Wildebeaste

With the contract to Fujitsu ending 31st March, surely that's an indication to Synetrix and other contractors that everything should be ready for the new contract? On time? The tools should be ready now. For us to use now. Not "some time this week" which is more likely to end up being next week. Do they not realize that we work with people who can't read or follow instructions? I've got many of the SMT who didn't bother to respond to emails telling them to get their info straight ready for the switch-over. And now not being able to get to their email is 'unacceptable' because they have important work to do. Ha! I'll have to calm down now. Does Synetrix get a fine if it can't do things on time? Or do those cutely worded Service Level Agreements mean diddly squat? Probably squat.

We had 7 laptop drives fail over the course of about a week. They were all over 3 years old. Can't expect them to last forever. But it is a bit scary. Best bit is asking the staff if they made a backup of the important data they saved to their desktop (no roaming profiles on the laptops). Almost worth the hastle. Toshiba with Hitachi drives. I was half expecting a built in expiry date with the other 100 due to fail. Bought a batch of replacement ATA drives (about 15). I have to saw the ends off the drive cradles to make everything fit in the case! Only had a couple fail since. Phew!

I've often had a problem with AD attributes transfering into Moodle. I'm setting up a new Moodle server (1.9) and LDAP auth works fine. Everyone can log on using their AD uername. However, I can't get the first name and surname attributes into Moodle. 'givenName', 'displayName' and 'sn' just put the log-on name (equivalent of 'sAMAccountName') into the fields. Other AD attributes such as 'mail', 'userPrincipleName' or 'sAMAccountName' put the appropriate information in. Am I missing something simple? I would've thought that if LDAP was authenticating properly, then these attributes would 'just work'. Any advice? Ta.

Hello folks. I've just got a Netgear SSL312 VPN Concentrator. Unfortunately, to create a VPN tunnel a user needs administrator privileges on the machine. This is never going to happen, as I don't let my users do diddly squat in this area - no local admin or power users. I was wondering... does anyone know a group policy or registry kludge that would allow a normal user to create a network adaptor? Or perhaps I'll just put it back in the cupboard and forget all about it? Thanks.

Have you been sniffing something?

Perhaps the Doctor needs a companion like Caprica (No.6) from Battlestar Galactica. Good, bad, evil. All wrapped up in one neat little package. What we will get is some porky middle aged woman running about shouting for half a season. Oh dear.

As you say, the Poseidon Adventure in space. I was expecting a swimming scene where the fat lady gets it. The Hosts were reminiscent of the robots in 'Robots of Death' in the 70s (only in as far as their facial design). Kylie was good. I thought she was very good. Possibly the only reason to watch? But they had to kill her off! It would've been great to have the three recent female companions appearing along with Kyle in the TARDIS. Ring side seats! Some flimsy stories in the last series. As usual, involving a lot of running up and down corridors. Ridiculous Pig people! It's made for kids I suppose. It needs some tension, passion and emotion and some really really nasty things happening. I'll go and lie down now.

I used to be able to see the Quicktime movies in Chemistry Set (using XP SP2, IE6 and 7). Now I get nothing but a 'Q' and a '?' if I'm lucky. I've tried installing, removing, reinstalling Quicktime in it's many versions and moving back to IE6. Nothing seems to bring the little blighter back to life. I can't seem to get the Quicktime ActiveX (plugin) to work anymore. I think one of the 'upgrades' to Quicktime or XP has broken something. I've tried various codec packs too. Nada. I'm not too fussed, but the Chemistry folk here like to show the little movies. Can anyone help? Ta.

If it's anything like the Assimilate portal that Ramesys run for the EMBC, I have to say it sucks! Nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty.... Cryptic, unpleasant to navigate, vile and horrible on so many levels. I'm sure some people will love it.

There is no way around this. At least that's what they said when we asked. So much for networked software. They'll have to use the same machine.

I found it when poking about on Lenovo's support site. Had a problem with loading XP, which turned out to be faulty RAM.

There's a driver for that here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/license.do?filename=mobiles/65dt11ww.exe The problem is, the web page was ever so slightly Korean. But I think the driver's in English. I'm sure you'll find out.

Did the bios updates fix the wobbly mouse pointer? Does the USB issue happen on ALL the laptops? Could be one of the other devices utilizing resources it shouldn't. I know the sound driver can be a bit buggy. Try this. http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-67594

Thanks for the replies. I haven't run out of disk space - > 90Gb free. I've already modified all the files needed in the Moodle Howto and it all used to work fine. The change I made to allow a huge upload was only a temp thing. I wanted to drop it down to a much smaller size - a few megabytes at most, but it won't let me do that. Nothing greater that 585.9Kb is allowed in the drop down list. Smaller sizes, yes, but that's useless. I'm flummoxed. no... wait... I've hashed out the values in the PHP.ini file and restarted Apache. It's gone back to the default 2Mb. I then put back the values I wanted and restarted Apache again. It works now. Hmmn. Weird.

Hello folks! I'm having a small problem with Moodle file upload limits. We changed the limits to 60Mb on friday in Moodle (PHP options already set to accept bigger downloads) as we needed to install some courses from Birchfield (which didn't work because we don't have PHP-XSLT installed but that's another matter) - all seemed fine. The course accepted the new 60 Mb limit. We've come to the machine this morning and it won't accept any file larger than 595K (or thereabouts) on any of the courses. It'll accept smaller limits and display them in the drop down list. Any hints as to what is happening? Ta

We had a similar problem with 'Take Register'. I think it was fixed by deleting the 'lessonmonitor.mdb' file on staff laptops - at least that's what I was instructed to do! Go for it and see what happens!

Great! Some more software that sucks! It won't work with IE7. So say their technical support. They were taken 'by surprise' when Microsoft released IE7. And there isn't a patch because the curriculum is changing and really, they just can't be bothered to fix it! Looks like I'll have to roll back the whole science dept laptops to IE6. Bugger.

Anybody know a fix to get Heinemann Catalyst (the CD version) Flash movies to play with IE7? They'll play fine on IE6. In IE 7 they just produce a blank HIPS Flash Viewer window. I'm getting cross with it as all the staff laptops have IE7 now. Any help gratefully received! Ta.

Thanks. I'll have a chat with 'em.

Anyone advise on a good supplier of parts for HP Proliant Servers (good as in cheap) - and I'm not interested in Ebay. I'm looking for a second processor module for a Proliant ML350 G3 - 2.4Ghz 533 FSB, also a second processor for a DL360 G5 3Ghz 800 FSB. My county suppliers take forever to provide a quote and more often than not it's for something other than I asked for! Cheers!

Not sure I can be fussed with Ebay. I really want them taken away sharpish. We've got a company that'll take them for nothing to recycle. I kept them for years because I really like the machines - I remember drooling over the first machine we had delivered in July 1994 with a massive 17" Philips monitor. It's like parting with a piece of history and I still like RiscOS, but times change and they've been in the cupboard for 6 years. An Arm 710 doesn't really cut it and the crabby refresh rates give me a headache. I shouldn't hoard this stuff. Oh! And all the RiscPcs have co-processor cards in them (one is *nackered). The A3020 has a hard drive, there's a Cumana SCSI interface and a 386SX PC Podule for an A5000 (wow). Surely that would tip the balance in favour of a good new home? On the negative side, some of the front covers flap like a outhouse door in the wind , there're no mice and only one keyboard (attached by a cunning PS/2 converter box inside an A4000 case), and they've got the name of the school emblazoned all over them and a fetching broad yellow stripe. I'm really selling this aren't I?

Hello folks! I'm about to dispose of approximately 32 Acorn computers that have been clogging up a cupboard of mine for years. Most are Risc PC 600/700s with a few A5000s and a few A3020/A3010s. As far as I know they're all working, but I might have to smash the HDs with a lump hammer to remove our software from them I'd like them to go to a good home but I've had enough of them so if someone wants them - come and get 'em or they'll get recycled! The clock is ticking....

This is so like me, it's creepy.

Ignore me. Your request is giving me a headache.

Complete gibberish! As luck might have it, I'm completely conversant in gibberish. Why would you want to do such a warped thing? I think what your asking is to have an automated method of averaging the sum of n columns, without having to enter this in a formula? Is that right?