LosOjos

but you work in IT so you must have a Mac, right?!

I can't wait for this to come out! Oh, hang on, yes I can. I can wait about 5 years until I can afford the hardware to run it!

Like any language, it has strong and weak points. It's a great language for learning as it's very flexible and there are tons of libraries out there plus hundreds of examples, but it's certainly not without it's shortcomings. Stick with it, it'll pay off. You might not understand what that code does exactly right now, but if you can adapt it to work for you then don't worry. It's not great having a load of code you don't understand, but it's really no different to using libraries - you can always dig in to the detail when you're more confident

This is actually one of those simple things that Python really sucks at - you can't do what you're imagining in any simple way. You'll need a library to do it, and threading will help. There's a code snippet on Rosetta Code you can use: Keyboard input/Keypress check - Rosetta Code Don't worry too much about the implementation of getch(), just focus on the loop to see how you can adapt it to work with your own code. Essentially, the code sets a thread running that captures the character pressed continuously, allowing you to read off the current key pressed. Not sure if this will work for the arrow keys, but you could 'spoof' it by using 2, 4, 6, 8 on the numpad. EDIT: meant to add, you have the concept right, it's just the actual capture of keyboard input that's awkward in Python. But yeah, implement that getch() snippet from Rosetta Code and issue commands from your loop depending on current pressed key. No switch statements in Python either so you'll need a string of if/else statements (and I do recommend using if/else rather than just if - as getch() will run in a separate thread, if you don't use 'else' then there's potential for more than one key to be detected per loop which could mess up some logic you add later on - using else will make sure only one key's actions are performed per loop) EDIT2: that was clear as mud, so to calrify in pseudo-code, you'd do something like this: if char is not None: if char == '8': moveUp() elif char == '2': moveDown() elif char == '4': moveLeft() elif char == '6': moveRight()

I got a bottle of JD at my last place. Sounds great, but then we proceeded to crack it open and start drinking (this was not a school!). Then it was time for my leaving speech... "I won't stand up here and pretend I like you all..."

It's #655635 and #8999bb (approximately) Seriously though, I see it as blue/black but both my OH and daughter see white/gold. Happy to confirm in Photoshop I was right (nearly) EDIT: to mess with your head even more, today's xkcd (HINT: both dresses are the same colour) http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/3/3f/dress_color.png

Might be worth looking at G-Sync monitors too - they're pricey, but paired with a 970 they're stunning (my limited understanding is it's hardware V-Sync - rather than limiting the framerate to match the monitor, the monitor matches it's frame rate to the GPU - flicker free image, minimal frame drop)

Is RAID5 really necessary in a gaming PC? I can understand a RAID1/mirrored drive for redundancy but RAID5 seems like major overkill and with SSDs you're blowing a hell of a chunk of your budget on that extra drive, budget that could be used for a better monitor or additional GPU, something I personally feel would be of much more benefit in a gaming PC. Just my 2p EDIT: also, if it's going to be exclusively a Windows machine, seriously consider Storage Spaces over RAID - it's software based, but much easier to swap in/out drives and even move drives in to a new machine if necessary (hear horror stories of RAID cards dying and being unable to rebuild, even on an identical card/mobo. Also had an issue myself where a BIOS update killed my RAID without me realising for weeks!)

This is awesome Would you mind if I showed it to my code club? They're teenagers and I think they'd have a lot of fun pulling it apart and re-purposing it

Some really cool ones there! Can't quite believe it, but there's an entire series of split-family photos this guy did in 2011: Split Family Faces - My Modern Met Today is the first time I've seen them, yet last year I made this: I'd forgive anyone for thinking I stole the idea, but I genuinely thought I was being original!

I've not got hold of the RR yet (waiting for login details) so can't say how it'll affect us as a school, but I think we'll be fine; our low attainers have always been a strong point. On a national level though, this update just seems to be weighting things favourably towards high attainers; previously, I was excited by Progress 8 as it gave a level playing field to all abilities (unlike A*-C based measures) but it looks like it's already being skewed before it's even got off the ground.

Digging in to this, I'm not happy about how these changes are going to affect lower ability students. Not only has the low, low/mid end of the estimated outcome been raised much more than the higher end, the potential points for lower grades has been dropped. This is going to make it much more difficult for the lower ability students than previous figures have indicated...

@tombry yeah I should have said 2016 really, sorry about that. I have been using the Progress 8 Technical Guide to generate A8 up til now, but as this blog points out, it's not accurate! Will definitely be using RR from now on.

@tombty - it was my understanding that current Y10 will be judged against the previously published figures for 2013? This is what our SLT believe to be the case, I didn't think it sounded right though... Problem with those 2013 figures is that they're pure speculation, the latest figures aren't going to be much different I don't expect, but next year's should be significantly different, the year after that also, as schools adapt to the changes. They'll probably level out from 2018 onwards I'd have thought...

@tombry - not seen the P8 ready reckoner yet, but we use the KS5 one a lot - I ended up adding in a sheet that I can drop a SIMS report in to and it does various lookups to automatically generate the layout expected by RR to copy/paste in the correct place. Took an afternoon to set up, but it's now a 5 minute job to update! Hoping to do something similar with this P8 one when I get my hands on it

The apt.conf.d folder contains configuration settings for apt (the package manager). So what you've actually done is configured apt to use the proxy. To set the environment proxy (which the browser uses), run this in a terminal (you can also add it to /home/pi/.bashrc to have it run every time the machine starts): export http_proxy="http://domain\username:password@proxyip:port/" PS - if you're going to make it in this game, you really need to work on your Google-fu

If you're on a Windows machine, the presence of a "Program Files (x86)" folder means it's almost certainly a 64 bit machine (I say almost because there's always the chances some crappy bit of software has created the folder itself) A more robust check (without requiring any software) is to type the following in to the command line: echo %ProgramFiles(x86)% If the output is blank, you're looking at a 32 bit installation.

the line 'while True:' initiates an infinite loop ('while' blocks execute until their condition is False, but as True can never be False, it's an infinite loop). To end it, you either need to edit the loop (you could do 'for i in range(0, 10):' to run the loop 10 times for instance) or just remove the loop completely so it only runs through once. Have a look at this website, it'll get you up and running in Python in no time Welcome - Learn Python - Free Interactive Python Tutorial

The import statement ought to be at the start of your script. You seem to have a bit of a weird workflow, generally you use the python shell to try out some commands or when using python as a utility (i.e. to calculate a one off formula) and any code you intend to reuse or debug will be saved as a script. Each time you run a script, you're essentially feeding the commands in to a 'fresh' python shell, whereas typing directly in to a python shell, python remembers. This means if you've somehow previously defined a reference incorrectly, python will remember this until you redefine it (or restart the shell to clear the memory). TL;DR: put your import in your script (first line(s)), save your script then run it from bash (i.e. python myScript.py) EDIT: I'm assuming you're running this over SSH as you mentioned you're using nano to edit scipts - if you have a GUI, it's much easier to use IDLE

This pretty much screams "overheating issue", then slaps you in the face with it. Repeatedly. Anywhere you can put it to get some more air to it?

Yes you're right of course! There's not a fat lot of 'locking down' you can do in Word I don't think - you can prevent editing, but it's an on/off setting if memory serves. The real problem is the screenshots - I don't believe that's possible with PDF forms, whereas it is of course in Word. Problem with Word is I don't believe you can lock things to editing, so there's always the potential for them to screw it up... and Word doesn't exactly play nice with images anyway at the best of times. I'm not helping, am I?! I'll step away now but keep an eye out for something suitable.

You can create forms in Acrobat: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/create-fillable-pdf-forms-acrobat.html However, that's pretty expensive software that your students are unlikely to have at home. I've always been of the school of thought that PDFs aren't meant to be edited (in fact, I save any document as PDF before emailing/uploading it if I don't want anyone changing it), wouldn't Word be a better option here?

Before you replace it, try letting it rebuild it's DB - over time, that can become corrupt and cause funky problems. To do so, go to services menu, on the remote press 0, 0, 1, Select, then choose Rebuild on the menu that shows. In that same menu, there's a system reset option which might help as a last resort (it will wipe your HDD!)

Excel is an excellent analysis tool and flat file database, but using it to write school reports? Bad idea (except in the case of it being used for data entry to be later mail merged in to something more suitable).

This would have been your only real hope I suspect... as the files have been overwritten, it's likely made it impossible for any recovery software to retrieve them (these work on the principle that 'deleted' files aren't actually gone, that area of the storage is just marked as free to overwrite to the OS - by saving over them, the are of storage they already existed in has almost certainly been overwritten with the new versions) Extremely unlikely the school laptop is in any way to blame. Corruption is common on USB drives, particularly when they get repeatedly pulled from drives whilst still in use. So, it may well be corrupted, but it's through misuse, not the laptop's fault. I think the only thing you can do is reinforce the importance of backups and not storing important data on flash drives long term (certainly never have a flash drive store your only copy of anything you don't want to lose!)