally came from a strong core of programmers in the US and I might add the UK. There is no accident in the MS team also including former Bell Labs employees (or did). It's a tenuous link I admit but its there one I like to throw in whenever I hear arguments about Linux and MS. At the end of the day is end user usability, peer pressure and marketing that got us where we are today. Strange thing is that there is a version of Linux working on an original 1979 Vax 11/780 right now. And if you ever get the chance to work on Embedded XP you will immediately see how the structure of XP is similar to Unix and the methodology of 'C'. I can also tell you that MS did make a foray into Linux would you believe? Why not, the core is free and anyone can use it - it made commercial sense apart from one thing, marketing. They then tried to get Linux blocked by throwing money at SCO - who claimed ownership of key parts (and still do). Now the question is where are we going? It might finally be the credit crunch that starts the opensource wheel rolling properly. And watch IBM.....there is life in the old blue yet! They have some old scores to settle......oh, and a big wallet and a relationship with Sun. IBM - Collaboration solutions - United States (No I don't work for IBM). CB

All true....but ultimately! Its the smart young ladies and gentlemen in today's schools that will decide what and how "computers" are used....Windows on Linux, Linux on Windows? It will be the processing power that makes it all happen. And my money on the world in 10 years time will be.....opensource; and maybe not as we know it today. Something somewhere just now emerging is likely to be the winner, not what we have today. I remember when IBM were so dominant that MS pales into insignificance by comparison...they made one wrong move and poof, ask any teenager if they have heard of IBM - they proved to me that it all moves so fast in computing you just cannot recapture what you lost. Ten bob with anyone! (Thats 50p to most of you). CB

Hi, A little bit of history - bear with me......cutting quite a bit of history out here but you will get the point! In the good old days (pre PC) there were mainframes, these mainly ran prorietory OS, you choose the manufacturer and the OS to suit your application. It's where the saying "no one ever got sacked for buying IBM" came from, because you could choose a wacky OS... but the sensible Pre-Geeks bought IBM. In the late 1970's the Digital Computer Company made Unix the front runner with its VAX/VMS Hardware/OS combination. This was further enhanced by the addition of Floating Point Accelerators (FPA). Then came the PC, with Bill's hijacked OS, MS-DOS.....and the world went PC crazy. Gradually over time PC's became the dominant partner, but reliability was crap. MS-DOS was eventually reliable (and is still used in embedded products) but "Windows" - Bill's attempt at short circuiting Apple, was a nightmare. Years and years of Windows were released until XP.....finally a reliable Windows.... ...and guess what. XP is driven by the old VMS team - yes, its got a UNIX base - you won't get MS admitting it, but its true. And now? Now we have Vista, built by the MS Alpha Team (not the XP guys)... and its not as good as XP? Possibly? But which team is writing Windows 7? You guessed it.......and why is it being pushed forward by two years? So, soon the argument is going to be pointless, the world is going to have a UNIX base, Linux/Windows you choose but underneath its UNIX. CB

All gone.... Thanks. CB Welcome to Initsys Education

Hi, £113 plus VAT at DABS (if they had any), school discount - not too individuals. Ours is inc VAT price which you claim back if you are a School, but, I was aiming these at home use. I would not recommend them for a School, too easily damaged and are only IPX4 (IPX4 is under eaves protection/splash proof). Absolutely nothing wrong with them they have just been used at an exhibition. Only 5 left as of this AM. Cheers. CB

Hi, I have 10 of these for sale. Panasonic - ideas for life - Home/Office Security Systems - Home Use - BL-C140E - Overview Second hand stock and ideal for use at home. They have been installed for one month and will be available next week (Week 2 Feb). £100 each (including VAT). Ideal for use at CCTV Protection for Home Security, Home CCTV that beats the Intruder Alarm - Intro. or download the free IP camera software at our website. Chris Welcome to Initsys Education Sponsor

This extension is fantastic for Joomla backups.....and restore should you have a BIG problem. It does everything, you just need to run it and download the backup file. Welcome to JoomlaPack CB

Hi, Windows or Linux server for DocMan? CB

Hi, Yes, I think you can do that in CB. It's not intuitive by any means. You need to find a dark quite place to read the manual. Chris

Hi, What exactly is the error with docman. There are some issues with this extension and you may have to extend your timeouts in your server to get it to work..... If it's an error on loading of docman please let us know what that error is. CB