SteveBentley

I think flash/hard drive is getting more common for news where the fast turnaround is a huge benefit. Also many new build media facilities are "tapeless" - I think BBC Scotland's new(ish) Pacific Quay in Glasgow is an example.

You do realise that .com is a worldwide TLD and not the American domain it is widely considered to be, and under your scheme we should all be doing searches on www.google.mountainview.ca.us

I'd agree with what you say, but it means buying two new camcorders and binning a perfectly serviceable one...

The way I read it, the students won't be using this particular camcorder, but the requirement for the new camcorder is to use the same tapes as the old one so that it can be used to transfer students' recordings while other students are out doing filming with the old one.

Just a thought - what type of photography are you going to be doing with the SLR? And who will be doing it? If it's just point and shoot stuff by somebody who doesn't know how to get the best out of the camera and use it creatively, you might find a mid to top end bridge camera is a better purchase.

I'm very happy with my Sony A200, although depending on who is using it in a school it's maybe a little plasticy and less well built than some of the more expensive cameras. As to the upgrade path on lenses, the Sonys are compatible with old Minolta AF lenses and I can't see them changing that in the future. Flickr's camera finder can be a useful tool, so you can get hold of real world photos taken with the camera you're proposing to buy and see what it can do Flickr: Camera Finder

I think it's the -- before root that is doing it "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin\mysql.exe" -u root --password=MYPASSWORD logintracker < C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\logintracker\logintracker\logintracker.sql You only need those quotes where there are spaces in the path.

I realise this is a first bit of code but it's important to point out that you should never, ever, ever pass anything from your users straight into a database query like this, because this is how SQL injection happens. Somebody could come along and tell your form that their name is ';delete from users where 1;' or some other nice trick which lets them pass an arbitrary SQL query to your database. There is a function mysql_real_escape_string() which you can pass all user provided information through and it will sanitise it so it can't do any damage. So adding this before the query (or at the start of the script) will make it much safer: $_POST[firstname]=mysql_real_escape($_POST[firstname]); $_POST[lastname]=mysql_real_escape($_POST[lastname]); $_POST[age]=mysql_real_escape($_POST[age]);

The syntax for giving the pasword has to be --password=xxxxxxx when using it non-interactively. -P just means prompt for a password.

The prescription goggles are only a very approximate prescription. I'd have thought the prescription polaroid sunglasses would be more likely, just polarise each lens at 90 degrees to the other.

With a lot of these capture devices it's often crap software that lets them down rather than the hardware. My (admittedly out of date) experience is that you'll never fully uninstall Hauppauge's software but it will keep a lock on the capture device so no other software can access it, and Pinnacle's isn't good at keeping audio and video in sync over longish recordings.

When I flooded the engine on my car I had the embarrassment of calling out the breakdown service I'm a member of, whose mechanic simply turned the key and it started! He did say that it was better to have done that than carried on trying myself and flattenned the battery or burned out the starter motor. And his advice "take it for a long run out" was a good excuse to visit a particularly good Indian takeaway on the other side of town!

You'll have made a claim in respect of the damage to the third party's wall, assuming they decide to persue it.

Huddersfield is under black ice, buses are suspended and although I live on a main road and could have driven in, it took half an hour to chip the ice off half the windscreen (the de-icer was freezing on contact!) I've gone for the "phone work and take a day's annual leave and sit and watch crap daytime telly" approach. Apparently the road between one of the main student halls and the Uni is blocked due to the ice, so the place will be quiet today anyway.

From the local rag Huddersfield Examiner - News - Local West Yorkshire News - Schools staff in Kirklees vote to strike

Meta tags are pretty much obsolete in terms of search engine rankings, they have a very low status in the page rank mechanism Google uses to decide on the order in which sites are listed. This is partly for two reasons - some sites were stuffing the keywords with irrelevant things to try and get a higher search engine position than the content justified, and because the crawler bots have improved and indexing the whole page is viable now. (In fact if Google's thinks that you're trying to play the system by having meta tags which bear no relation to the content of the page you can end up getting removed from the index completely) The things which are given highest priority are things like the h1 and h2 tags as has been said, and also the title tag. Alt elements on images are also quite important. Another key factor is who links to your site, so if you have a number of sites linking to yours, you should get a higher ranking. The "importance" of those sites (based on similar factors) is also taken into consideration. Having links from other relevant sites is also a good way to get listed in the first instance, because as their site is respidered, Google will follow the link to your site and discover your content and add it to the index. A site which a friend and I launched a couple of weeks ago is already on Google and hasn't been submitted manually, just linked from a few blogs. It would be worth trying to get a link or two from your LEA site in the first instance.

Grit is being managed centrally, so that all councils have access to some supplies, regardless of which councils had the foresight to order plenty in advance.

Apparently BT were having some big issues yesterday, so if you're either on BT or another ADSL provider on an unbundled exchange, that might explain it.

Your main risk is that if the database gets trashed you lose all of the services while you're restoring it, rather than just the one. I guess there's also a potential security issue that a vulnerability in one app could lead to data used by the other applications being compromised. It's not too big a job to split these into seperate databases, either on the same server or a different one - stop the applications writing to the database, dump the database to a .sql file, make a copy for each of the databases you want to end up with, delete the queries which create the tables for other apps, and then import the file into a new db. Then change your script which connects to the database to look for a new database name. There's no reason to (and I would strongly advise that you don't) change the table prefixes.

Twitter? You could even pull the twitter RSS feed back into the body of your site rather than just linking it.

We use turnitin here, and I spend quite a bit of time training staff how to use it and helping to interpret the reports it produces. We mainly use it via the Blackboard integration building block, which takes away most of the admin headache. We find it very effective if it's used well, as part of an overall package of educating students about plagiarism, what constitutes it, how to avoid it etc, and where staff are willing to accept the limitations which such software has (mainly that it can't detect *everything*). What it's not so good for is just blindly throwing a batch of work through to catch out students who have plagiarised, it needs to be seen as one tool which is part of a process. Happy to go into specifics if needed!

Just had a very heavy show shower here which wasn't forecast at all.

Case sensitivity sounds like a good call to me too. The fact that you're getting a 404 tells us that the problem is likely to be with the directory rather than the index file within it. If the directory didn't have an appropriate index you would either get a file listing or a 403 Forbidden error, not a 404 Not Found. Equally a permissions error would be more likely to throw a 403 than a 404.

This is kind of where I was going, I did a GNVQ (remember them?) in Media in the 6th form, but a slightly dubious choice of degree course led me into focussing on web stuff and from there into more general IT stuff. Probably a good call, seeing the state of the radio industry at the moment!

Yeah, if the DVLA can send you a reminder that your tax is due, why not that your MOT is?