dhicks

Yes, I'll be there, along with a chap from the finance team here to make sure I don't accidentally sign up for something that costs lots of money. Assuming we have name badges, mine will most likely read "David Hicks", if that's any help spotting me.

360 degree video is (generally) a standard video file, the video data it holds just happens to be in (most often) equirectangular projection. You just need a video player that handles equirectangular footage - handily, you can now build your own with WebVR (see "day 2" for a simple example): https://risonsimon.com/days-in-vr/ You just need to get the above viewer to work with a password (or whatever) autheticated source of video footage and away you go.

Still images or video? If still images, and if the scene you're taking a picture of doesn't involve too many moving objects (people / vehicles) then the "photosphere" feature on a mobile phone is generally pretty good. For best results place the phone on a tripod with a head that rotates around the camera lens - you can buy them, or cobble something together out of bits of Lego and gaffer tape. If video, how "360" does your video need to be? I use a Kodak SP360 4k, with a 235-degree field of view. That's two-thirds of a sphere, and if whatever is behind the camera isn't changing a great deal anyway you can cheat and simply paste in a still photo (or even a video from the same camera turned through 180 degrees). The quality of the results you'll get from two Kodak SP360's back-to-back depends on the software you are using - getting good stitching results proves to be tricky. The current consumer-end all-in-one solutions haven't got great reviews - they are all limited resolution or have stitching issues. As this is for a one-off, you could hire a camera. Until very recently this would have been quite expensive anyway, but as of this week you might be able to get hold of an Orah 4i, they are now shipping in Europe. Previous "pro" cameras started from around £20,000, but this one is around £3,500, so hiring one for a couple of days might be quite affordable. If you simply want to buy a cheap 360 degree camera, the Ricoh Theta is meant to be pretty good. Lower resolution, but does seem to produce pretty good results, and is very portable and easy to use.

Not quite - SQLite is designed to be compiled into a language compiler / interpetor, so tends to come included in other languages. For instance, in Python just do "import sqlite3" at the top of the file and away you go.

After a discussion yesterday me and our external IT consultant had about possible cloud setups, we might consider Untangle. Seemingly the same software install can run on dedicated hardware (Linksys routers, in particular, I think) or as a cloud install. This would allow us to create a VPN to an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (and also out to a third building we use) all on the same software.

Goodness, no - sorry, I wasn't clear enough about the above setup, the above is simply for fail-over purposes in case of on-site hardware failure. Things like file servers and print servers will still be onsite - we might look at moving the MIS server permanatly off to the cloud, but we'll see how we get on just with a mirror server first. I'd be interested to see if Google's new File Streaming, or any other similar systems, cache any data for read / write purposes locally - I can't see how file access for multiple clients would be practical otherwise.

We are in a very similar position, having hardware from around 2010 - it's trundling along okay, and disk capacity and speed is okay, but at some point it's going to need refreshing. We do have the advantage of a good Internet connection, though - 200mb/s, with capacity up to 1gb/sec should we need it. Hence, my plan is to start replicating functionality off in the cloud. For the moment, that's going to be a VPN gateway and a domain controller to get started with and see what monthly costs are going to be like (I vaguely guess somewhere under £50 for two quite small VMs). Those two server will always be running. Also, at some point, we should ditch the DC and move to Azure cloud Active Directory or whatever, but I'm still working up to that. We'll move shared file areas to Google Team Drives, mirrored to local harddrives, and we'll start moving some backups on to Google Drive. We can then start adding further VMs, but just as fail-over server in case of on-site failure. This means they shouldn't need to be running the whole time, we'll maybe have them start up a couple of times a week to run updates. That's an MIS server (our MIS produces backup files hourly, so on startup the failover machine just needs to get the most recent backup from Google Drive), a file server (mounting Team Drives via Streaming Files). We should also be able to export VM images from our on-site system (XenServer) to a format that AWS will import. We'll do that for our print server and our licensing / AV / updates / etc servers - a backup image taken once a week should be enough. My very rough guess is around £200-£300 in monthly hosting costs. If we feel we need to add additional local capacity then I plan to look at second-user servers, which should be very capable for what we require them for.

We are in a very similar position, having hardware from around 2010 - it's trundling along okay, and disk capacity and speed is okay, but at some point it's going to need refreshing. We do have the advantage of a good Internet connection, though - 200mb/s, with capacity up to 1gb/sec should we need it. Hence, my plan is to start replicating functionality off in the cloud. For the moment, that's going to be a VPN gateway and a domain controller to get started with and see what monthly costs are going to be like (I vaguely guess somewhere under £50 for two quite small VMs). Those two server will always be running. Also, at some point, we should ditch the DC and move to Azure cloud Active Directory or whatever, but I'm still working up to that. We'll move shared file areas to Google Team Drives, mirrored to local harddrives, and we'll start moving some backups on to Google Drive. We can then start adding further VMs, but just as fail-over server in case of on-site failure. This means they shouldn't need to be running the whole time, we'll maybe have them start up a couple of times a week to run updates. That's an MIS server (our MIS produces backup files hourly, so on startup the failover machine just needs to get the most recent backup from Google Drive), a file server (mounting Team Drives via Streaming Files). We should also be able to export VM images from our on-site system (XenServer) to a format that AWS will import. We'll do that for our print server and our licensing / AV / updates / etc servers - a backup image taken once a week should be enough. My very rough guess is around £200-£300 in monthly hosting costs. If we feel we need to add additional local capacity then I plan to look at second-user servers, which should be very capable for what we require them for.

Good point. An idea: the people dealing with figuring out the commonalities between existing systems already are the people making the cloud-based systems like Clever.com. They are creating meta-MIS systems, if you like, with databases that fit data exported from various different systems. We could turn that round again (a meta-meta-MIS...) and create a minimal MIS that supports just the data necessary to sync with various external providors - Clever.com, SalamanderSoft's link to GSuite and similar, Microsoft's new data syncing tool. This MIS wouldn't be anything fancy, and probably wouldn't really be intended for production use, the idea would be to have a test platform to produce data around which we could then build further services.

How does your product compare with Google's newly-announced Drive File Streaming?: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/181218-google-drive-file-stream.html

Ooh - just got a special offer email from CPC: Daily Deals

Can you push it out via the Google Admin Console instead?

Worth checking up on whether planning permission is needed - I seem to remember something being connected up to the mains moved it from "shed" to "extension", planning wise. You could, of course, install solar panels on the roof of the shed instead, if that would power the application you are intending to use.

For the client-side tool(s), there needs to be a "test" mode of some kind that produces dummy data in a predictable way, maybe replacing actual data with data generated by the position of the item or similar. We can't test a system like this with people's actual, real data.

It's not a massive problem, it's a case of running a SIMS report on a regular basis and sending the data somewhere in a secure and auditable fashion. Might I suggest that Clever.com's CSV specification as a good place to start: http://assets.clever.com/documents/clever-sftp.pdf If nothing else, we'll wind up with a data link from SIMS to Clever.com and be ahead of the game for when they get round to operating in the UK. The original poster definatly has a point about making something UK-centric - the specification above has references to zip codes and US-style addresses, which are going to need to be cludged a bit to fit UK-style addresses and postcodes. SalamanderSoft suggest a CSV file containing at least Class Name,Teacher ID,Pupil ID for their system, which the above would seem to cover quite well. The above does not cover daily attendance data, but adding another CSV file to cover that should be do-able. Should we aim for around an hourly update time, do you think?

I don't have recent experience with SIMS as my current school uses a different system, however SIMS doesn't seem to have changed much over the years. In the UK, SalamanderSoft provide tools for extraction of data from MIS systems and for syncing that data with other systems. In the US, Clever.com seem to be aiming to own the market in applications that utilise school's data - it might be an idea to check out those two companies approach. You'll need to keep the database backend (the bit where you can enter details) separate from the emailing functionality. Very few schools are going to want to switch over MIS, they'll want to use their existing MIS and data, but you might get some schools start to try out your tool if they can hook their existing system up easily. I just did a quick search for "dhicks sims", which yielded 80 results - it would seem we first had similar discussions almost exacly a decade ago: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/6076-programatic-data-extraction-sims-net-data-base.html Yes, do please PM me with details about your mailing list.

You'll need to be able to get the data you need from existing sources, i.e. existing MIS systems. You'll need to be able to get data securly from schools systems to your system with some kind of tool. Do you have particular plans for this? If it's any help, I have an account with Positive Internet (UK-based) that you're welcome to use as a test or deployment server.

I can recommend PythonAnywhere as a hosting environment for general Python-based projects, especially Flask-based ones - it takes about 5 minutes to get your code up and running. I'm not quite sure exactly what you aims are, but attempting to write an all-in-one monolithic reaplcement-for-SIMS is not going to work. I think a SaaS provider with a UK schools focus is an excellent idea, although I'm not quite sure what advantage making it a not-for-profit would give it - I figure aiming to undercut existing suppliers and reduce the cost to schools of providing services they need, along with providing good customer support and development of new features, should still leave plenty of scope for making a profit.

Hmm - that's an interesting one. Will the RAID controller see the SSD as a drop-in replacement for the original harddrive? Not sure how to check that one.

I've transferred a number of system over to SSD over the past few years, and I've pretty much always used Acronis True Image, a copy of which comes free with SSDs from Crucial. You simply connect up the new SSD, set the software off to do its thing, wait an hour or two while the data gets copied accross, then switch the devices and boot the computer up again. I've never had any issues - I've not tried it with a server version of Windows, but I don't imagine there's any difference in the process. Acronis handles fiddling around with partition sizes and so on, there's very little you really need to do.

Use a cloud-based storage system? Google Drive gives you free unlimited storage if you're a school.

Something to check: is Expeditions communicating over HTTP (or HTTPS), or is it using a completely different port? Is it possibly using web sockets, i.e. does your proxy support web sockets?

We have rather beefy 48-port, 10 gigabit-capable, PoE-capable HP edge switches around the school - they are a bit on the noisy side. That was a particular problem in a classroom, so we fitted a sound-proofed switch cabinet to put the switch in. The switch seems to operate just fine (it's been running for maybe three years now) and it really cuts the sound level down.

It might be worth investigating in a bit more detail - I'll email at some point. Macs turn out to be really easy - you just replace the user's Documents folder with a link to the place you want it to point to. We currently do this with a login script that redirects to a network drive, if you can mount a Google / Office 365 volume in the first place it should be quite easy.

Can it map user home folders / desktops on Windows (and, when the Mac version is ready, Macs)? So when the user logs in, the files they see in their Desktop and My Documents folders are actually from live Office 365 / Google Drive folders?