jamesb

Turing. One of the first, and the best.

Tongue in cheek it may be, but it may be worth noting that for commercial products the first port of call for most will probably be their support. Moodle support is community based, so I'm not surprised that there's more postings about it on here than any commercially supported product.

Just because something doesn't necessarily need a response immediately doesn't stop it being important, or urgent. Much of the time support people might be busy with something, and so an urgent problem goes to e-mail. Personally I use e-mail rather than a phone call when I need a response because I'm aware that people are often away from their desks or using the phone. My own phone is in use most of the time, and e-mail means that I can continue to communicate with people when I need to. Multitasking is a very useful school, and generally I can help resolve several relatively simple but important problems via e-mail while investigating the highest priority one by phone. Not only that but during investigation you may need documents, or other attachments, or you may need to send utilities. E-mail's the easiest and quickest way to do this. Try sending an error log by phone. Finally, if you need to tell 100 people the same simple message (for example to tell them about an urgent outage on your MIS server) then phoning really isn't the best way to do it. Would've been much easier to send a mass e-mail, wouldn't it? How exactly was the meeting itself announced? The outage apparently lasted about 100 minutes for some users. If its your own e-mail server, then at least its everyone in your organisation who's affected. Everyone's aware of the problem. With something like gmail going down it affects a lot more people than just, say, a school e-mail server going down. Some of those people are going to be relying on their e-mail for orders, support, urgent communications and so on. I don't necessarily agree with some of the complaints, I'm strongly of the opinion that you get what you pay for, but I can certainly understand why they're complaining. Its not necessarily about survival as such. E-mail going down is a huge inconvenience for me. It means that work stacks up a lot more, I'm unable to deal with simple problems which come through which otherwise could be resolved with a quick e-mail. It makes my life a lot harder in other words, even if I can still continue.

Nonsense! Outsourcing call centres went so well, why wouldn't you want to outsource your vital infrastructure too?

Its my only complaint about the device. It'd be useful if there were some way to automatically get a copy of any books you already own the hardcopy of, but somehow I don't see that happening. I guess for re-readings I'll just have to stick to primitive hardcopy.

Just signed up for the free box to arrive next week...hopefully. I'll have to see how my occasional postage deals with it.

$arrMemberType = (values you want to use) $objUser.PutEx($arrMemberType.Count, "otherIpPhone", $arrMemberType Try that one.

I've found them to be crystal clear. I had to refer to some technical manuals the other day, which I have in PDF format. Since even the 6" screen was a little small for them I just rotated the display (hold down the zoom button for a few seconds) and could read through without any problems. Links within the PDFs do work, using the navigation keys. You can jump directly to a page by typing in the number. The interface has been very carefully thought out, particularly shown by the ease of bookmarking and the number of ways you can turn pages. At first I thought three (or maybe four, I forget) ways to turn pages was a bit much. Then I started actually using it. Since its light enough to hold one-handed comfortably it really does help to have page controls in the three areas where your thumb naturally rests. The Sony can reflow pdfs as far as I've seen, and the text comes out great. It will break any graphics though if you zoom in too far. Notably, the only PDFs I've had any trouble with and had to rotate the display for are A4 sized. All the others I've been able to read comfortably. I feel like I've started something. Where's the eBook owners social group?

Why not talk to the departments you've got on board and see if you can get them each to come up with a competition idea, one to be run each half-term or any other appropriate timescale?

Yep, I know, but I quite liked the look of this model. Picked it up twenty minutes ago. Unfortunately I'm back in work now, and on a trip for the next couple of days so I don't know when I'll get to play with it.

A large part of the reason I'm getting it. I'll let you know how well it does once I've got my hands on it.

In that case maybe a page on which there's an I accept link, which redirects to the ISA logon? Seems simpler than trying to do it the other way around - just a standard HTML page would probably do it.

Why not edit the Forms logon page to display the AUP, and specify in the text that by logging on they're accepting it? Saves the extra step of redirecting.

I'm getting a Sony Reader sometime over the next week and have been hunting down eBook sellers. So far I've got Blackwell (Academic specialist, not that useful for me), ePubBook (free stuff mainly, and some e-Vanity publishing as far as I can tell), Waterstones and WHSmiths. I'm just wondering if anyone knows any others out there, or can recommend any particular sites with free/cheap self-published books which are above the average for quality?

You might want to look at the N85, its a phone rather than a smartphone but does come with a set of video cables which you can use to connect it up to a tv. It'll run slingplayer, its fine for internet so long as you're happy with using a phone keypad rather than some undersized qwerty keyboard, makes phone calls and sends texts happily.

Shock horror and surprise, the thieves don't want to support even the possibility of a legitimate service. I'm stunned, really.

I tend to use one developed by Matthew Hull. I found it somewhere on the internet, but can't remember where. It'll reset all the passwords for users in a specific OU rather than just all passwords at once. The script itself is here: 'Created by Matthew Hull 5/20/04 'Last modified 9/9/05 'Version 1.01 'This script will reset the passwords for all users in a specified OU. 'You can have it assign the same password to all users or generate a 'random password for each user. 'Version History '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 'Version 1.01 - Improved error detection. 'Version 1.0 - First version of this script released. Option Explicit On Error Resume Next Dim intPasswordLength, strOU, objUser, objOU, objADHelper, intRandomNumber, txtLogFile Dim strPassword, bolForceChange, strLogFile, objFSO, bolNeverExpire '***************************************************************************************** strOU = "Script Test" 'Name of the OU that contains the users you want to modify strLogFile = "C:\Password Change Log.csv" 'Location and name of the log bolForceChange = False 'Set True to have the user to change their password on next logon bolNeverExpire = True 'Set True to set the password never to expire intPasswordLength = 8 'Set the length of the random password strPassword = "" 'Set generic password for all users if inPasswordLength = 0 '***************************************************************************************** 'Exit the script if bolForceChange and bolNeverExpire are set to true. If bolForceChange And bolNeverExpire Then MsgBox "bolForceChange and bolNeverExpire cannot both be True." & vbCRLF & _ "The script will now exit.",vbCritical,"Error" WScript.Quit End If 'Create the OU Helper object and get the OU object using the OU Helper object Set objADHelper = CreateObject("ADHelper.wsc") 'Exit if the ADHelper object isn't installed If Err Then MsgBox "You must have ADHelper 1.0 or later installed on your PC. " & _ "The script will now exit.",vbCritical,"Network Missing" Err.Clear WScript.Quit End If 'Use the ADHelper object to create the OU object Set objOU = objADHelper.OUObject(strOU) 'Exit if the there is an error creating the OU object If Err Then MsgBox "There is a problem with your strOU setting, OU Not Found" & _ "The script will now exit.",vbCritical,"OU Not Found" Err.Clear WScript.Quit End If 'Create the File System Object, and use it to create the log file Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set txtLogFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strLogFile) txtLogFile.WriteLine("Display Name,User Name,Password") If Err Then ErrorMessage 'Loop through each user and set the password For Each objUser in objOU If intPasswordLength <> 0 Then strPassword = GeneratePassword(intPasswordLength) End If If objUser.class = "user" Then Call SetPassword(objUser, strPassword, bolForceChange, bolNeverExpire) txtLogFile.WriteLine("""" & objUser.DisplayName & """," & _ objUser.SamAccountName & "," & strPassword) End If Next MsgBox "The passwords have been reset.",vbOkOnly,"Done" 'Close the log file txtLogFile.Close '***************************************************************************************** Sub SetPassword(objUser,strPassword,bolForceChange,bolNeverExpire) Dim intUAC objUser.SetPassword(strPassword) objUser.SetInfo objUser.Put "UserAccountControl", 512 ' Normal Account objUser.SetInfo If bolForceChange Then objUser.Put "pwdLastSet", 0 'User must change password at next login objUser.SetInfo End If intUAC = 512 If bolNeverExpire Then intUAC = intUAC + 65536 End If objUser.Put "UserAccountControl", intUAC objUser.SetInfo End Sub '***************************************************************************************** Function GeneratePassword(intLength) Dim intIndex, intRandomNumber Randomize Timer For intIndex = 1 to intLength intRandomNumber = Int(2 * Rnd) Select Case intRandomNumber Case 0 intRandomNumber = Int(10 * Rnd) + 48 '0-9 Case 1 intRandomNumber = Int(26 * Rnd) + 97 'a-z End Select GeneratePassword = GeneratePassword & Chr(intRandomNumber) Next End Function '***************************************************************************************** Sub ErrorMessage MsgBox "There was an error detected." & vbCRLF & vbCRLF & "Error Description: " & _ Err.Description & vbCRLF & "Error Number: " & Err.Number & vbCRLF & vbCRLF & _ "The script will now exit...",vbCritical,"Error" WScript.Quit End Sub '*****************************************************************************************

SLG2 is authentication-independent. So long as you've got some method of logging in to SharePoint or WSS as a provisioned or consolidated user, the actual method is irrelevant.

Apple's niche is very much prestige and luxury items. It surprises me that they've done as well as they have in a supposed recession, but this may be the first time that people's need to budget is beginning to bite.

Surely a devolution? Its a step back towards the mainframe systems of old. My theory is that cloud computing will be a flash in the pan and little more, the big evolution will come when truly distributed systems are developed. Personal computing power is now so cheap that in many cases building a dumb terminal is a waste of resources, better would be to build a terminal which is a node in a massive distributed system, which can be connected or disconnected from that system on the fly and will both allow access to the resources of that single, massively redundant distributed system while simultaneously providing any spare resources it has to operations running on that system.

You can make some stunning photos with black and white, or sepia, or other tones if you want. The problem comes when people try to use it to add 'depth' to every single picture, or think that turning a bad picture black and white makes it a good picture. Used in moderation, its great. Overdone its just dull.

After a hectic couple of weeks, I've finally started looking at the file management thing again. I think this should handle the actual moving and renaming of the file themselves (as yet untested, I plan to test it tonight when I get home). The updating of links in PowerPoint files is currently on hold until either I find a reliable fix for the PowerShell localization problem with Office, or I get around to using PowerShell 2 instead. I'm assuming its fixed there. For anyone interested in the code, its stuck in below. function Move-Files ($OldPath, $NewPath, $Overwrite) { $OldPath = $OldPath.TrimEnd('\') + '\' $Filenames = Get-ChildItem $OldPath -Recurse -Include "*.ppt*" foreach ($OldFile in $Filenames) { $Keywords = $OldFile.Split(".") $Limit = $Keywords.Count() - 3 $Buildpath = $Path $NewFile = $OldFile foreach ($Keyword in $Keywords) { if ($Count -le $Limit) { $Buildpath = $Buildpath + ($Keyword) + '\' $NewFile = $NewFile -replace "$Keyword." if (!(Test-Path $Buildpath)) { New-Item $Buildpath -ItemType Directory } $Count ++ } $OldFile = $Path + $OldFile $NewFile = $Buildpath + $NewFile if (!(Test-Path $NewFile)) { Copy-Item -Path $OldFile -Destination $NewFile } else { if (!$Overwrite) { Write-Host -Object "$NewFile already exists - skipping" -ForegroundColor Red -BackgroundColor Black } else { Copy-Item -Path $OldFile -Destination $NewFile -Confirm } } } } }

Obviously you have not truly accepted the Great and Mighty Jobs into your heart and soul. Give over your free will to the Great One and you will be rewarded by His Holy Grace and a goatee. Free turtlenecks too.

My biggest concern with cloud computing is if mission-critical applications are shifted over. If that happens, your entire business is completely dependent on a third party's systems. Single points of failure litter the whole idea, from the internet connection on your computer, to the software that they use to administer the cloud. Not only that but a cloud is generally by its very nature accessible from the internet. I'd've thought that the exposure of Twitter's internal documents by someone guessing a Google Apps password would've highlighted the dangers of this.

I've heard of various cases. More than one by a long way. Incidentally when Dell and Sony had similar issues with laptop batteries they immeadiately issued a recall of ALL those batteries, and replaced them free of charge. I suppose this is where Apple's idea that the user shouldn't be trusted to replace their own battery bites them. An XBox 360 is a few hundred, and you can swap the heat sink or slap an extra cooling module on the back yourself. Also, while I've heard of them failing because of over heating none of them have yet set fire to a car, or someone's trousers. If your iPhone had caught fire in your pocket, you might want more than to be offered a refund/replacement tied to a gagging order. I know I would. The odds of any single battery being one of the ones that explodes are minor. The problem is the sheer number out there, and this is why I will never understand Apple's policy of preventing their customers from replacing the batteries themselves.