mitchell1981

I listen to a few and my selection is defintely on the geeky side: PC Pro Podcast Dr Who Podcast Friday Night Comedy Waffle On Podcast - Talking about old TV shows from the 80s and stuff like that Engadget IT Idiots - Actually a video, but can be listened to Stuff.tv - Gadgets and stuff and you can't beat a bit of Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, although they have stopped for now.

I have recently completed a redesign of our website which was looking a bit tired. I've tried to make the regular updates as easy as possible, hence there is a twitter feed on the front page in a widget from a website called WidgetBox. Also, our main news pages, and sports pages, are actually an embedded Wordpress blog. This means that we can give over control of these elements to non-technical staff who can do most of the updating themselves, without risking destroying the whole website! Take a look at: Mascalls Website PS - It looks pretty rubbish in IE6, but I've been keeping an eye on our stats and only 4% of our visitors still use it so I'm not going to make too much of an effort to sort it out.

Thanks for the suggestions. I fiddled around with this for hours but couldn't get it to look right. However, I did stumble accross the solution: Add this to the CSS and it fixes the layout: -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; Unfortunately it won't validate, but it does the job. It basically turns off the text rescaling options on the iPhone and other webkit browsers.

Hi All, Sorry, another question about my new website! Does anyone have much knowledge of how an iPhone renders text on a webpage? I realise that the screen size is a lot smaller, but I would have thought that the easy zooming capabilities would mean that it should render text in exactly the same way as a desktop browser, however, I seem to get far fewer words per line when my website is displayed on the iPhone. See attached screenshot: http://new.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/iphone.jpg And this messes up my layout! I know that my layout should be able to dynamically cope with this, but I'm still learning CSS. Is there a way to force the way the text is rendered so that I get the same number of words per line on any device? At the moment I'm using the "em" method of font sizing. Should I use normal font sizes instead? Here is a link to the website so you can see how it renders in a normal browser. Thanks.

Think I can live with that for now! Thanks!

My front page is now completely recoded from scratch and them split into SSIs afterwards. Everything is much neater now, all the links that I have set up are working, and the code validates with W3C. http://new.mascalls.kent.sch.uk Ready to do the rest of the site now. It's going to take a while as the school website is huge! Thanks for all the help. I still find CSS relative positioning quite infuriating, but I know a lot more about it than I did a few weeks ago! Tom.

Thanks for all the help. I'm going to start it from scratch and follow everyone's advice and see how it goes. It should be easy now I've got all the graphic elements sorted. Will post my improved code once it's finished!

Thanks abullett. Yes, this is my first attempt at web design using SSI and CSS, so I'm working it out as I go along and probably not very neatly! I like your idea of getting it all working and then splitting it up. Wish I'd done that. Might start from stratch on it. My big problem was getting everything to stay relative to the centre of the page and not the top left. I stole some code from someone else who said the only way this could be done was to include a centered wrapper on each page, and stick everything inside it, but I suppose that gets far more complicated when you've got multiple pages using SSI. Should I get rid of all header information on my includes, and remove the centreing stuff? Thanks for your advice, and if you know an easy way to make the positioning relative to the centre then let me know!

Good point. I'll give that a try. The only reason they are there is becuase I've been using 'Server Side Includes', so it is effectively four pages combined into one. I will take the html, and body tags out of the content pages and see if it makes any difference. Thanks.

I'm working on a redesign of our school website. This time I'm doing it properly, trying to learn CSS as I go! So far only got the first page working but it looks ok, certainly compared to the old website! Mascalls Website I've just got one silly problem which I can't work out, but is probably something simple. I've created a basic html link to our Prospectus which is a pdf. The link works in IE, but not in Firefox and I'm not sure why. Could anyone take a look at my source code and tell me what I've done wrong. Usually setting up links is the easy bit! (It's line 53 in the source code, and the link is on the 'Prospectus' button at the bottom of the menu on the right) Thanks, Tom

No problem, I've worked it out. I didn't realise that ADMX files in a central store don't update automatically. I had to copy the files from the: Windows\PolicyDefinitions folder to the Policy Definitions folder in the central store and then all my policy templates updated.

I want to disable InPrivate Browsing in IE8. I am reliably informed by serveral websites that the GP setting is located here: User Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Internet Explorer / InPrivate However, when I go to this location I don't get the InPrivate options. I'm assuming this is a problem with my admx files or something like that. I am running Server 2008 R2, so I would think these setting would be there by default. Can anyone suggest what might be wrong? Thanks.

Have you looked at any of the government schemes? I've just bought a house on a scheme called New Build Homebuy. Basically you buy a percentage and rent the rest (at pretty good rates). I got a brand new house priced at £165,000 which is reasonable in this area, and I pay about £300 mortgage and £200 rent. I own 25% of the house, but can increase the percentage at any time. Obviously if you do that then the mortgage goes up and the rent goes down. I only had to find a 10% deposit on 25% of the value so £4125. I think this is a good way to start if you are a first time buyer. I could afford this on a single wage although I am a network manager.

We've had some serious problems with reports since the upgrade. We've reported it to Serco and they confirmed that at least one other school had the same problem. Basically any report with graphics on (photos, logos etc..) will not print properly. Random stuff will be missing from the report. Strangely, the reports will always print preview ok, but not actually print. It's caused us lots of problems as we rely heavily on reports and most include a logo. Anyone else got this problem so far?

Is he only doing Manchester, or is it just that these are the only dates he has release so far? Would like to go, but that is a bit of a long trek!

Yes, you need the IIS6 compatibility stuff installed. Took me a while to work this out, as the help files don't seem to refer to server 2008 at all!

Hi, Just wondering what people think of the libraries feature of Windows 7 and are you going to use it in your deployments for students? It is a useful feature for home and personal use, but I'm not really sure how it would work out in the classroom. Is it possible, for example, to include a network share of photos, in every students pictures library? Is anyone who has already deployed Windows 7 making use of this feature?

Hi All, I now have all our servers moved over to Windows Server 2008 R2, and all is good. Our backup software was incompatible so I thought I would experiment with Windows Server Backup and actually, for most of our servers it is great. It's really simple to use and dead easy to restore from. Obviously not much good for Exchange or SQL but for basic file servers it seems to do the job. Only thing I can't work out is how it decides whether or not to do a full or incremental backup (it is all automatic). We have two very similar servers set up. Both just file servers sharing two volumes. On one server, WSB does a full backup of each volume each time. On the other server it has done one full backup and then followed it up with incrementals. The second scenario is what we want. Anyone got any idea how it determines which type of backup to do? Both servers are configured exactly the same as far as I know and both are running VSS on their shares. Thanks. http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/full.jpghttp://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/inc.jpg

Yes, I think the scheduled install is probably the only option. It would be nice to have the choice of manual reboot though. Thanks.

Ideally I want to avoid any automatic reboot as a couple of our servers have issues where services do not always restart correctly after a reboot, but a weekend reboot would be preferable to a reboot during the school day so I might configure this. Thanks.

I've set up a WSUS server and all is working ok except for the reboots! Basically I want the servers to update from the WSUS server, but not the reboot at all, until I manually do it myself. Is this possible? I've set the group policy to: No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installation - Enabled Now, I don't know if I'm being stupid, but that sounds like it should stop the machines from rebooting automatically. I set this up today, and then disaster struck when all the servers ignored this setting and all rebooted within 5 minute of each other! Caused a bit of chaos and I've turned off the automatic updates again. Anyone know how to do this? Surely nobody wants servers to reboot automatically?

Hi All, Keep getting this message for this user. It only happens when certain other members of staff send her a message. All the other members of staff are using full Outlook 2007. Web Outlook is working fine, and she is getting most of her mail. Everything seems correct on the server. Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists: Louise Pettifer The recipient's e-mail address was not found in the recipient's e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator. If I click the link in the e-mail it shows the following details: IMCEAEX-_O=MASCALLS_OU=First+20Administrative+20Group_cn=Recipients_cn=Pettifer@mascalls.kent.sch.uk Anyone got any ideas why it would keep doing this? Thanks.

Thanks for suggestions. Turns out that the problem was that the groups were global groups, but needed to be universal groups. Not quite sure what difference that makes, but it fixed it anyway. They now all appear in exchange.

No one got any ideas? If this is not possible with 2007, how do other schools stop students sending messages to all staff, all students etc.. Do you restrict using the maximum recipients options?

We have recently upgraded from Exchange 2003 to 2007. We have distribution lists (security groups) set up for each year group in the school. We allow staff to send mail to year groups, but we don't allow students to send mail to the whole year group for obvious reasons. This worked fine in Exchange 2003, and the mailboxes have moved over with the correct settings as shown in this screen shot of the 'Mail Delivery Restrictions' box. http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/mail1.jpg However, I've tried to do the same with the newly created year 7 group, and the dialogue box will not let me add in the staff group (or any group) as an allowed group. All I see is a list of individual users. http://www.mascalls.kent.sch.uk/mail2.jpg Anyone know what's going on? Thanks.