srochford

I've never really used Dreamweaver (because it produces horrible code which I could never make sense of!) but key things to look out for are lines which do width="640" rather than width="50%" etc - the latter will resize; the former won't Can you link to/upload what you're trying to do and others might be able to offer more advice. to be honest, most of what I do is reports which are just pretty basic tables of numbers!

It depends on what you're trying to achieve. Good code will just resize; anything else is "bad" code :-) Is there a reason for a fixed size? What are you doing that can't flow? Are you deliberately trying to alienate users who don't have a standard page size (eg those on mobile phones, netbooks, TVs etc)? You can use script to get the size of the browser and then show the appropriate page but it makes lots more work for you (because you will have to maintain a range of page sizes) It's generally a lot easier to use CSS that can just resize cleanly.

Are you sure you didn't create a new GPO doing the same thing? Software installs are tracked by the GUID of the GPO and that won't change so it shouldn't reinstall the software just because you link it somewhere else. I've certainly been bitten because I've deleted the actual object (not just the link) and created a new one.

In principle, there's no problem with extending the range. The problem comes with routing - something, somewhere, needs to know how to get back to your IP range. If all your machines connect to the internet via a proxy then I think the only thing you're going to have to change is the DHCP settings (easy) and then any systems with fixed IPs. If you have a default gateway that takes you out to the internet then the router will have to be adjusted so that it knows the new addresses are part of your range.

If there are any FE colleges or independent schools in your area then they will buy directly from a supplier without using any kind of approved list. They are likely to have their own list of "preferred" suppliers but this isn't fixed and individual purchasing managers (the title may be different) will make the decision. I used to work in FE; I regularly got calls from suppliers of all kinds. I'm afraid that most of the calls were a waste of time but the odd one would come at just the right moment - a regular supplier would be unable to help or would have done something weird (upped prices by silly money, for example) and a new contractor would look like a good idea and I'd recommend them to purchasing. You can also get satisfied customers to recommend you - there are often queries here from people saying "can you recommend a company for X" but that, of course, means you need to have done good work in order to get recommended. Once you do get customers who are pleased with what you've done, it does no harm to ask them to mention your name to other colleagues etc.

The other good think about Joomla is that, out of the box, it gives valid HTML. For a school (which ought to at least pay lip service to the idea of an accessible web site) that's really quite important.

And that's the point - "only if we let it". Sadly, far too many parents do let it (or, probably more accurately) do nothing.

Now, I'm old enough to remember editing graphics without a mouse (PXED on a 380z, anyone?) but doing it without a GUI - well, "respec'" is what I think the young people say :-)

Is this before or after a shower????

Also worth installing Xming - a free X server for Windows; you can then do GUI stuff as well as command line.

I can't quite remember 90 years ago (but sometimes it feels like that :-)) but they basically had books and manuals. If you think about it, even a complete car engine is way less complex than a computer system - it doesn't really have many parts and it doesn't do many things. If it doesn't work then it will be for a very limited number of reasons and you just have a list of things to check and fix. IT is much more difficult because there are so many other things that interact with each other and it becomes massively more difficult to document every possible thing to try. Going back not quite 90 years but well before the internet we did have bulletin boards, Compuserve, Cix and other conferencing systems.

Yes :-) If you possibly can, use a Linux machine as your main machine - you'll find out how to do things because you need to and that's much more of a driver than just working through unrelated tutorials etc. If necessary, keep a windows machine under the metaphorical table and just remote desktop into it. My "real world" project at the moment is MythTV - I must get round to writing up what I've done because I've learned a lot with it.

I think you've missed out great chunks of history that were important (eg what about CP/M) Dave Cutler worked on VAX/VMS and left that to lead the Windows NT team; XP obviously developed from that via Windows 2000 and Cutler is still at MS working on the next generation of software. I don't think it's true to say that Windows is in anyway based on Unix. Yes, there are some ideas which are similar but I really don't think you can go much further than that.

Eeee, you were lucky. When I were a lad ... Ooops! Wrong thread :-)

You can probably change "Linux" to "Just about anything in life" - you can certainly put "Windows", "Mac OSX", "Exchange" and every other IT thing in that category :-)

There's an advert keeps popping up for "webnary" which I'm guessing is a web based dictionary. The only problem is that it spells dictionary wrongly; do you think I should have any confidence in such a dictionary (or am I just stupidly missing the point???)

We use DTP for all our HP printers and MFPs - they work pretty well (although they've just put the mag card reader on a new printer "upside down" compared to the last one and this is causing major confusion :-)) In my last place we looked at leasing but decided the cost wasn't quite right; we were talking to XMA particularly for Kyocera printers (we'd already got photocopiers from another company and we used the Equitrac software. This also allowed us to manage the printer charging)

Are you really saying that you know how to fix every problems and never have to ask anyone else for help? Most of the other people on Edugeek are here because there are things they don't know and they're asking for help! For me, a key thing which marks out a good technician (and I'm not in any way suggesting that the people described on the video are good or bad technicians) is that they recognise their limits and know when and how to ask for help, use the help they're given and learn new things.

err; so was I - hence smiley in my text!

Well, if you're going to have a dig at teachers, let's have a dig at IT people who can't phrase a question which includes anything approaching the correct info :-) - nothing in your original post suggested that you were accepting full URLS and your examples were just host names - nothing included the page etc that might be submitted. You'd go down a storm writing examples for open source docs which are all too often full of this kind of half example!!!

What I started thinking was that you need to make sure that there are at least 2 full stops left before you remove anything - that deals with "google.com" - it has 1 full stop, you don't strip any more. Sadly, it fails with bbc.co.uk - it has 2 full stops so you remove to get co.uk The only thing I can think of is to work back from the end and do an nslookup on each name that you get; once you can resolve, you know you've got a name. eg - you're given Google so you try "com" and it fails; you try "google.com" and it works Not sure how you do name lookups in PHP (I can do it in ASP.Net but that doesn't really help :-)) but I'm sure it must be there (everything else is)

Good news is that the times don't change much from during to after school - that suggests that there's not too much load put on the system. With just one set of readings it's hard to be certain but the difference between the S->J and the J->J readings is relatively small so I don't think the fibre link is the problem. You can work out the link speed; you're moving 550 Mbytes of data in (best case) 70 seconds so that's 550/70 Mbytes/s = 7.86 Mbytes per second or (roughly) 80 Mbit/second That suggests that you've got a 100Mbit/s link both within the junior school and from junior to senior school (your worst case figure is 550Mb in 110 s or about 50Mbit/s - way more than 10Mbit which is the other possibility) I don't think it's a general connection problem; it wouldn't do any harm to put in a faster link but if you can get 50Mbit/s for your session during a busy time then it suggests that there's "spare" capacity on your link. Having said that, of course, if the switches are sometimes failing and needing resetting then it may be that when the switch is OK everything works OK (and you get good speeds) but when the switch is crawling you wouldn't get such good speeds. If you take a machine from the junior school to the senior school (and vice versa), does it work OK? Just wondering if there's something different between the machines?

There's a good summary of the DPA principles on the ICO web site. If you've never read it then it's really worth reading. In essence, if a data subject is told that the data is going to be used in a particular way and that way can be reasonably justified then it's probably legal. For example, it's perfectly legal for a company to say "we will sell your personal details to all and sundry if you tick this box" (although they're not normally quite so blunt!) Playing devil's advocate a bit, what would your attitude be if a teacher wanted to publish a league table for sports results (not just for teams but individuals - times over 100m, for example)? Would you let kids opt out from having the results published? I don't think this is a particularly good idea but kids tend to find out what the others in the class got in any piece of work. I'd say it's extremely common as well for teachers to say things like "that was really good, one of the best in the class" or "that was a disaster; you really need to do better". Is it so different to do this in electronic form?

Key thing about minitel was that the equipment was given out free -this meant it got a really big take up in the early days (wikipedia compares it to Prestel; I'd guess that in terms of technology this is true but in reality Prestel was very poor, often didn't work and had minimal takeup because of the cost) I much prefer text based services; I can read and I don't want the visual distraction that so many other things impose (this site is a good example - essentially most of the content on Edugeek is text but then the whole thing is brought to a crawl by all the pretty gewgaws around the page!)

Take the N9 from Heathrow to Hyde Park Corner and then the N8, N16, N38, N73 etc from there to Victoria. The N9 runs every 20 minutes; the buses from Hyde Park Corner are very frequent. Journey should be about 60-70 minutes. If you don't have an Oyster card then it will be 2 x £2 cash fares or you might be able to get a bus pass at Heathrow for £3.50 Answers to any questions about travel in London can generally be found on the TfL website - Journey Planner is absolutely superb and should be copied by all other public transport organisations!