maniac

Get yourself a pair of these 5.8GHz Wireless AV Audio Video Sender Transmitter on eBay (end time 26-Dec-10 16:27:18 GMT) They work brilliantly. Big advantage over using the packs designed for instruments or radio mics is you keep a stereo signal. Mike.

The main difference is uncategorised sites. They are available to staff, but not to students. This emcompasses quite a few more obscure sites that some staff want to use, things hosted on personal webspace and the like and also anything that's very new. There's other differences, and sometimes the odd site is blocked from students by keyword filtering and have to be added as a specific allow. We've just upgraded websense to the latest version as well which seems to have some sites in different categories to what they were before, so some staff are finding sites they've used before are no longer available and as such some have started running every single site they want to use past us before they use them. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's starting to take up more of our time than I'd like testing them on behalf of the teacher, so I wanted to create an easy to use interface they could use to test them theirselves. As I say they are supplied with a student login they can use on a workstation, but most complain they don't have the time to do this and expect us to do it, so I want to offer an alturnative that they can't complain about! As you can guess it's us that gets it in the neck when students can't get onto a site and the whole lesson is disrupted etc. etc.

Our web filtering has different levels for staff and students and is a bit over the top sometimes, so ends up blocking sites that should really be available. e.g last week we found the marlowe theatre website was blocked for some reason, and other strange occurances like this, sites which you would assume would be available, that are perfectally harmless. Therefore I want an easy way for staff to find out if a particular website is blocked or not before they try and use it with a class, and also a method that avoids them asking us, as it takes up a fair amount of our time - I must get at least 3 or 4 of these type of requests a day, and many more where a member of staff has gone to use a site and suddenly discovered it's blocked then come running to us in a panic, some of this might be avoidable if staff can easily test if a site is blocked for students or not before they use it. At the moment the code I've tried is not setup to accept an input from a form, I was just testing this bit of code with a hard programmed in website to see if I could get it to work. I have to admit I don't understand the cURL options witin PHP properly and I ripped this code from somewhere else, except it wasn't setup to use a proxy. As soon as I add the proxy options, it just reports every time as the website being un-reachable. This bit of code should test to see if Google is available. If I remove the proxy lines it works, except it doesn't go through our proxy so it's no good. I just cannot get it to authenticate to our proxy whatever combination of different options I try. function Visit($url){ $agent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)";$ch=curl_init(); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url ); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent); curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt ($ch,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSLVERSION,3); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, '10.49.60.5:8080'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, 'spires\student2:password2'); $page=curl_exec($ch); //echo curl_error($ch); $httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE); curl_close($ch); echo $httpcode; if($httpcode>=200 && $httpcode<300) return true; else return false; } if (Visit("http://www.google.co.uk")) echo "Website available"; else echo "Website not available"; ?> Anyone see what I've done wrong? Mike.

Unfortunitely not possible to do that, as it's supplied and maintained by the LEA. I have access to the interface and nothing else. My idea is to use a simple script to authenticate to the proxy as a student, see if the website is available or not and then report the result. Sounds simple enough but I just can't get it to work properly.

In house, it's a websense box.

We get quite a few requests from staff 'can you make sure that ****** website is available for students to use' not a major issue, but I'd like to find a way of staff being able to test it for themselves easily. They already have a student login they can use, but few staff can be bothered and would rather ask us. What I'd really like is a web based form to put on our intranet which staff can put a website URL into a box, that can then go out to the net through our proxy authenticated as a student and tell the staff member if the website is reachable or not. I've had a go using PHP and cURL but I can't get it to work properly, although I know in theory it's possible. Anyone know of a pre-written script which will do this, or point me in the direction of a good understandable guide for using cURL properly. Cheers Mike.

600ish clients, full in house developed network with about 10 servers and all the usual systems. 2 of us all year round to support it all. It's hard work, but managable because we're well organised.

That on certain website, like sky for instance, you can upgrade your account on-line, but if I chose I want to remove a service I have to ring them up.

What does it do when you boot it into fog? I've yet to find a wholey incompatible machine, but I have had to add some arguements to the Kernel before to get one or two to boot correctly. Updating the kernel can be done through fog its self. Can't remember which menu now, might be the fog settings one and look for 'kernel updates' on the left - should be quite self explanatory from there on in.

I copy my posts into the clipboard almost by habbit, because of other forums I post on having simelar issues, and also our webmail timing out on me constantly when I'm writing new messages. ctrl-a , ctrl-c takes a fraction of a second and saves plenty of time if that happens.

Closing date is this friday if anyone here is interested in applying for this position.

My username for Active Directory operations in FOG doesn't have the domain before it, it's never needed it - works quite happily with just the username in the box.

Use a 10" netbook PC that has a VGA output as the PC for xibo. Cheap as chips and does the job nicely - may seem a little bit of a waste as you don't use the built in screen, but compare the costs of other options it works out the cheapest. Won't run a full HD one properly in my experience, but a 720p screen is fine done this way and they're so small and light, a couple of cable ties holds it out of view behind the screen easily and if you want more security, use a kensington lock.

Tut tut, I believe discriminating on age is actually illegal!

Yes, I got turned down for lots of jobs for that reason as well, but it doesn't mean they all will. I have no ICT qualifications what-so-ever, all my skills are learnt on the job and the highest qualification I have in any subject is 'A' level, but I have progressed my way to where I am now off the back of my expeience and hard work. I only started working in IT at the age of 23 after I got bored with Retail. Every school I've ever worked at has tried to keep me as well by offering me more money to stay (although they never succeed) so I must be doing something right. All I'm saying is qualifications are not the only way, they really aren't.

Rydra, you are in a simelar position to where I was at your age, I earnt a simelar amount doing a simelar job, but I still opted not to go down the qualification route to better myself and just kept applying for better jobs. Eventually one of those took me on and I now earn £10k more than I did 3 years ago just through pure hard work. It's nonsense that people always take on people with degrees over those that don't, because they took me on here and I happened to see some of the other applications after I started, people with loads of very good qualifications, but apparently no personality at interview so they picked lil old me because they liked me, it was that simple. Charisma really is the key to opportunity. Mike.

Snowing hard in Canterbury, don't think it's going to last thou.

Oh I don't know; with the sun in the right position, Dunguness has a nice glow about it.

**Looks out front door again** Nope, still not snowing. Can someone please direct it to kent!

A lot of manufacturers are only making their expensive kit to order these days, or as you say only holding the minimum they can get away with in stock. I've noticed this with on-line retailers in particular, there's a lot more 'out of stock but more due in . . .' notices on some sites than there ever used to be.

**looks out front door** Nope, not a single flake of snow here.

Not ever had issues with their servers, the last range I used was their G5's and they seemed very good, and their service has always been top-notch when I've had to use it. However I totally agree with the comment regarding the printers. I've got a fair number of different HP printers in my place, some going back over 10yrs and the newer one's just aren't the quality build of the older ones without a shadow of a doubt. Papertrays in particular are much more fragile, and I've had numerous problems with electronics in the newer ones where as the older ones just soldier on and on and on and on - it's just a shame they're not quicker or we'd probably have never replaced them! I've switched my prefered printer manufacturer from HP to Xerox in recent times, as they seem better built printers.

Yes that I agree with, get rid of the rubbish then you wouldn't need to change the funding because there wouldn't be so many people willing to goto university in the first place, and then a degree would start to take back on some of it's status that is used to hold many years ago, the letters after the name would actually mean something again! Go back to the 'red brick universities' and the 'traditional courses' as my grandfather would call them. He had a point, he was very strongly spoken at the time I was considering going that (in his opinion) if I was going to goto university I should study a 'proper' degree course at a 'proper' university, and if I didn't do that then there was little point in me going. I didn't fancy any of the traditional courses, I did consider a computer networking degree for a while (much to his disappointment) but eventually decided to just make a go of it and get a job and if that didn't work out I could always go to university in a few years time. Although I didn't goto university in the end, I'm not doing so badly now and I certainly don't think I'd being doing any better if I had gone, as evidenced by one friend who went and did almost exactly the same course as I was going to, and now does the same job as me. Of course he ended up about £11,000 in debt as a result and is still paying it back 8 years later. In a way that made my grandfather correct, there was little point in me going to university unless I had gone and done what he considered a 'proper' degree, as I've worked my self to the same position as the computer networking degree would have most likely got me by now anyway.

But are we really benefitting when you consider academic organisations seem willing to hand out degrees for being able to fart in tune these days? The very best students will still go no matter what, because they will excel and benefit society and themselves anyway. What it will do is put off Kevin Smith who was going to study a degree in Social media studies, then come out of university and go and work in B&Q as a manager - lets be honest you don't really need a degree to do that, so is there any benefit to socety for him going in the first place? I can cite counteless real world examples of this having seen the outcome of many many friends going through university. I'd say only 1 in about 4 of my friends who went to uni are actually working in a job where they needed their degree to get it, the rest are doing pretty normal jobs which you would be able to get anyway, so how has society benefitted from those 75% of people attending university at our expense? (These are guesstimated figures based on the people I know by the way, but it would be a very interesting statistic if it existed in the real world, how many people currently employed actually needed their degree to get to where they are? I bet it's a lot lower than people think) "Why did you goto uni kevin?" "Ah well it seemed the right thing to do, and it was easier than getting a job at the time!" (that's a real answer from someone by the way, but I changed the name)

You do, you just have to get a loan to cover the costs. No one's managed to put forwards a good arguement for why people shouldn't pay if they want to go on to higher education. In theory if you goto university your employment opportunities should be better, your earnings potential should greater and thus your ablity to repay a loan should be higher. I think the question is why should tax payers continue to pay for the university system, why shouldn't the people directly benefitting from it pay for it?