alexharrington

Longhill School is seeking to recruit a network manager to lead IT team. If you are a skilled IT professional; calm, patient and flexible; capable of creative thinking and excited by the prospect of a challenge, we’d love to hear from you. The schools heterogeneous network takes best-of-breed solutions from the commercial and Open Source sectors to deliver systems that are reliable and performant while providing excellent value for money to the school. The post involves supporting Windows and Linux servers, the schools MIS system (SIMS .net) and associated hardware and software, and maintaining the development of the network in to the future. Full details are available on the website here: Network Manager in IT Department - Longhill High School

Hi there We've had Youtube for Schools working via Dans Guardian for some time now however today students appear to be able to view any video they have the URL for. I also found a post in the Google in Education forum from another school seeing the same issue. https://productforums.google.com/d/topic/google-education/RlLuJ9QkLug/discussion Can anyone else using Youtube for Schools confirm if they see the same issue please? It's worth noting some videos for me are blocked still - usually the ones that have the pre-roll warning that they contain inappropriate content. Thanks Alex

In my experience proving what damaged the printer is pretty tricky. I have it first hand from a printer engineer that his company lost the business of a toner supplier after they were called to a job and found the toners were at fault and informed the customer of this.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the Xibo Devs. If you are going to look at Xibo, make sure to use 1.2.0 as it has far better permissions for allowing/disallowing users to publish on various screens or groups of screens. You could in the most extreeme instance prevent anyone sheduling anything to any screen and then do the scheduling for them once you're happy with what they've done. Alex

http://wiki.xibo.org.uk/images/5/52/Introduction_and_Basic_Operation.pdf Install Guide NET Client - Xibo It sounds like either you might have PowerPoint viewer installed (which isn't supported - it must be a full version of PowerPoint at the moment) or maybe missed some steps from either the client configuration or preparing the PowerPoint file for upload. Those links have full details on both. Alex

+1 for Comcen. I normally go for Office Basics branded compatibles as they're very reliable, but the CB40xA range just shot up in price so we've switched to Computer Ink compats, still from Comcen - which have been fine too.

Hey all We had an issue with students storing gigabytes of flash games across their personal folders on the servers. Unfortunately, the IT teaching team use Flash with students so I couldn't just veto storing swf files. Instead I've written a little python script that takes a folder full of files - "needles" and searches for those files, optionally recursively inside a second folder "haystack". It matches files on filesize and md5 checksum so it will pick up files even if they've been renamed, extensions changed etc. We're a Linux shop so it's only tested on Ubuntu 8.04. If you're going to run it on Windows then do some proper testing first! Usual disclaimers apply. FileHunter Unstructured Musings Of A Geek Cheers Alex

All sorted now - thank you.

Hi all After quotes please for the following machines: * 160GB SATA2 HDD * 22x DVD-RW * Vista Business COA * SFF Chassis (towers would be ok if small) * Microsoft Keyboard/Mouse * Power Cable * 2GB RAM * Intel DG31PR Mainboard (or similar) * Core2Duo E7400 2.8GHz * Internal memory card reader * 19" TFT (DVI/VGA) 4:3 ratio ideally * 5y NBD/OS Warranty Ideally you'd also deploy an image on to the machines for us (we'd supply on a hard drive ready to be cloned) and asset tag with an indellible mark and numbering system specified by us. I already have a quote from Stone and have contacted Simon and CPLtd about a Dell equivalent, but am interested in what others have to offer. Quantity is 111 initially. Cheers Alex (alex _at longhill (_dot) org (dot_) uk)

Sure is! If you're interested in what's coming up, the Blueprints section is the place to go: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/xibo Anything marked for the 1.1 series is likely to be in the 1.1 testing releases ready for a stable release as 1.2.0 - there will be an upgrade path from 1.0.x to 1.2.0 Stuff that's already implemented or being implemented for 1.1/1.2 at the moment is listed here: https://launchpad.net/xibo/+milestone/1.1.0 The 1.0 series is "stable" so we'll provide bugfix releases as required, but there won't be any new features implemented. That means people running 1.0 in production shouldn't be too concerned about upgrading minor version numbers (1.0.1 -> 1.0.2 etc) Cheers Alex

We're using Xibo here - on 5 screens now. I have a fair bias here since I'm on the development team for it, but I'm really pleased with what it's doing now, and excited about what's coming in the 1.2 series of releases. Re the forum. We'd never planned to have one, but several people asked if we'd put one up as an informal place to discuss Xibo etc, but it just hasn't been used. All the support etc goes on over in Launchpad and you'll see there's alot of activity there: https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo We're in the middle of putting together an official layouts site - where you'll be able to upload layouts under a Creative Commons license, and download/use other peoples layouts as you wish. Initially that will be just by exchanging background artwork, but with the 1.1/1.2 series of releases you'll be able to import/export whole layouts too. Cheers Alex

PPT minus scrollbar is just a setting in Powerpoint. There's instructions here: https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo/+question/64797 Cheers Alex

Hi Dan That's a limit of your PHP install. I have 1GB odd HD video running over Xibo Best place to put questions that are Xibo specific is the Launchpad Answers section for the project: https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo Cheers Alex

Hi John We've very much getting what we have already up to par at the moment. I've got allsorts of plans in my head for a MythTV integration, but I expect we'll be looking at those kind of things for a 2.0 release. The server is written in a very modular way - in fact that's been the bulk of the work that has been done to release the code publicly was to modularise the way content is added to the system. The Java client has been written ground up to be modular, so there's nothing to stop somebody developing a 3rd party module and plugin to make video streaming happen earlier. Cheers Alex

Heya Shameless plug for a project I develop on. Xibo Open Source Digital Signage Project We've been running it as a commercial product where I work, but it's now available as an AGPL v3 Open Source system. PHP based web interface (server can run on Linux or Windows) and a Windows .net client (a Java client is on the way for Linux/Mac machines). Have a look! There's not much of a website yet, but the manual gives an idea of what it looks like and how it works. Xibo Manual We released 1.0.0-rc1 earlier this week. There were a couple of bugs in it that are worth avoiding on a new system, so wait for 1.0.0-rc2, hopefully next week! Cheers Alex