srochford

WHAT FUTURE FOR BRIDGWATER'S SCHOOLS? - the Conservative MP for Bridgwater arguing that the schools in his constituency should go ahead. I can see his point that the schools need to be replaced but when he was interviewed on the radio this morning he was basically saying "PFI is wonderful - we can build now but pay much later". Isn't this what we're being told has got us into a mess in the first place? It does fit with what Alistair Darling said - not sure if it's true but he claimed that no Conservative MP ever got up in the commons and said "No, don't build a PFI hospital or school in my constituency". They may have been happy to criticise the government but they were never prepared to vote against stuff they felt was needed locally.

Best fill the bottles now and store them safely - the next step after hosepipe bans is turning off the water completely and going to standpipes in the street. Can't remember when that last happened but pretty sure it's in my (very long!) lifetime.

Don't buy any of them - HP drivers are an absolute pile of *&^!" Sorry - having a bad day with HP universal printer drivers - not sure what universe they're supposed to work in but it's not this one :-(

I don't know the situation for UU but for Thames Water the issue isn't really how much they want to invest in doing the work, it's also about the practicalities of doing it. We have a situation in London where there are major road works all over the city caused by water main replacement. We know it needs doing but doing much more of it and we might as well put up "closed" signs round the M25 and all move to the Lake District for the duration :-) It's not helped by the weird attitude of local councils such as mine (Hammersmith and Fulham) who publish a "newspaper" which can have articles bemoaning the water leaks and a few pages later other articles bemoaning the chaos caused by the companies trying to fix them. Add to that the fixation H&F has with trying to stop Thames water fixing sewers and it's amazing anything at all gets done!

Agreed. Add the word "Goodbye", put the phone down, job done in about 10 seconds and life moves on!

If you sent your FoI info to them anonymously then it's likely they hold no personal info about you but you're obviously entitled to ask for the info they do hold. I'm sure we all know why companies are using FoI like this - @BrotherSidious says they could just have sent a customer survey. Well, of course they could (and perhaps they did) but most such things end up in the bin. If you're trying to keep your business successful then you need to use every available method to find possible openings. I'm sure the FoI Act wasn't passed solely for the purpose of helping businesses during a recession but I see no reason why it shouldn't be used like that. I know some people get incredibly worked up about people phoning them trying to sell stuff and I've never understood why - it really shouldn't be a big deal (but I suppose some people just like having something to get upset about - witness all the ranty people on radio phone-ins and TV programmes or look at the Daily Mail etc for ample evidence of that)

It may not help you decide but my (bitter!) experience is that just because a supplier says "we can install a leased line in 30 days" doesn't meant that they really can do that (or get anywhere near that time scale) Of course, FTTC may also not be available by autumn. Have you got more than one company that could possibly provide the leased line service? (Just because it's a BT line doesn't mean you have to get it from BT - Thus frequently undercut BT for a service delivered through the same fibre!)

How to save money on holiday | Money | The Guardian - best rates for money ordered on-line (but you can then collect in a branch) I'd guess as ever it's a case of being careful. If you find a site called "Steve's Super Spends" offering spectacular deals for your cash and without an SSL cert then you should perhaps avoid it :-)

I heard an interesting discussion this morning about the problem. Part of the reason that the north west is having problems is to do with the rock. In London and the south east there is porous chalk so underground aquifers form as the water trickles down through the surface and we can then extract that water even though we don't get much rainfall. In areas of harder rock, the rainfall just runs away (into the rivers and then the sea???) so even though there's more rain, we're not capturing it (and probably can't do so easily) Think I got that right but it sort of makes sense. What we need is the various water companies to employ a huge number of people to build a water grid so we can collect more water and channel it around the country. Benefits would be long term water security and also employing lots of people who currently don't have jobs. Of course, it would cost a vast amount of money with no real impact on increasing profits so I don't suppose it will happen.

I think you should check out some of this week's other news stories about pensions and other conditions of service for public sector employees - I rather doubt that anyone can sit back comfortably and say "Glad that's all over, my job's now safe on its current conditions"

Have you recently installed an OKI printer? If so, it looks like this has messed up somehow. going back to last known good has presumably stopped the driver from loading (and failing) but hasn't completely removed the software and this could be causing the errors you're now seeing in the event log. I think error 0xC0000005 is generally an access denied error - it could be bad permissions on the driver file or it could be that some other process is opening the file and preventing access. You could try uninstalling the OKI printer from the machine (and, if at all possible, never install printer drivers on a DC again) and see if that fixes the problem. You can try using the Kyocera driver deleter (http://www.kyocerasupport.co.uk/dlc/gb/utility/all/Deleter_2_9_2619.-downloadcenteritem-Single-File.downloadcenteritem.tmp/Driver_Deleter2_9_2619.zip) - it will clean up any printer drivers, not just Kyocera. The switches for chkdsk can be found just by typing chkdsk /? at a command prompt. The /r tells it to scan the whole disc, including the bits not used for data to see if there are bad sectors and to try and recover them. The /f tells it to fix other problems (I think /p is the equivalent in recovery mode; not sure why there are 2 switches to do much the same thing??)

Sorry, but that's nonsense! Managed IT services are used by very many "capitalist" companies who wouldn't dream of touching anything even vaguely resembling communism and they find it works well. It's about trying to work out what needs doing and how best to do it - Microsoft, for example, don't do their own IT - they outsource it and (as I understand it) get it done pretty well. It certainly shouldn't be some central diktat saying that "from tomorrow you will do IT like this" but about each school saying "what we have isn't perfect" (however good it is, it won't be perfect) and looking for how it can be done better.

get it to write some logging info: echo starting >%temp%\excelcopy.log time /t >> %temp%\excelcopy.log if exist h:\ echo H drive OK >> %temp%\excelcopy.log if exist h:\project.xls goto copied echo about to copy file >> %temp%\excelcopy.log copy \\server\share\project.xls h:\ echo copied file >> %temp%\excelcopy.log :copied echo finishing off time /t %temp%\excelcopy.log - this should create a log file in the user's temp folder (so check it before they log off otherwise the log will be deleted!) and might help you to see what's going on.

I'm sure this will happen. Possibly not for academy schools (which will have less government control) but for other state controlled schools it seems extremely likely. Outsourcing is used by pretty much every successful (and many unsuccessful!) companies in order to save costs - there's no reason why it can't be used successfully in school IT. Why do we have (say) a network manager and 1 or 2 IT technicians in every school? Why not 1 network/IT manager per group of (say) 10-20 schools, with a few people doing 3rd line, a few more on 2nd line (perhaps based in schools - makes sense to keep them close to end users) and then people to take phone calls/answer emails (who could be in a call centre anywhere) It's not what we're used to but there's no reason it can't work well. The benefit to education is that you save money and (ideally) good ideas get spread across all schools. The benefit to IT support staff is that there's no a decent career structure without necessarily having to move employer. Add in some proper training to that and it looks like a winner (and we'd hopefully have fewer posts on Edugeek from people who appear to be running a school network without the slightest clue about what they're doing!)

jobs.ac.uk has been mentioned. You can get a complete list of unis at UCAS - List of universities and colleges and just pick out those in your area. I work at a university (Imperial College) and while it's a good place to work, it's not a good time to be looking for a job here - we have had a budget cut of about 10% and a good number of people have left. Almost all of those have been contractors who were on fixed terms or people who've got jobs elsewhere but there's no guarantee that we won't be looking at redundancies. I'm afraid most universities are in a similar position (and I suspect some will be worse off)

If you buy HP laptops with webcams then you can use the face recognition bit of Protect Tools to log on etc. (with XP, Vista and Windows 7) Not actually tried it yet (and not sure that I trust it; HP make good hardware but their software is pretty much uniformly dire ...)

I'm sorry, but this is the sort of thing that gives IT Support such a bad reputation! It's not "bad practice" on their part to use a computer in a way which is convenient for them. It's bad practice on your part to not make the effort to set up redirected desktops. In that case, "desktop" just becomes a folder in the user's home directory and causes no logon slow down etc.

I'd be much happier if the source code was posted - I know many people won't be able to read it, won't understand it, won't know what to do with it and just want an EXE file they can run but I think it helps to develop ideas if others can chip in and say "Wow, that's a brilliant way of doing ...", "what about doing ..." or "OMG, why have you done ..." I think this is partly why I like scripting - you basically always distribute source code which people can use as they see fit.

Not sure if it's too late, but Microsoft have an Active Directory Migration Toolkit which will do all of this for you - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=20C0DB45-DB16-4D10-99F2-539B7277CCDB&displaylang=en

I suspect you'd see a bigger difference if you could afford to go to 2Gb of RAM. Very little of what you describe the server being used for is CPU bound but it will use lots of disc access so extra RAM helps with caching. Faster discs would also probably help but they cost big money (and I'm guessing you've not got lots of money to spend given the hardware you've described) Performance monitor is always your friend here - you need to see what's being used and where the bottlenecks are. Check in particular the disc queues; if processes are waiting for the disc then everything slows down. There's some good stuff here Performance Monitoring about perf monitoring. It's written for Windows 2000 but I think it's all still relevant for 2003.

Fill in the first couple of cells Press F5 (Goto) and enter the ref for the final cell Press Shift END and you will highlight from where you are up to the bottom cell which contains data. You can then just use Fill Down to fill the range. If you're filling to the right from where you are then basically the same - press F5, goto the last cell and press Shift END

Would be good to find out why the auditor wants you to change policy. It may well be that they just don't understand your current process - they don't know what "encrypted hard disc" means and they have a tick list which says: "taking confidential data off site?" and a big FAIL next to it. If you can afford a fireproof safe then I'd be tempted to get one and put the backups in it so the auditors are happy but continue taking an encrypted copy off site so that you actually do have access to the data if the school does burn down.

You say that you're going to get a VLE -do you have an idea of timescale? Has an actual product been selected? Installing a basic intranet as you suggest is fine and if it's only ever going to be used for a few notices etc then it would be maintainable as a set of basic HTML pages but if it grows then managing it becomes hard work and something like Sharepoint (either the free version of the paid for one) becomes better (if you've used Linux then Drupal, Joomla etc are also good) If the VLE is still at the stage of "we'd quite like one but we're not sure and we've got no money" then take a look at Moodle. You can install it on Windows or Linux (IIS/Apache; MS SQL/MySQL) and can easily run on a desktop machine while you're learning it. You can set it up with a single, public "course" which would be your intranet but you can also set up subject based courses that people can try out/play with/look at/whatever to get a feel for what a VLE does. Moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning for lots more details and the download.

This isn't easy :-( What you want to do is: Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set oSpecialFolders = oShell.SpecialFolders sMyDocs=oSpecialFolders("MyDocuments") sINI=sMyDocs & "\desktop.ini" scmd="cacls " & sINI & " /e /r administrators" oShell.run sCmd,,true as part of the user login script. What this does is find the location of "my documents" (it will return \\server\users$\username or whatever the redirected location is). It then works out the full path name for desktop.ini and builds a command to run cacls on it. So far, so good ... It all falls over because you'll get "access denied" when you try and run cacls - even though a normal user will have permission to reset the permissions on the file, UAC will prevent this from running. I'd guess what you're trying to do is stop having hundreds of folders all of which appear to be called "documents" so let's change the desktop.ini content so that it does just that - what we want is to make each folder show the user name. Plan B: on error resume next set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") Set oShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") set oNet=wscript.createobject("wscript.network") 'get the name of the logged on user sUser=oNet.username 'find the "mydocs" directory Set oSpecialFolders = oShell.SpecialFolders sMyDocs=oSpecialFolders("MyDocuments") 'and the desktop.ini sINI=sMyDocs & "\desktop.ini" 'delete it if it's there (true forces delete) if ofso.fileexists(sINI) then ofso.deletefile sINI,true 'create it. "True" says overwrite if present - belt and braces! set oFile=ofso.createtextfile(sIni,true) 'write the content oFile.writeline "[.ShellClassInfo]" oFile.writeline "LocalizedResourceName=" & sUser oFile.close I think you could actually stop after the delete statement - you then won't have a desktop.ini and Windows will just show the username for each folder (because that's what the folder is called!) but this just puts in a desktop.ini containing what you want. You could add more - eg you could add an icon, you could look up the user's full name and so on - but hopefully this will work for the basics you need.

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0912&L=WINDOWS-UK&F=&S=&P=56 Gives a couple of methods - the first just sets file permissions to block access to the relevant DLLs (could be done with a GPO). The second is more complex and uses GPOs to disable the controls.