Jamman960

I went for a semi-intensive course a few years back which worked out to 3hrs a day for 2 weeks(excluding weekends), I found that about right - 3hrs was tiring as a learner so I could imagine the additional 2 hours or so per day on a fully intensive course wouldn't be quite as productive. If you've already had a fair few lessons it may be worth booking a few long lessons with an instructor, a full course may be overkill.

I've developed a web based rewards system to replace our paper based one, basically teachers find a pupil and give them an Academic or Non-Academic "Plus" which is then recorded in an SQL database. For some reason in internet explorer it takes around 3 seconds for anything to happen, loading the whole school stats page takes around 30 seconds. In Firefox everything is instant as it was before - The only changes I've made recently is the CSS, I've basically swapped out the old one and tweaked the one from our website to fit. Is there anything within CSS that I should look for that could cause this kind of slowdown? our actual website dosen't seem to suffer in the same way. The site uses Jquery(mainly for Ajax calls), PHP, MS SQL & general Javascript Cheers, James

Not sure about the Ricoh but our sharp and Konica MFP's are able to scan to email which I've found more useful than scanning to a folder, most do have some LDAP functionality but I haven't tried sorting that out as yet

Can we really blame capita for this? they are simply taking advantage of the additional features offered in a newer version of SQL server, they do the same with the .net framework. I'd rather they kept moving forward rather than developing on an old platform as they did with previous versions. I'd presume this is also down to MS mainstream support for SQL2005 ending in the next year or so. As for the cost surely the academic pricing is low enough already? smaller schools can just use the express versions

This rings a bell, I'm sure another release did the exact same thing in the past? We hadn't noticed this bug but have found an issue with Fee's billing which won't be fixed until the next release as its a client issue...wonder if they could sort that out now they've had to pull the release anyway As they've now decided to go with 4 releases per year we've got a while to wait and as yet theres no release date other than "Summer 2010" argh

Wasn't too bad thanks, fourtunatly the kids weren't in so I could still get away a bit early

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A few of our teachers and the head are out of the country at the mo... could be interesting lol Didn't think the planes would have a noticable effect on the air quality in the area... amazed that its cleared up so quickly though.

It gives more granular access to behavior and assessments as well as enabling you to access registers directly from the timeline(without it you have to go the long way round via the menus even if your afternoon reg is part of a lesson). you can still use behavior without it but its much more cumbersome - you have to enter all of the details to log an incident including time,date place etc. I'm sure there are more advantages but we currently just use Attendance(am/pm only) as thats all we legally need to do.

Think I'll be upgrading to the Giganews Diamond package... VPN+The best news feed around for $29.99/mo My MP also didn't bother to vote... can't wait to get rid of him, he's also about to retire having taken full advantage of the expenses system!

I found the following how-to very useful, it still took some tweaking but I got it working in the end - How To Install And Configure Dansguardian With Multi-Group Filtering And Squid With NTLM Auth On Debian Etch | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - its mostly the same for ubuntu except having to use different package managers etc etc In the end I setup the 1st policy to block everything and then played around until NTLM auth worked and put me on the 2nd policy. If I remember correctly it came down to which port I connected to, I believe I had to connect directly to dansguardian which then went through squid to get it working.

Looks great! I'm liking the way the quick reply box pops up directly below whichever post you want to reply to - multi quote's pretty cool too Only issue I've found so far is submitting posts appears to be a bit slow

Not much of our software currently requires activation over the net, as long as its as automated as possible I don't normally mind(if we could add the details to the msi that'd be great). It must support automatic proxy detection and authentication - I've found a few programs that don't, having to resort to email/phone or other manual forms of activation isn't fun if it needs doing for a decent amount of workstations Make sure the activation carries accross between users - I've encountered one program that required activation per user and pc, this is the only software I've so far refused to install - fourtunatly the company has since fixed this issue. Oh and if your going to ask for things like address, phone number that need to be entered per workstation please keep it short... software that asks for loads of info other than the serial/email address tends to get false info returned.

have you tried: Opening a page on a local server without a proxy make sure "automatically detect settings" is disabled try it on a different network without a proxy if poss connecting to a site via its ip Sysinternals TCPview may also help - make sure no dodgy programs are using ports etc

Thanks Josh, will take a look at it when I get time could do with sorting out an autoupdate method for the pupil acheivement webapp I've been developing James

Brought a Dell XPS M1330 last year, nice n light but not the cheapest of laptops then again all 13inchers tend to be pretty pricey.

Nope, just the one - SamKnows Broadband - Availability - Exchange Mapping

looks like my local exchange and both exchanges near the school are due to be setup in the next year or so... the area I moved from about a year ago already has FTTC lol - sods law or what!

I think the main aim of managed service is to standardise IT accross schools, at the moment school A could have a great IT setup and spend £100k whereas school B could have a slightly worse setup and spend £150k/year for instance - at the moment both schools will simply carry on as they are with no one disputing the fact that School B isn't getting the most for their money or providing the best IT setup possible. Maybe school IT management should be taken away from individual schools and be done at a higher level - Techs and Net managers could be employed directly by the LA rather than by the schools themselves, I get the impression this is how the American school systems already work, they appear to be managed in districts. The managed services being put forward are an extreme example of this, if only there were a middle ground. Edit: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/us-general-chat/29570-techies-life-us-school.html is a very interesting read

I really hope we're above that... BSF or not its still a job and not a badly paid one at that(would have sent my CV already if I thought I had the experience), From what I've seen MSP's like Ramesys and RM tend to pay the going rate for experienced staff which is more than can be said for schools most of the time. I'd hope that MSP's would feel able to advertise jobs on here, after all we're surely the sort of people they'd want to employ? - tech's/network managers with experience in the school environment?? [sorry for taking this off topic... sometimes I think the anti-BSF attitudes on here are going slightly too far]

Dansguardian will allow you to differentiate between user groups, if you've got the money though I'd go for smoothwall

Sims.net consists of 3 components on the server side - Database(SQL2005, soon to be 2008), Document server and a setups folder which contains the client/server install files(clients pull their updates from here). In most cases they are all on the one server although larger schools may have seperate servers for each. FMS is the accounts package provided by Capita. Its gradually becoming more and more like sims.net on the management side so it shouldn't be too much of an issue once your used to sims.net Within solus you can upgrade both sims.net and fms, if you wish to upgrade one but not the other simply leave the username/password blank. During an upgrade solus will download the new files, copy the patches and new installation files into place then runs dbupgrade which backs up the database, locks it and then applies the patches, if this fails it will automatically restore the database and provide error messages etc - I'd recommend taking a backup yourself before doing an upgrade though just to be on the safe side. I'm guessing you got the job - if so congratulations!

Not too sure about changing the menu.lst file but he should at least be able to copy the files accross to a flash drive once booted into a live cd with the drive mounted.

There seem to be a fair few cashback offers on HP/Compaq/Fujitsu's at the moment(or atleast there are on the misco site), if you use CP they may also be able to sort out a good Dell price(had a good amount knocked off a server price earlier this week).

1. Sims.net is the newer .net version of sims, sims was previously made up of seperate programs or modules such as Attendance 6, Star 6, Personel 6 and more, these have all gradually been migrated into sims.net as version 7 of each module, the older modules are still availible but being slowly discontinued. System 6 is the only module that hasn't been updated as yet(I think) 2. As above there is no such thing as Sims 2. 3. System manager responsibilities would generallly include the following: Upgrading/Patching Ensuring backups are being done on a regular basis(both database and document server need to be backed up) General user management - adding, removing, resetting passwords when needed etc Managing permissions Most of the management is done via the System module(accessible via the focus menu provided you have sufficient rights) You may also end up helping staff to create reports etc so its probably worth getting to know how it works in general. Capita or possibly your support provider do System Manager courses, I'd recommend going as they go through things like disaster recovery and general management bits, the courses at capita aren't too expensive provided you go to them - they charge about 1k to come out and provide training on site. Edit: forgot to mention the Sims.net manuals and other documentation are generally well written and stored within the sims.net program folder, you should also be able to get a Capita SupportNet account setup, SupportNet contains some very good knowledgebase articles and other info.