pod

Gareth, Stands cost about £450 per sq metre...as Dos_Box says a few grand for a small stand. The other cost is the constant advertising calls you get when you sign up...it's ironic that you go to Bett to promote your product and you get inundated with people trying to sell you marketing. I find the line 'we have no money left after paying for Bett' cuts the calls short :-)

Cheers for the tips and especially the chair tip...I've a back problem that get's worse if I stand a lot and I guess I'll be doing a lot that :-) Chris

After 13 years of being the office guy -> photocopy guy -> IT guy and then eventually network manager of a large school I have left school life behind and joined the private sector. As part of my new life I will be exhibiting a small stand at Bett 2012. I know some of you guys from edugeek have had a stand in the past and I would be grateful for your feedback and any tips? As you will know it's a big commitment and I want to make the most of the time I'm there. I have been once as a visitor but any advice from the other side of the stand will be much appreciated. Many thanks, Chris

We will be running moodle and I guess about 10-20 simultaneous connections.

We are considering giving web access to our existing intranet based VLE, what would be the best type of connection to buy into in terms of speed? We are a school of 1200 students and 130 staff. I would be especially keen to hear from folk who are doing something similar. Thanks, Chris

Thanks for all the replies! A mention of pipes got me thinking. I am having gas heating put in and I guess the fitters will need to add some sort of boxing to get the pipes upstairs (or downstairs as the boiler is going in the roofspace). I reckon there would be plenty of space alongside the pipes to work some cabling in. Thanks again for shaping a better solution. Chris

I am hoping to get the wisdom of the crowd on how to best network my new house? I have done a significant amount of cat 5/6 cabling in the school I work down through the years. However, there aren't going to be wires nailed to the walls of my new house as there are in some of my classrooms :-) So what approach would folk recommend, in particular routing cables to each room? Thanks, Chris

Not so much funny but sticks in your head. http://i.imgur.com/TZ9Sk.jpg

I have a reseller account at hostgator.com and I love it! I have a few websites I made for clients and now I host them rather than someone else getting paid for it. If I remember rightly I am paying about £200 a year for the reseller account. Chris

I would agree with Mossj, his approach is more business like than 'how much per hour'. I created a site for a large company recently and had to involve another company to provide the day by day support (I'm a network manager in a school) so one didn't overlap with the other. I also look after a primary school website I created a few years ago and charge them about £125 annual upkeep which is maybe more in line with what you are talking about. There was a £1k initial outlay, the site had a custom made backend that allowed staff to update their class pages easily. It's not about taking advantage, some prices mentioned here are silly. It's about doing work you are proud off, can support and making sure you are first and foremost doing the job you are getting paid for

I started a linux user group at the school I work at some years ago, it lasted for a year or two then fizzled out. It was a fairly positive experience, the kids set up a ubuntu server and we had a website running of it for a while. We used an old PII machine and dns via dyndns.org, so there was no money involved. I'd say encourage any interest, especially in the network side of things, because it doesn't come around too often :-) Chris

I spend a lot of time working on websites and I have considering buying a second monitor as I don't have enough desktop to edit code in one window and view the result in a browser in another window without having to open/close windows. I decided to look for a software solution first and was surprised having a code editor and browser preview in the same space wasn't easy to find. I work with php/mysql and Dreamweaver 8, so the standard html preview approach Dreamweaver uses (don't know about the new version) doesn't work for me and it's php testing server launches in a new window. I tried Microsoft Expression and had no joy with that either. I am pleased to say I have been running Eclipse from eclipse.org for the last few days and it does exactly what I was looking for. Jumping between code and a browser preview is a tab away. I know it may not seem like a big deal, jumping between windows, but when you have done it for the 1000th time it saves on the rsi :-) I can tell as well that I am only scratching the surface with eclipse at the moment and I'm sure it will prove even more helpful in the future. I don't see it as a teaching tool to frighten students with but I am sure there are many here who already use it or may find it useful. Chris

Thanks!

Does anyone know how to turn off 'client disconnected' message in RM Tutor 3, can't see an option in the config? Very annoying when you have several hundred workstations. Thanks, Chris

I must confess I was running 64-bit Ubuntu Studio before Windows 7 but was hooked in when MS gave a free version of Win 7 Ultimate at some conference I was at. I love my monitor, with built-in cam/mic, but the linux kernel doesn't, hence the move. I have been using linux since the 90s but I just don't have the inclination anymore to spend days/weeks getting a bit of hardware working. The days of messing with refresh rates and kernel modules are over...any linux I am running these days is a headless server.

Not quite sure what you mean? It is online as oppossed to a desktop app but there is a free plan that does more than I need and I am sure most people would need. Cheers, Chris

I am a big fan of basecamp, Project management, collaboration, and task software: Basecamp

I am running windows 7 ultimate 64-bit on a quad core opteron. I'm noticing logon is a bit slower than it used to be...is it unfounded or do folk think the idea that microsoft updates start to slow performance down on fresh installs is true? Not that there's much you can do about it, I was just curious? Cheers, Chris

We use google spreadsheet forms as online questionnaires to collect data from staff/students. Maybe not the angle you are coming from but we have found it a very useful tool. The only problem is I now have 100s of pages of questionnaire data collected from staff training days

To answer your question, I created a room booking system for my school and now other schools use it. It's sort of grown and become a commercial thing, although I haven't given up the day job just yet. On the back of my booking system I have now been employed by a large company to create a bespoke booking system, this time for the public to book facilities out of school hours for a group of schools. This is a big project so I have partnered with another IT firm and they provide support. I have come to realise that those who create, rather than maintain, tend to get more kudos or money for their efforts. Most folk here like myself work in support roles but there is always opportunity to create new solutions in education as we usually have the resources and know-how to do so.

I run reports each week for behaviour and achievement, if you are still stuck let me know. I upload the resulting csv file to a rewards system I created for the school, Lagan College - Northern Ireland's First Planned Integrated School. It's fairly standard SIMS report writing, you just need to watch SIMS doesn't try to group results together, there's an option to deal with that when you are choosing the output type.

Some routers will not, or are not configured, to connect machines from internal to external and back again. I was tearing my hair out one day trying to do something similar to what you are only to discover that all was setup correctly but I could not connect to my webserver's external ip address from the internal network. This might not be the case, but it would be easy for you to check.

I would second using Google forms, part of the Google Docs spreadsheet. We use them in the school I work for inset surveys and other data collection. There's also more of a chance that others might pick up on how to use them. If you decide to dive into php and hosting your own script there's one below I use for the sixth form students making websites in my school as a generic email form. for this to work the html form pointing to it must have a hidden filed called EmailAddress with the value being the recipient's email address. Save the headache and do the Google thing though :-) Email Contact Form <?php // common.php function info($msg) { ?> exit; } ?> /* get date */ $today = date("F j, Y, g:i a"); // March 10, 2001, 5:16 pm /* recipients */ $to = $_POST['EmailAddress']; /* subject */ $subject = "Email Contact Form"; /* message */ $message = " $today Senders details - "; /* message continued - get details from form */ foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) { if ($key != "email" && $key != "submit") { $message .= $key ." : ". $value . "\n"; } } /* and now mail it */ mail($to, $subject, $message, "From: [email protected]\r\n" . "Reply-To: [email protected]\r\n" ); info("Thank you, your email has been received."); ?>

Apache2 does make using vhosts really easy. Coupled with dyndns you can have up to five free domain names pointing at the same server, the key is using the ServerName directive. They will be dopey domain names like shacknet.nu but they're free. I have a fixed ip address at home with bethere.co.uk broadband and use vhosts to run several test sites for my live sites running of an old box...it's good stuff.

Thanks, but I am trying to automate the process as much as possible, familiar with excel, I'd like SIMS to do the work. Chris