srochford

It's not just governments who spread FUD. After the Cumbria train crash in 2007, Carol Vorderman was being interviewed (think it was a review of the papers thing) and made some stupid comment about how dangerous train travel had become. If a woman who is supposed to be good at maths can't see the basic stats involved, what chance has anyone else got!

In a batch file you can test for a program running like this: @echo off tasklist | find /i "excel" > nul if errorlevel 2 goto problem if errorlevel 1 goto notfound if errorlevel 0 goto running :problem echo find didn't work goto end :notfound echo Excel not found goto end :running echo running :end tasklist gives a list of running processes; that's then piped through find to look for a particular process and the result redirected to nul (so no text on screen) If the string is found then errorlevel is set to 0; if the string is not found it's set to 1; if find fails for some reason then you get error 2 Still probably easier with VBScript - what I tend to do is something like ChrisH suggests: sCmd="""C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\pn.exe"" & "" /APP Desktop""" wscript.echo sCmd oShell.run scmd - this allows you to see what's going to be run and you can adjust quotes till you get them right!

Now you're giving a bit more necessary info :-) Your connection string of "localhost" made me think you had MySQL and the webserver running on the same machine. When you're experimenting, this is by far the easiest way to do things - you then don't have to consider what other people might have done on their server etc. If you want MySQL on your own machine but the web site hosted on another then, as Kim says, you'll need to open port 3306 on your router (possibly a bad security idea!) and the connection string will need a fully qualified name (mypc.somedomain.com) Getting it all set up in the first place can be a bit fiddly; one of the easiest ways to do it is to get a pre-built virtual machine - a quick google finds this Virtual Appliances -> Products which has images that will run on VMWare or Virtual PC/Server (all free) and I'm sure there are others. Using the VM has a few advantages - it will work immediately; it doesn't involve any risk to your own machine and when (not if!) you mess things up on the server, you just delete the VM and put in a new copy. Good luck!

It's a pretty amazing loss leader! Selling a loaf of bread at a loss is generally not going to lose the supermarket money - people don't go just to buy the bread, they buy other things as well and may end up spending even more than they intended. Selling a PC at (say) £150 loss seems a bit extreme - you've got to buy an awful lot of beans to make up for that :-)

Unless you've changed things, you can't lock out the administrator account (SID ending -500) - I think that this is done in part to protect you against DOS attacks. There are lots of other things a user could do get prompted with a username/password box - just try connecting to the admin share on a remote machine, for example - and a malicious user could lock out any account with this (not just administrator accounts) Changing the number of bad passwords allowed before an account is locked out can be a good idea. I've read suggestions that you can set it to a huge number (>100) - this is the sort of number which will defeat an automated attack (just going through an entire dictionary) but won't cause a problem for a user who's forgotten their password and is trying each of the passwords they regularly use and will probably also mean a "bad" person will get bored before the account locks out. Any changes that users can make (eg display settings) should be specific to that user; logging on as another user will get things back to normal and if your users have mandatory profiles then even their personal changes will be cleared up at logoff.

The reason you think MySQL looks like DOS is because I'd guess you're using "raw" SQL commands ("insert into" "select username, surname" etc type things) This is kind of why you have web sites - they give you the GUI, the PHP (or ASP, ASP.Net etc) then generates the relevant SQL commands and executes them. Given the list of technologies that you've seen requested, I'd probably start with Visual Studio Express - it's free and the download includes SQL Express. Working with databases in this is very, very easy - in some ways, it's too easy because you're sheltered from the need to learn T-SQL but that can always come later :-) As Kim says, if you can think of a project that you'd like to build, that's always the best way of getting started (looking at tutorials gets pretty boring after a while :-))

You need to make sure that your script tries to change HKCU - users can change that and when Explorer wants to open a file it checks HKCU before HKLM to see what app to use. This is quite good; it means that user X can use Fireworks to open JPG etc but user Y can use Paint and so on.

Probably simpler to just use the fingerprint reader!

Hope it all turns out OK. For general info, do you know this web site: Traffic England - Motorway Traffic Flow - it will show you the state of any motorway including speed and the various overhead signs.

Just picked up on this thread and saw the bit about rushing off to Google without letting the user know. Using Google (or other resources such as Edugeek and other web sites) is absolutely not something we should hide - if everyone knew how to use this kind of resource then there might be fewer of the "easy" questions asked. There's something of an air of mystery for many people about IT and there doesn't need to be - the internet has made it so easy to find the answers to lots of questions. Of course, the big thing is knowing the question to ask and that's one of the things which marks out a good technician.

One way round this if the problem is basically Word (and it probably is!) would be to create a macro to replace the default save command - this could then prompt for a name and not allocate a default or just suggest something shorter.

Just been installing a box with Mythbuntu and hit a few problems so I thought I'd post what I did to get it to work in the hopes that other people having similar problems will find it useful. The first was a DLink DWA140 wireless adapter which is wrongly detected. Adding #dlink dwa140 wrongly detected blacklist rt2x00usb blacklist rt2x00lib blacklist rt2800usb to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf sorted that. Next problem was the TV cards; I've acquired several over the years and I was trying to use a Nebula and a Hauppauge. The latter worked fine; the Nebula just doesn't work - many, many error messages in dmesg. Some googling suggested this is a known regression issue from about 2 versions ago but the latest kernel is supposed to fix it. Couldn't download that from package manager (probably just me being incompetent) but I found this web site HOWTO: Kernel Compilation for Newbies - Ubuntu Forums with details on how to compile a new kernel. I've never compiled a new kernel before but that just means there's a learning experience ahead :-) I download the source from The Linux Kernel Archives, followed the instructions, waited an hour or so for it to compile and (drum roll) it now all works :-) Still got to get the remote working but quite pleased with it.

The tube to Olympia is often heaving when there's a show on (particularly something big like Bett!) The other alternative is to get a bus from Euston - come out of the station and cross the main road. Get the 10 bus which will take you to Olympia via Oxford Street, Park Lane, Knightsbridge and Kensington so if you're on the top deck you can do some sight seeing as well! You need to buy your ticket before you get on the bus; there are machines at the bus stops and it costs £2 (you could also get an Oystercard if you want to do some exploring; you'll then pay a max of £3.90 for any bus journeys) If you want to take a less crowded tube, come out of Euston Station, turn right and walk about 5 minutes to Euston Square. Take the Hammersmith and City line to Hammersmith (end of line!) and then either walk to Olympia (about 10 minutes) or get a bus (there are several; 27 from right outside the tube station but others just round the corner)

rsync has a switch "-n, --dry-run" to show what would have been transferred - you can use this safely to see what's going to happen; if it shows the right files being copied the right way then you just run it without the switch and all is well.

In the US you can get a replacement disc for $15 but it looks like that's not available in the UK Nintendo customer service link is here: Support - Nintendo I would hope that they would let you have a disc for just the handling costs - you can't be the only person with children who destroy the discs :-)

Just add this code: user.passwordexpired = 1 'password needs to be changed now user.setinfo after the "call user.setpassword" line @maniac - the ldap browser idea won't help here - it will tell you that the property is pwdlastset but because @bart21 is using the WinNT provider it won't work. Why Microsoft chose to use different property names for essentially the same purpose with the different providers I don't know; it's just one of those things which makes life a misery :-)

It's nearly twice minimum wage (which is not to say it's a good wage!)

What distance is there between the 2 closets and how easy is it to run cable? If there's a good route then the cheapest option is to do it yourself. You can buy pre-terminated fibre which you just pull through, screw on to a patch panel and job done :-) Videk sell the fibre - Videk Online - I'm guessing they won't ship to CT but there are loads of companies that do it.

Only teasing :-) Although I've spent nearly 25 years in London I'm well aware that the best bits of the country are way north of here so I'll be spending Christmas and New Year in Lancaster, Northumberland and Liverpool. PS - are you sure that there's anything south of London??? :-)

Are you sure?? I know there are whippets and grim factories and coal mines and stuff, but is there really life?? :-)

that's a good idea actually. Scheduled tasks have to run under an account but it won't be the logged on user. If you were just querying something on the local machine that's no problem - there are WMI calls which will tell you who is logged on and let you get info about their folders on the local machine but I'm not sure if you can get info about remote folders. I'd guess you could spawn a task as you log on which runs in the background and every x minutes does the necessary.

Agreed, but the problem is that even teetotallers could have some alcohol in their blood stream for all sorts of reasons. If you set the limit at zero you could have people being penalised when they've done nothing wrong. I think Grumbledook's comments are right; many people who drink and drive do it after leaving a pub etc when lots of people will have seen them and done nothing about it.

I suspect the problem will be proving that it wasn't his fault - the insurance company will take a default permission that it was his fault. I'm guessing there might be evidence on the road that another driver was involved but it may not be enough to prove that they caused it. Given that, and given that there is no knowledge of the other drivers, the insurance company will just say "must have been your fault; tough" I hate insurance companies; I've had very few claims over the years but it's always hard work dealing with them and I always feel I'm being ripped off every time I renew.

Do you have an existing 3 year plan? If so, it's a case of looking at that and saying things like "we'll make desktops last 4 years instead of 3 years", "won't replace TFT monitors at all unless they fail" and so on - this means that you saying what you can cut rather than someone coming in and saying "no spending on IT and, by the way, we need XXXX new doing as well"

The best is definitely the comments from all the people who are taking it seriously!