srochford

I think this is an excellent idea. As you say, it clearly lays down who makes decisions about allowing/blocking web sites (I'd guess you need another column in your document "allow/deny") and logs who has actually implemented it. The idea of having a review date is good - some sites will have been allowed for a short period (perhaps for a project or something), others will just have folded and the domain reused for porn or whatever. It takes away the "IT is rubbish, they won't let me use the websites I need" etc (well, it probably won't but it gives technical staff grounds to say "this is the way things work - talk to $approver if you want it to be different!") It also gets people used to the idea of change control - things should be stable in a network unless a change is planned! For each establishment you'd need a list of who's allowed to request (anyone including pupils??), who's allowed to authorise and confirm, who can actually make changes. I'd guess you also need guidelines for setting review dates - perhaps default to yearly but if a request is made for (say) the duration of the World Cup then it's going to be much shorter.

If you've got a mortgage then it's likely your personal inflation will be negative, similarly if you spend a lot of money on gas/electricity (which have dropped in price)

Have you thought about using Putty? If you're reading all your switches from a database then it might not help but if you're going to have to type them in manually then you can just build a list of "saved sessions" which include a name/IP address and the fact that you want Telnet (or SSH, RAW etc) Putty can also be launched with the name of a session - eg: putty -load switch01 [/putty]

It might be a wireless problem but he has far more laptops than desktops so he's going to see intermittent problems like this more frequently on laptops than desktops. The DNS settings are wrong so it does make sense to fix them; even if this turns out to be an issue with the wireless network, it does no harm to fix things which you know are wrong.

Something like this will work. First block is your data entry page, second is submit.php I think the only real problem was that you were trying to send multiple chunks in the email and you can't - there has to be 1 item for sender, 1 for subject, 1 for message body, 1 for other headers so what you do is join them together (today's big word: concatenate :-)) and in PHP this is done with the "." The other changes I've done are just a bit cosmetic - the "\t" character inserts a tab; the "\n " a new line. That works nicely in the plain text email but not on the web page so the final bit replaces the \n characters with HTML breaks ( ) One of the reasons I rarely use PHP is that I find it harder to debug than ASP or ASP.Net - the default settings seem to be that the page just completely dies if there are any errors (even just a missing ; right at the end!) whereas ASP etc will run to the error point so at least you've got a fighting chance! Update Info </pre><form name="form1" action="submit.php" method="post"> Student Name: Your Name: Contact Email: DOB of Student: Details to be Updated: Email Address Home Address I am only doing this so that you have to work lots! Please give further details here: Please Provide Further Information Here </form><br><b Thanks Thank you for your information $email = $_REQUEST['email'] ; $studentname = $_REQUEST['studentname'] ; $parentname = $_REQUEST['parentname'] ; $studentdob = $_REQUEST['DOBStudent'] ; $needforchange = $_REQUEST['dataforchange'] ; $furtherinfo = $_REQUEST['furtherinfo'] ; $body=$body."student:\t".$studentname."\n"; $body=$body."DOB:\t".$studentdob."\n"; $body=$body."Reason:\t".$needforchange."\n"; $body=$body."Info:\t".$furtherinfo."\n"; $headers="From:".$email; mail( "[email protected]", "Parent Update Form",$body,$headers) ; echo str_replace("\n"," ",$body); ?> This has now been submitted

Don't think unplugging will be a problem - that only seems to occur if you plug a device into a different USB socket. Given that pupils will only be able to get at the scanner end, the reconnect should be fine.

It's always going to be difficult when you can see big money being spent on "projects" but no money for even minor pay rises. You then get told "ah, yes - but that's capital funding and we can't use it for salaries" and at that point I get ready to explode; why can't we move money between the pots?? I think (and I don't know - it's just speculation) that it's often easier to find money for a project because it's just a one off. If you give someone a pay rise then you have to pay it this year, next year and for ever more (and you probably have to pay another pay rise and so on) Even a pretty small pay rise costs a lot of money across everyone who gets it. Suppose you give 2% to every one and they have an average pay of £20,000. I think there are about 5000 secondary schools in the UK and lets say that they employ about 75 people each. That pay rise costs £150 million pounds which is quite a lot of money. Scale this up to all public sector employees and you're spending a very large amount of money which I'd guess is one reason why politicians start calling for a public sector pay freeze.

I really like the VM idea - I can't see why it wouldn't work (but that doesn't mean it will!) I'd definitely try it - it would be quick to set up a machine with a couple of VMs and connect a couple of scanners. Once you know the technique works you can then look at using USB extenders. Again, for the distance you're thinking of, I think it ought to work.

Has it ever been different? Sure, interest rates have been higher so you get more interest credited each year but if inflation is also higher then you're no better off. The whole way the savings market works is that I lend my money to the bank. They then lend it to someone else who pays x% interest. The bank keeps some fraction of that and gives me (x - a bit)% interest. The only people that win are the banks because of that "bit" they keep.

Dell Outlet currently have a load of 10" Inspiron netbooks at approx £150 (160Gb drive; 1Gb RAM; Windows 7 starter) I don't seem able to make a direct link but "outlet" is linked from the bottom of their home page.

It's interesting to look at MPs pay over the past 30 years and see how it changed under the Conservative and Labour governments. Between 1979 and 2007 it went from £9,450 to £43,860; it now stands at £64,766. There were some massive increases under Margaret Thatcher - the first 2 years alone saw an increase of 50%. Under the Labour government no year has had an increase of more than 6.5%; most are 1% to 2.5% Of course, a lot of MPs claim the infamous second home allowance but they were also introduced by Thatcher; they've just become rather more public in the recent past! (figures from http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M05.pdf)

Looks as if the "attractive" zebra and leopard patterns are not available in the UK which is a shame. I did, however, find The Snuggie Sutra but be warned it's a bit NSFW :-)

Comparing budgets like this seems a bit pointless! If I know that school A gets £25k but school B gets £50k I can't say which is better off without knowing how many pupils and the current state of the setup! It's "nice" to get told at the start of the year that you can spend X thousand pounds but I think it's better for everyone if you have a long term plan - eg we will replace every desktop computer every 5 years, every laptop computer every 3 years. Over the next 5 years we will upgrade to 10Gbit backbone and 1Gb to desktop. We will replace all servers every 3 years etc etc Doesn't particularly matter what the actual plans are (they'll be different for most places) but planning like this means that the IT people can make long term plans as can the finance people. It also clearly establishes the fact that IT does need ongoing expenditure - 30 years after IT started going into schools I think there are still governors who haven't twigged that you have to keep replacing and upgrading IT kit!

That's quite a nice idea but it needs more info. I don't know how many councils make parking info available in a form that a site like this can use but that would really help - at the moment it says there is no street parking or meters both where I live and work but there are both.

Some books may have been checked for accuracy but unless it's some kind of academic text book I really wouldn't assume that it's any more or less accurate than the stuff you can find randomly searching the web. This is particularly true in areas like politics where most of the content is opinion (you can be reasonably sure that it is the opinion of the author but that doesn't make it accurate!) but there are plenty of other books which are the view of one person (or one group of people) - the Bible and the Koran spring to mind but there are plenty of others - the Food Doctor is one where you might think that the content is fact but plenty of people would disagree. The critical thing with any source of information is to try and assess who is writing it; Wikipedia loses out because its content is basically anonymous but there are plenty of websites where you can identify the author and you can find out whether their opinion is generally respected and trusted.

OK; the solution is obvious and I'm amazed that the Daily Express hasn't published this yet. It's all the government's fault (obviously; everything is the fault of this incompetent, corrupt, insert adjective of choice, government) so they should fix it. Instead of wasting money on parliamentary expenses we should get escape lanes built on every road. This serves multiple purposes; it makes our roads safer (particularly from paedophiles - they're bound to be there somewhere) and it gives jobs to all the unemployed. There's quite a nice escape lane here Rural Roads - Exmoor Coast - Lynton and Lynmouth but that might be bigger than we need everywhere. I'm sure we could find British engineers to do a better job!

Something like this will recurse the folders and process them. I use this to transcode files on my media PC from .ts to .mp4 but the principle is the same - you'll just need to get the right ffmpeg line! It assumes you're going to convert files under C:\recordings - I'd guess yours will be something like d:\homedirs\year7 It writes a log to c:\temp\transcode.log It assumes you want an mp4 file - change the line at the top to whatever it needs to be It looks for .ts files to transcode; change that to whatever extension you're transcoding from. There's a commented out line at the end to delete the input file; I really, really wouldn't do this - YMMV but I find ffmpeg often fails to complete the transcoding. You're then left with a zero byte output file and no input file if you auto-delete. (I think the problems I have is because the MPG2 transport stream that you record from Freeview is not perfect so this may not be a problem for you) const sLog="c:\temp\transcode.log" const sExtension=".mp4" const sRecordings="c:\recordings" set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") if not ofso.fileexists(sLog) then set oLog=ofso.createtextfile(sLog) else set oLog=ofso.opentextfile(sLog,8) end if set oFolder=ofso.getfolder(sRecordings) for each osubFolder in oFolder.subfolders for each oFile in oSubFolder.files Encode oFile next next for each oFile in oFolder.files encode oFile next oLog.close sub Encode(oFile) sExt=lcase(oFso.getextensionname(oFile)) if sExt="ts" then sTitle=ofso.getbasename(oFile) sInput=oFile.parentfolder & "\" & oFile.name sOutput=oFile.parentfolder & "\" & sTitle & ".mp4" if not ofso.fileexists(sOutput) then oLog.writeline now & "~" & sTitle sCmd="c:\utils\ffmpeg.exe -i """ & sInput & """ -b 384k -s qvga -r 25 -aspect 4:3 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libfaac -ab 112k -ac 2 """ & sOutput & """" oLog.writeline sCmd oShell.run sCmd,,true 'this line is destructive!!! 'ofso.deletefile sInput,true 'the line above is destructive!!! end if end if end sub

The FE college I used to work in found that book use increased substantially when they put computers in the library (Learning Resource Centre) Students would come in to use a computer to find info for coursework etc, get stuck and ask for help. Sometimes the LRC staff would point them at a relevant web site but often they'd point them to a better book. The critical thing here is that the book stock was relevant. Can't remember the exact numbers now but an average public library only lends about 20% of its stock in any year; this college library lent every book more than once. The LRC staff were also involved in getting content into the VLE (Moodle) and making sure that it worked well - I think the future for education libraries that you have a mix of "traditional" and "modern" media and staff who are comfortable with all of it. I think one real advantage of a book is that you can't just copy and paste and say "job done" - you actually have to read it, find a bit you think is relevant and write it out. Even if you end up just copying out a paragraph, at least you had to read it in the first place.

Denver is South of London :-)

There's no problem with Excel loading data from an Access database when it opens. On the data tab in Excel just click the "from Access" button, browse to your DB, select the query containing the data you want and job done. Each time you open Excel it will prompt you to see if you want to update the data from the linked source. You could do it from Excel. You could have a form with a button on it, when you click the button it runs an export to Excel. Not sure I understand what you're trying to do. Do you want the Excel sheet to open so that it can be filled in on screen? If so, what happens to the data once its entered - it won't be easy to get it back into the database if that's the idea. If you're going to print out paper forms then an Access report is probably easier (and will be "live" each time its run) If you just want to fill in on screen, you could just use a query in Access to select the correct group of people and then link a form to that - the form can have a mix of labels for fixed data (name etc) and text boxes where you can enter data. Hope that gives you some ideas to get started!

Utterly changing the topic but the whole "it might be dangerous, we should run away" is completely maddening! Yesterday we had a reasoned report saying that people with depression are often big users of the internet. It explicitly said that they didn't know whether people got depressed because they use the internet or if depressed people were drawn to the web. Metro headline pretty much said "we're all doomed if we go on the web" Today we have Toyota. There's a problem with the accelerator on some Toyota cars. So far there are just 26 reported problems in Europe and, as far as I can see, none has been serious. Reading some of the reports, you'd think that every Japanese car was about to run amok and attack us all!

Probably shouldn't mention it here, but this is one of the areas where I think BSF and managed service providers will be expected to save money. Currently, every school sets up its network in an ideal way and gets it matching the exact requirements of the school. In principle, this is a really good thing. It's also a really expensive thing. If you say that every school in an LEA (or whatever grouping) is doing basically the same thing and needs basically the same network then instead of each school spending 2-3 days getting GPOs etc just right, you do it once per area (or, realistically, once per BSF provider) That saves money. Does it provide a better service? Does any politician or newspaper leader writer care as long as it saves money for "hard working taxpayers"? Discuss :-)

Maybe a stupid question, but have you run out of disc space? Error reporting shouldn't be running - it's the thing which deals with sending reports to MS after blue screens etc. Could the permissions be messed up? SYSTEM needs full control pretty much everywhere and if it hasn't got it then I'd expect weirdness (but no idea how that could happen!) Bad news about the backups. Do you have more than 1? If you could get a working server back from one of them then you could perhaps get data off the current machine (although without networking it's harder but you should be able to just add it as a second drive to the working VM)

The news article says that the council has a 35% share in the company and the company expects to make money. It seems likely that they will make money so they should get back their initial investment. Assuming that they do make money then this seems financially like a good idea.

Err; no???? 20 minutes per machine is not 3 per hour unless you're only doing them one at a time! I know there's a bit where you have to type stuff when the machine is starting and you can probably only type on one keyboard at a time (unless you take your shoes and socks off!) but I would have said that bit takes about 5 minutes so you ought to be able to start about 10 machines per hour and complete 20 in about 2-3 hours.