srochford

Ours is here - ICT SLA and KPIs - it's probably got far more than you need but you might get some useful stuff from it!

Now, if you'd added sound, we could try to decide which one sounds better. Not absolutely sure, but I suspect Justin might lose :-)

Just been told we didn't drink enough last night so we have to do it all again today. Life is tough :-)

Some info about complaints and who's worst (npower) - Npower bottom of energy provider league table | Money | guardian.co.uk I've been with British Gas for ages (dual fuel and an internet tariff). For me the prices are good but I use very little gas (and not that much electricity; heating and hot water are provided as part of my service charge) It's easy to submit meter readings online and they also send readers round in the evening and at weekends - much more sensible than during the working day when no-one's at home!

I think you're using VBScript (not VB???) and the error handling is very limited. What you basically do is include an "on error resume next" statement at the beginning, clear the error value before you do "stuff" and then check after each action to see if the error value is non-zero (which means the previous action failed). For example, on error resume next For each objFile In objFolder.Files ' Begin to LOOP through all files in the specified folder and process If objFSO.GetExtensionName(objFile) = "xls" Then Set dbXlConnect = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") err.clear dbXlConnect.Open = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" & objFile.Path & ";Extended Properties=""Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;"";" ' Excel Object connection properties if err.number<>0 then 'an error has occurred sendemail "Couldn't open file " & objfile.path else err.clear Set rstXlResults = CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") rstXlResults.Open strXlSQL, dbXlConnect, adOpenForwardOnly, adLockReadOnly, adCmdText if err.number<> 0 then 'an error has occurred sendemail "couldn't load data for " & objfile.path else 'etc end if end if - first, try to connect to the spreadsheet. Did it work? Yes - carry on; no - send an email. - second, try to create the recordset. Did it work? Yes, carry on; no - send an email. this needs you to have a sub-routine called sendemail which takes as a parameter some text to be sent in the message (in this case info about what you were trying to do and the name of the file you were doing it to)

Grey skies in Kensington. Not warm (but not ridiculously cold). Still odd patches of ice and snow (particularly where it's been heaped up when pavements were cleared) Don't know what all the fuss is about :-)

It's a group policy setting. Details here - Appendix: Group Policy Settings for Roaming User Profiles - the key one is "Exclude directories in roaming profile" - you can put cookies, temporary internet files and temp in here.

That sounds desperately sad - is no-one prepared to share with you any more? I'd offer to put you up but, weather permitting, I'll be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic on the Friday evening. All being well, I'll make a slightly jet lagged visit on the Saturday.

There's a separate issue with the Mac as well that it will print in colour to a colour printer unless you explicitly select mono in the settings (not in front of a Mac now but it's an obvious setting when you go to print). This is a real nightmare because grey scale documents get printed using the mix of colour toners and (eg) Safecom charges for a colour print (because it is in colour!) This setting seems to be a user specific one and we have found no way of forcing it - if someone prints a document in colour because they want it in colour then subsequent documents will also be treated as colour until you explicitly revert back to mono. There may be settings to get round this - most of our Macs are very lightly managed if at all - but it's caused grief when people found they were being charged colour rates for what they thought were mono pages!

I do agree with this and it works up to the point where children will tell their parents about things they're not sure about etc (when my friend's young daughters first started using Google they got some strange results searching for "women dressing up" which lead to "Daddy, why have these women got no clothes on" and a proper discussion). Once you get a bit older than that and you want to look at porn no amount of "tell me if you find something disturbing" is going to help. As you say, however, filtering is much, much more difficult to get right and I think there's little chance of it working. The idea of a .xxx TLD has been floated again and it would be easy to only allow access to that from people who've asked for it but how do you set someone setting up their own personal web site and putting porn on there?

It's on the front page of today's Sunday Times and I think the Aus article you link to is probably the same story (both Murdoch publications and the last line of the story says "The ISPA did not return calls to London's Sunday Times." Not sure how you do this in such a big scale. Smoothwall type approaches are fine for the relatively small organisations like schools but I'm not sure if you can scale them. Blocking by DNS is possible but then takes out huge chunks of the web "by accident" because there happens to porn on the same host as loads of other stuff. There's also the problem of whether it will do what's intended. "She quoted the example of two underage brothers sentenced to at least five years' detention this year for a sadistic sex attack on two other boys in South Yorkshire. The brothers were said to have had a "toxic" home life where they were exposed to pornography." - in this case, I'd guess the parents would have opted in to having porn available so the children still wouldn't have been protected.

Slightly different, but as well as giving away money to charity, Google is also giving away "Chrome" chocolate :-) They've got a big advertising thing going on at Westfield, White City and they were handing out (quite nice!) chocolate tonight.

Probably being stupid (or overly cynical) here but *who* is actually donating anything? Web site says "Install the Chrome for a Cause extension and your web browsing will drive donations made to charities around the world." but it doesn't say who's actually giving the money or how much - it just talks about donating "tabs"

I have seen that happen. Like you, I take an image of the unsysprepped machine - it's then easy to re-sysprep and try again. I've never had it fail twice so I assume it's just one of those random things which are sent to make your life a misery :-)

@mac_shinobi - you really, really, really don't want to change the drive letter after it's installed. Windows will almost certainly fail to boot and you're then into nightmare scenarios of off-line registry editing to get it all going again :-) I would leave well alone - it's just one of those mysteries that happens sometimes (typically, something else grabbed the drive letters before install as others have said. If you have any software which insists on using drive c: then it's just not going to work (although if that happened you might be able to get away with doing a subst C: H:\ before the install starts to bodge it)

I think if that's your attitude, you'll fit in nicely at Apple :-) Personally, I want to be in control of things and hate software which takes care of stuff for me because, invariably, it's not doing things the way I want them :-) (and, no, I do not have OCD :-)) I'd say go for it - if the money's OK it could be a good place to work. As @somabc says, you're not going to get into designing the new iMac working there but I'm sure there is scope for progression and that always looks good on a CV when you decide to move on.

We use Ghost - it works fine. Build your master image and sysprep it and then deploy. At minimu, you'll get a machine that goes through the "out of box experience" once you deploy the image. That's probably not what you want and unattend.xml allows you to specify a whole raft of things which happen (eg we run a script which finishes off the install and renames the computer)

The trouble is that not enough people agree with you about the goodness of this show (eg me - I've never heard of it :-)) so the people who produce the show move on to something they think will make them more money. That's the problem with lists like this; I can look at some of them and think "That was brilliant" and yet for others in the same list I just think "How can I ever get back the time I wasted watching that" and you can pretty much never come up with programmes which everyone is going to like.

Recording stuff from the main UK channels for educational use is fine. Recording other stuff (including most websites) is not fine from a copyright point of view. You can make it easier to get at all the various web TV things - TunerFree MCE looks like a very good addition to Media Center

There's some info here Naming conventions in Active Directory for computers, domains, sites, and OUs but basically, 33 characters is not a technical problem but it could be a problem if people have to type it :-) Are you running Exchange? The presence of Exchange is pretty much a show stopper if you want to rename a domain but otherwise it's doable (but not easy) I'd leave well alone :-)

I'd guess very few people know it because very few people need to know it. I don't even understand it (if you've got a 1-6 travelcard then surely you only pay once however many times you go through those zones ???) The pink readers are also only relevant for people who regularly use the overground and don't go via central London. If you do it regularly then you'll work out what they're for; if you don't then just ignore them - Oyster readers are yellow for about 99.99% (made up random stat) of users :-)

How quickly and does it need to be a caddy? Quite a few HP Elitebooks have just 1 or 2 screws; the old Dell Latitudes used to be the same so it was pretty quick to remove/replace a drive but I think the new ones put everything under the keyboard.

Would it sound like boasting if I said we had 4 complete class B networks (something over 265,000) and it never seems to be enough?

First, rather than reinventing the wheel, you might want to look at Windows Update Agent force script, email results version 2.6 | The I|Toolbox which is designed to give you a scripted interface to the Windows Update process (so you can make updates happen when you want rather than when the local machine decides it wants to do it) If you really don't want to use the built in tools then start looking at places like TechNet Script Center Repository for some ideas. What you want to do is break your task down into several chunks: 1. Check the remote folder to get a list of files in the folder 2. Copy each file in a list to a local folder (need to choose if you're going to overwrite if already there) 3. Get a list of files in the local folder and execute each one in turn (again, do you want to check "have I already processed this?")