SteveBentley

I did this the cheapo way - put a VNC server on the front machine, installed as an application rather than a service IIRC. On workstations at the back of the room I installed a listening VNC client, launching at startup. The front machine has a couple of batch files, one to start the VNC server and add each of the clients, one to kill the VNC server.

When did Russell Brand get an account here?

Just posted the same in the contact the admins forum.

The BBC and ITV are launching a freesat service today, not to be confused with Sky's freesat. I suspect that HDD recorders for that won't be too far away if they're not already here

Somebody's brave launching a product with an acronym WAT, how long before that acquires an unofficial extra letter before it?

I've realised that the solution to this is not to use the network and rely on unreliable digitising cards etc... I'm borrowing a vision mixer from our media dept and feeding TV-out on the laptop and a camcorder into it, that's going to provide a split screen effect and feeding that into a Cat5 AV extender (Lindy AV Extender via CAT5e/6, Upto 600mtrs - Misco.co.uk) into a network point which will be patched directly to a point in the second room where the other end of the extender will bring it out as video which will go straight into the projector/amp. Thanks for your thoughts guys

I thought about that Jona - but I've never really found the SVHS output to be of a particularly good quality. Maybe I've only tried it on rubbish graphics cards.

We have an external speaker coming in for a public lecture next week and there may be more people turn up than can be accommodated in our biggest lecture theatre. Management in my dept have got wind of the fact that a higher profile lecture was recently relayed into another room, but on hearing that an AV company organised that at cost of over a grand, thoughts have turned to whether something can be lashed up (with a budget of approximately nothing) to relay slides, webcam and audio to a single projector in another room. I've been experimenting with the Online Broadcast add-in for Powerpoint, but it seems to only deal in whole slides, so anything where parts of the slide appear on a click don't appear in the second location. As it's an external speaker it's harder to ask them not to use animations. Anyone have any thoughts for how this could be done? cheers Steve

I presume you've tested opening other files on the lappy? It's not just a screwed Excel installation?

Just a guess - his 2000 laptop doesn't have the import filters for 2003 files?

People using Excel when they should be using a database is one of my pet hates (although I understand and sympathise with the OP's position). I've found the linked tables feature in Access to be brilliant when trying to sort out the mess people get themselves into. Set up some named ranges on the Excel Sheet, pull them in as linked tables in the DB and use proper SQL queries to do whatever reports you need and the user can continue to edit the data in Excel, which they are familiar with. I set up a system this way for my ex (before she was my ex!) who had to compile two monthly reports, one in a spreadsheet, one as a summary, both presented to the client on paper. The spreadsheet didn't contain enough data to be able to break things down for the summary, so the summary had to be done manually and often didn't tally with the spreadsheet. So I added a couple of extra fields outside the print area for the reporting categories and imported the lot into Excel as a linked table and set up queries to do the summaries and create the report. Worked like a charm and meant that she didn't have to learn how to input data into Access (not that it's difficult) and could continue to use Excel and just open Access up when she needed the summary report. Incidentally - whoever invented vlookup should be shot, if your data is complex to need that, it needs to be in a proper relational DB, not a flat spreadsheet.

Don't you only get paid anything when somebody clicks the links in the ads, not merely when they are displayed?

I figured we ought to have our own corner of the site

Seems somebody is making a sport out of messy cable installations. Not sure *why* though... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7240939.stm

If you want to demonstrate the dangers of online translations, take a passage of text, translate it to (say) French. Then translate the result back to English and compare and contrast.

I guess I should probably have said that I work at a Uni rather than a school so it's a slightly different environment, both politically and the types of user! The main issue is that we don't want staff to have to come to us to get the pen whenever they want to use the board, because we are often out fixing things and the office isn't always occupied. There are also evening classes when we're not around. The room with the Promethean board isn't owned by a particular department, and working out who used it last isn't always easy. "Nothing to do with me, I just ran a powerpoint through it, didn't use the IWB so I didn't notice if the pen was there or not"... People here tend to only be interested in kit working for the duration of their lecture. The fact that they bugger off with the remote control for the projector in their pocket which means that the next poor sod to use the room can't use it is of little concern to them. (Yes, we have fitted control panels since). We had to take the wireless mice we had out because they were consistently failing to put them back on the charging cradle after use. So I need some method of leaving the pen in the room, without people needing to get a key to open a cupboard to retrieve it (because they're guaranteed to leave it open/not take the key back) but without the opportunity for staff to walk off with it or students to nick/hide it.

How do you keep your Promethean pens from walking (maliciously or absent-mindedly)? Some kind of chain it to the board solution seems like the obvious answer but I'm not sure what the best way of doing that is. cheers Steve

It could work quite well if you ran the Listening VNC client on the pupil's machine and had the staff PCs run a VNC server which offered a connection to his machine.

Good old DOS can sort this one - just cd to the top level directory which the student home folders are in and use dir /S *.mp3 > report.txt

I thought this was exactly what Sysprep was there for?

You can set a script to run on an OU containing the computer objects for the PCs in that suite rather than the user objects.

I've had issues with Publisher sending jobs as Letter size by default (regardless of printing prefs) and PCounter ditching those jobs as it's only set up to handle A4.

I have to say that your policy sounds like a recipe for passwords on post-it notes under the keyboard, but it should be possible to apply a GPO to an OU and override the domain policy if you set the loopback.

We have problems with people sending large b/w documents to colour printers when there is a dedicated b/w printer available that can print the document cheaper and faster. Does anyone know of anything that can identify jobs which don't contain colour and move them to the b/w queue? We're on a Windows server/AD environment. I'm aware that PCounter might be able to do it but following some "interesting" experiences with it lately I'm fairly keen to avoid that route if possible. TIA cheers Steve

mysqldump is the command you want here: mysqldump -u username -p [password] dbname > filename password can either be given in the command directly after -p or interactively, dbname can be the name of the database or --all-databases to do the the lot. To bring the dumped file back in, either use phpmyadmin or mysql -u username -p [password] dbname < filename