Straight from the 80s

It's like Gav knew that we were going to be going to the 80s bar and he dressed appropriately!

The EduGeek giant and his wine

Shaun (the EduGeek giant) struggled to drink his red wine out of a normal large wine glass

The EduGeek marketing trip

On Tuesday I embarked on a trip for EduGeek with the aim of drumming up a little sponsorship for BETT 2009.

The trip began by travelling down to Brockenhurst in the New Forest to visit Navaho (the makers of the excellent Mediacat digital signage solution).

The hotel that Navaho booked me into was called The Watersplash... it should have been called Fawlty Towers... it was AMAZING. I was greeted by a lovely french girl who spoke english OK but really struggled to understand english. When she showed me to my room she was extremely apologetic about the single cobweb that she had missed cleaning earlier and the proceeded to try and grab it - however she struggled since she was rather short!

I then went down to the bar for a drink... where I couldn't pay because the french lass didn't have a key for the till (I did pay the next day!). A couple (I believe the only other guests at that point) came down for their evening meal. A table had been set in the corner and in typical Fawlty Towers style the couple complained that it was a bit chilly in front of the window... the girl simply smiled, agreed and laughed. After a few seconds she realised that the couple wasn't too amused and asked, "what is chilly?" and they explained that they were a bit cold. "Not a problem!" she exclaimed... and proceeded to drag the table nearer to the fire!!! You couldn't teach it!

Anyway... James and Chris then appeared and we went out for a nice curry followed by a couple of pints in a local pub. The genius that is the New Forest meant that on my way back from the pub I had to walk through a small heard of cattle with disturbingly large horns!

The next day I had another chat with the lovely french girl - she probably still has no idea what I said - and a nice breakfast. I checked out of the hotel and drove 1 minute down the road to the Navaho offices where we had an extremely productive meeting discussing how we could help each other at BETT and how I was using the Mediacat in a school environment.

After the Navaho meeting I did the trek to Reading where I met up with Mandy and Nathan from Westwood Associates for lunch followed by a trip to an academy in Reading for a brief meeting about how we could help each other at BETT. Again, quite productive.

Then the epic trip home to try and get back for snooker in the evening... it didn't happen :-(

Pimping the EeePC

I have been loaned an Asus EeePC 4G (boosted to 1GB RAM) so that I can experiment with it to aid in the deployment of a load of them for a Lancashire schools project.

I have also added some ideas for ways to 'pimp' the EeePC... my idea being that you could teach kids to hack the configs and generally 'geek it up'.

In keeping with the open/free nature of these I decided to share some of my findings on the EduGeek Wiki too. Check it out at http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/EeePC_-_Linux_OS - I cannot take credit for it all mind.

EduGeek North '08 Conference Pictures

A selection of my pictures can now be found in my EduGeek.net albums at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/members/ric_-albums-edugeek-north-conference-2008.html - a few notes will be added soon (along with comments for the pics).

See if you can see Jenny the Horse too ;-)

PyKota - Another update!

Following on from yesterday's update, I managed to find some more time between a Nedap meeting, meeting with the architect and cabler for the new extension and ringing DELL to arrange for a new motherboard to be sent out to take another look at PyKota.

I tweaked some accounting settings and re-added the test users. The printing AND accounting now works a treat! YAY!!!!

As a result, I decided to publish my installation notes on EduGeek so that others can learn from my experience. I will be refining these to create a 'proper' installation guide as soon as I get chance.

In the meantime, anybody who is interested can check out the guide at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7100

A Quick Guide to Thin Client Computing

Many people on EduGeek have recently been looking into thin clients as a way of reducing TCO in their schools. Many of these people have turned to me as I am somewhat of an authority on this. As a result, I promised to write a little guide explaining some of the basics. The guide can be found at http://edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=7035 - enjoy!

As a background, my network setup uses 6 terminal servers running Windows Server 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to server approx 200 thin clients... most of the clients in the school are thin clients.

EduGeek @ BETT

It's taken me a while to get these pics up but here we go...
Monday - The Week Begins

We arrived relatively early on the Monday to begin the preparation of the stand and were presented with an empty shell.

Nothing could really be done until we had some hardware stand so we decided to go off for a wander amongst the ensuing chaos of stands being built to find our very kind sponsors to collect bits and pieces.

Anyway, we had pretty much no luck fining anyone... in fact we discovered some people wouldn't be turning up until Tuesday afternoon! However, we eventually managed to grab somebody from Promethean so we could set up the interactive whiteboard and projector that they loaned us.

Of course, all the time that this was going on, Tony was being mithered by work about SIMS stuff which made my eyes glaze over every time he tried to explain it to me.

By this time we had begun to start getting hungry so we popped off for lunch... to a traditional english pub - except that the entire menu was made up of curries! Quite odd. Upon our return we didn't have to wait long for a delivery from LapSafe - a nice kiosk to display our fancy web site on :-)

Tuesday - Not long to go

So Tuesday came and we eventually got some hardware. Firstly a box on loan from Stone Computers to run demonstrations on and connect to the Promethean board.

Then came the SmoothWall box - kindly donated to TickMike after we'd been let loose on it!

Then, in the afternoon, came the monster DELL server (which we would later name BEAST). This quad-dual-core Opteron with 16GB RAM and SAS drives was quite something. The only problem was that it had no OS and no setup disks.

When we did eventually get the server going, it was quite something to look at as it sat there without breaking a sweat with 6 virtual machines running!

So anyway.... there wasn't much time for picture taking during the show's opening hours. Steve Thomas from Novus did get rather tired of the standing at one point though.

And Tony made time to print some additional promotional material.

Finally a quick thank you to Art Lader - our Moodle Evangelist that was flown in from the States by Sun to help out on our stand. Well done for pulling that one off Tony ;-)

I'd also like to thank Jo (aka LinuxGirlie) of Koroshi fame.

Another thanks to our sponsors who had people helping out on the stand. Of course there was Steve Thomas (Novus), two experts from RM and two experts from Solutions Inc. (Apple experts). We also had a helping hand from Mandy Brereton and Sacha at EuroLaser (who also donated 2 laser printers as prizes and are generally very nice to everyone).

If there's anyone or anything I've missed out (I know that there is a lot!) I'm sorry.

EduGeek North West Christmas Gathering

Yesterday was the Christmas Gathering for EduGeek members in the North West... organised by Dos_Box himself!

We had hoped for a larger turnout, however only 4 of us made an appearance. Despite this pitiful showing, a good time was had by all with drinking and a nice curry.