maniac

I'm not sure, there's a whole series of out takes on the DVD where bits don't work properly!

The only thing we use macs for in our school is the music suite, and macs are so much better in this department in my opinion. They are all stand alone, but are networked for internet access; the browser prompts for login details when they open it, as our proxy is programed in and the settings locked. We use PCs in our art department with photoshop CS3 on, much less hassle and better value for money in my opinion. Mike.

Oh yes, the imfamous cog advert! I have a DVD with a documentary about the making of that ad, and contory to popular opinion it was all filmed in a single take

yes, they share the same 2.4GHz band as other wireless technologies, and as such will get interferance from wireless routers etc. Most do have a limited channel selection, so if you're lucky you can space the router and wireless video sender far enough apart so they don't interfere with each other. Mike.

Every now and then there's a commercial on TV that makes me sit up and pay attention because it's a bit different, funny or just plain entertaining. It's normally the likes of guiness, or the infamous cadburys advert that has this effect, but at the moment this one is my favourite. Barclaycard Waterslide Ad Anyone else actually enjoy some TV commercials, if so what's your favourite one (past or present) ? Mike.

Our librarian has a really cheap HP inkjet printer for label printing, as I've seen too many printers ruined by labels. So far this has been ok, but if it gets jammed up and ruined because it only cost £40, we'll just buy a new one for her and throw the old one out. Not very green admitedly. Mike.

Agreed! The annoying thing is the DVD of this tour comes out on November 10th (as he did the same tour earlier in the year) but I'm not going to see it until 4th December so I'll have to resist buying the DVD to avoid knowing too much of the material before hand! Mike.

I never managed to get tickets for this tour, dispite trying! You lucky people! However, I do have tickets to see Bill Bailey in December, so it's not all bad! mike.

Yes, the loss of interent connection is main downside I've thought of, but our internet connection is exceedingly reliable here in kent. I think we've only had one genuine piece of downtime recently which was only a couple of hours. KCN are upgrading all the connections at the moment, which should make things even faster and more reliable. It's only because of the highspeed fibre connection we have that I think a hosted VLE is now viable. Student managing multiple usernames and passwords, well they have seperate logins for all sorts of stuff at the moment here so one more into the mix isn't going to make a great deal of difference. It will in the long run actually cut down on the amount of usernames and passwords issued, as hopefully some of the external services we use at the moment can be fully integrated into the VLE platform in time. Mike.

It's hosted by ITs learning. Origenally I was put off by hosted VLEs, but the more I thought about it the more I realised it makes sense, as once you factor into it the cost of new server hardware, the time spent maintaining it, backing it up, sorting out the external connection into the school etc. a hosted solution works out much better value for money and is (in thoery) much less technical agravation to set up, leaving us free to concentrate on actually using the VLE as oppose to struggling to get it working properly. I have a further meeting next week with their sales team to discuss costings and finer details of what we want from the platform, and then 99% sure we will be buying into it, watch this space! Mike.

Never found a solution to this, and I don't think there ever will be one. We change on average 2-3 keyboards a week, and repair around a dozen or so from our ample stocks of spare parts. I've warned the bursar how much this is costing, but the word from the top is just to carry on fixing them up, as there is no alturnative really. it is eating £1000's into my budget, but not a lot else I can do really (I'm lucky, I do have a generous budget) We have found that we get less damage if we catch it early, so we are constantly pushing the message to staff to report damage to machines as soon as they notice it so we have a chance to fix it quickly before it gets any worse. We find a laptop that is already damaged is more likely to suffer further damage as a result. By fixing them promptly the theory is we should get less damage. Too early to tell yet thou. Mike.

This is for a personal project, not related to work. Basically the question is which web based forum software would people recommend using at the moment? Are products like PHPbb good enough for most forums, or is it worth paying for a product like VBulletin? What are the advantages and dis-advantages of each option? Is there other forum software worth considering; wikipedia has a whole load of them listed, a lot of which I hadn't heard of before! Many thanks in advance, Mike.

Yeah, I wish I'd brought that one myself now! My friend was origenally the Zombie, but I couldn't find another costume I liked as I wasn't keen on the twisted jester outfit, but my friend was so I brought it and we swapped. Then we tried them on, and I wish I'd kept the jester outfit now, it's a much better costume, but there we go! Mike.

I will be out and about tonight in the Canterbury area dressed as a Zombie (How origenal!) it was the only costume I liked thou! http://www.curiousplaces.co.uk/images/ForumPhotos/costumes/zombie.jpg and my friend will be dressed as the 'Twisted Jester' Probably along with half the town, as these are by far the best two costumes that our local matalan had on the shelves. lol http://www.curiousplaces.co.uk/images/ForumPhotos/costumes/twisted.jpg Mike

@powdarrmonkey If you would like the source code for the simelar program I wrote recently to combine into yours to make one 'super' password changer, then let me know. Mine was very tied down to a particular username pattern, but it did have a plus feature that it browsed the directory and displayed a list of usernames rather than the user having to type the username in. You managed to crack what I could never get working in VB.Net, which is reading and writing settings from a config file, which is why I never developed mine any further. The program I wrote is here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23952-easy-password-reset-software.html Mike.

It will do this if you've not got all the required fields entered as said above. However by editing one of the moodle PHP files, you can change what fields are required and what fields are optional. Off the top of my head I can't remember what file, but I know it can be done. Search the moodle users site for changing mandatory fields, and I'm sure you'll find it. Mike.

It's important to destinguish between a Learning Gateway and a VLE. The KLZ is pushed as a Learning Gateway, not a full VLE, and provides students and staff with a sharepoint based online file storage area and tools to colaborate on projects, as well as E-Mail via Exchange and a few other bits and pieces. If you are looking at a sharepoint based VLE you will be able to get all the functionality offered by the KLZ within your own Learning platform, (except the part that allows you to colaborate with other Kent schools, but of course that's dependant on the other schools using the KLZ.) If you are looking at a non-sharepoint based Learning platform such as Its Learning or Fronter, then you could benefit from some of the functionality from the KLZ, as features such as File storage and E-Mail arn't as well developed in these learning platforms, as they are much more geared towards the actual learning content delivery. It is well worth nothing that the KLZ will work in conjunction with most of the popular learning platforms, allowing users to move seemlessley between the learning platform and the KLZ, but if you opt for a sharepoint based Learning platform then you will find features overlap a lot, and you may be spending money pointlessly. At the end of the day it's what fits the school best. Personally we are on the verge of going with ITs Learning for our learning platform, and using the KLZ functionality for Student E-Mail and on-line colaboration and storage (we have signed up already, but haven't started using it yet.) We feel this offers our school everything that we need from a learning environment, and a good base to build on for future developments such as SIMS webparts integration etc. Mike.

I've just recycled our old SIMS server into a server for FOG. Very easy to set up and so far I'm pretty impressed with it. I've only captured and restored one image with it so far to test it, and installed the windows client on a couple of test workstations, but it just works no complecated setup procedures etc. Mike.

Pretty tired, really wanna just slump in front of the tele, but I really need to start making some headway at packing/clearing out stuff as I'm moving soon nearer to work, and there's just so much to do. I hate moving, but I have ended up moving 3 times in as many years! Hopefully this place will last a bit longer! Mike.

Yes, I figured as much, but I personally don't know where to look or what to change to rectify this. Incidently it lets no one log on, even if they have logged on before, as credentials are not cached (student laptops) staff laptops do work, as credentials are cached. I'm afraid I don't know a lot more, other than the network is using RADIUS and PEAP-MSCHAP v2 and WPA encryption, and the settings are distributed through a Group policy which is being applied correctly according to a GPresult and resultent set of policiy modelling in GPMC. I'm pretty sure it is using IAS although I've yet to discover which server is hosting this as I'm not familure enough with the setup. It's a pretty standard W2k3 domain, 3DCs, storage server, exchange etc. and the servers all seem to be in good health. Thanks for the offer, I may send you a PM tomorrow morning if you don't mind if the engineer from the support company isn't getting anywhere. Like I say, they've had at least 2 attempts at fixing this, so hopefully they'll send an engineer who actually understands 802.11x systems this time, as I understand the last two engineers wern't up to much. (Some support eh, but that's another issue entirely) And I think the servers are all 2003 Standard edition. The only reason I care so much is the principal of the academy I'm covering in is also the principal of the academy I normally work in, so I think he'd be extreemly pleased if I can resolve this issue for him, and as per usual, I love a challenge! Many thanks, Mike.

I'm currently covering for absent technical staff at one of our associated academies. Amongst other things, they are having a lot of problems with their wireless network, which the principal has asked me to look at while I'm there, as their current technical staff are a little out of their depth with the complexity of the system (by their own admission) The system is a RADIUS enabled wireless network, using PEAP-MSCHAP v2 authentication and WPA encryption. It works, but it only works after a user has logged on via a cabled link, it will not let users log on wirelessly. As you can imagine this is a little bit of a problem. We have an engineer from the company who support the systems in the school visiting tomorrow, unfortunitely this is a different company to the one that installed the system. I understand this is not the first time they have visited and So far they have been un-able to get the system to work correctly. Apprently it did work up until July time when as far as I can work out the certificate expired on the clients, which messed the whole thing up. This part was fixed, but it's never worked properly since then according to the people I've spoken to. Because the support company have had more than one attempt at fixing this, I'm not holding out a lot of hope of them fixing it this time, so I'm hoping I can gather some information from fellow edugeekers to help me guide the engineer if they don't seem to be getting anywhere. I've never worked with a wireless network using 802.11x authentication before, although I do understand the principles behind it, so any helpful suggestions or comments appreciated, so I can at least help the engineer tomorrow if they are struggling. Many thanks, Mike.

Necessary or not? I ask because I'm covering for the technical staff at another school at the moment, and will be tomorrow as well. They are having a ton of problems with system slowdowns, and slowed down a lot about 10 minutes ago. Checking the error logs on the servers and I think it may be down to the McAfee virus scanner on-access scanning, as this has a lot of errors in the event log around the time the slow-down occured. Not that I'm going to make the change myself, as it's not my system to meddle with, but I'm just interested if it's considered essential to have on-access scanning enabled on the servers or not, so that I may be able to make a recommendation to the staff working here. Many thanks, Mike.

If you put the accounts you don't want this rule to apply to in a seperate OU, and block policy inheritance, that will do the trick. That's what we do for service accounts and the like that we don't want our normal policies to apply to. Mike.

If it's a set of instructions, or a manual for something I much prefer a printed copy. If it's just an e-mail, letter or something short then on the screen is fine. I prefer hard copies for reference stuff, as invariably I add scrawled notes all over it! Mike.

I think this is what you're looking for, and it works brilliently! CHDK in Brief - CHDK Wiki Sorry if you've just spent the last ten minutes looking, but I happened to have it to hand. Mike.