I’m going to break this down into 5 sections and discuss each individually and then come to a conclusion; the sections will be: Computer Hardware, Networking Solutions, Choice of Student’s Software, Use of Monitoring ‘Spy’ Software and Communication with Students.

Computer Hardware

Computer hardware is a particularly sticky issue as the choice of this varies significantly between schools, types of schools, Local Educational Authorities (in the UK) and most notably country. Overall I see the trend that in schools with significant amounts of hardware such as my own that the computers and other resources such as ‘Smart Boards’ are not used anywhere as much as they could be used. My school has high-end, expensive computers (at least 100 of them) which possesses large 19-inch monitors and 3.2GHz processors; the fact of the matter is that most of the time simply using the computers for surfing and word processing will never reach the boundaries physically set by the computers. The school I visit has at least 20 of these so called ‘smart boards’ and I often go into classrooms possessing them and quite often they are not used at all and when they are used their ‘smart’ functions are never used, they are simply used as projectors.

At schools with significantly less computer technology they seem to get along perfectly adequately without the need to splash out on extravagant luxuries such as smart boards or high-end computers. As I see it there are two uses of these high end computers: to satisfy what I call ‘Microsoft’s Minimum’ (the minimum system requirements needed for each of Microsoft’s subsequent bloated releases of the Windows operating system) and to show off to prospective parents who think that the future is solely based in the art of communicating by means of a computer; life isn’t changing that much. These are both completely ridiculous arguments for having such vast quantities of computer power under one roof.

It is quite easy to see where the ‘need’ for this is coming from: the IT industry. Microsoft consistently and systematically informs users that they need to upgrade their machines for the next, ‘better’ version of Windows and as a result offering leases of windows to schools which seems to enable them to upgrade to the next version of Windows simply by signing a new contract for about the same price meaning that it pressures schools into upgrading computers.

Networking Solutions

My school generally uses 100Mb/s Ethernet cables to connect the computers in the school together and a variety of switches connecting all the computers to one magical Microsoft ISA server to connect to the internet. Quite frankly the log-on takes far too long and so I think that Gigabit Ethernet could be in order in some places to replace the archaic 100Mb/s connections to each individual computer and some fibre optical connections between buildings.

WiFi is a complete mess as well at my school, you must supply your MAC code and ask them for Access to the network using your user-name and password. Why can’t they just let everyone log onto the network with their user-name and password? To me it just seems that they’ve felt pressured into needlessly secure it using a MAC address due to industry ‘standards’; as if it wasn’t easy to spoof a MAC address anyway.

Choice of Student’s Software
Yes, I understand why all schools (in the UK at least) use Microsoft Office; businesses all across the world use it but surely there’s some place in schools to give the students some choice between what the school wants to use and what they want to use. For instance I think that schools should install copies of Open Office on machines so that when you go in and use the computers you’re not forced to use Microsoft’s backwards application set. I would also like to see Linux in schools for the exact same reason; my school’s IT department is opposed to it for two reasons: the Microsoft servers that they use to route all of the traffic are very hard to configure under Linux and, the big one – they can’t control students as effectively as they can on Windows. This I believe is all up to industry pressure to effect forcing schools to conform and buy what they want them to buy: proprietary and highly-priced software. I have yet to see one computer in my school running Linux; at least run a small scale test to see if it integrates well with the infrastructure!

Use of Monitoring ‘Spy’ Software
Okay, here’s the story: I got ‘called up’ to the IT office in my school for typing things like ‘I can see you, fuck off’ into the Internet Explorer location bar and hitting enter; the IT staff evidently searched the logs of which sites people had been visiting and found those words. Sure, I know I shouldn’t have done that but quite honestly I didn’t actually expect anyone to be reading those statements after I had hit ‘return’ and the words had disappeared into the ether; so I was wrong and okay, maybe it’s okay for them to be searching the logs of visited websites for profanities – I’m not going to argue with that. What I was told next was that they very often monitored what students were doing on their computers and that they even had key loggers. What kind of IT department is this? One that logs every single keystroke that people type and stores it for future use by the IT department? Passwords, emails, user-names, even Credit Card details of the head of my school all stored with easy access for the IT staff. All of this without even telling people that they were doing this to begin with – that’s not right. What if a rogue user – or dare I use the word ‘hacker’ – managed to access this treasure-trove of information? I raised the issue though my school’s student council only to be knocked down and told to simply put up with it. Students still aren’t warned about the key loggers. I think you can make up your own mind about that one.

Communication with Students
Communication between my school’s IT department is abysmal, I emailed them in January asking for Google Docs to be unblocked (yes, that’s right it was blocked) and got an email back saying that they’d discuss it internally and that they’d get back to me with the decision – It’s now 17th March and I haven’t received their decision. I went up to talk to them to see what was going on with it in February and got told that it’d be a while until they could even discuss it internally.

What’s the issue with Google Docs? Apparently it takes control away from them meaning that they can’t monitor what students bring in and out of school. I find it pretty hard to vindicate that as a response, it’s just not right. Do you wonder why people are accepting the Big Brother society? It’s beginning in schools and there’s no one there that can see it happening, has the will power to stop it happening or even wants to stop it happening. Now that people have started simply accepting this in schools it’s easy to see how it can develop even further in the future. If people can’t communicate to even argue their point effectively then they just don’t bother with it in the future.

I’ve asked my student council representative to ask for a committee between students, IT staff and non-IT staff teachers but honestly I can see that not happening. At the time of writing my school has blocked the BBC Blogs and the BBC News streaming video. There is not much that can be done about it.

School IT departments are seriously flawed and I’m sure it isn’t only my school’s IT department. No one seems to care and students aren’t in a position to stop it; this issue isn’t publicised nearly enough. Who knows when or even if it’ll end?

Quite honestly the key point in history that this seems to come parallel to is the Nazi government’s campaign of using children, anyone really as ‘blocklighters’ to spy on everyone, even their parents to inform the Gestapo (the secret police) of who to take under the cover of darkness away to concentration camps.

Quite honestly I don’t see that much of a leap from the Government’s rather agressive campaign against Benefit fraud and the current government advert, that I am right at this minute listening to, threatening employers with a £10,000 fine per illegally employed worker with the catch phrase “Don’t end up as illegal as them”.

It’s time to stop, this isn’t right; sure people ‘stealing’ money by incorrectly claiming benefits is wrong but the way in which the UK Government is going about it is entirely incorrect. Stop threatening and start doing; local people being caught for illegally employing immigrants or cheating the benefit system is going to make more of an impression on the people doing it (those with an ear to the ground) than broadcasting needless adverts on public radio and TV.

Well I left teenlug after a large argument with Ewan over tlcms a while back (and so resigned from my post as tlcms developer) and so I’m just costing along without any #teenlug or teenlug.com-ness! Anyway teenlug seems to be going down the pan a bit now and I think everyone can sense it; Zach recently posted on the teenlug.com blog on the “Current state of teenlug” and even though I don’t really want to get back into the community I don’t want to see it go under as it certainly helped me get into and stick with linux in the longrun and I think it’s important for the future that it stays open to help wayward teen linux users get on the right track with help and support.

I’ve come up with a bit of a rough idea about how I think that teenlug could cut out a lot of the arguments and hopefully stay running in the long run and I shall pitch it to them later today when some people are around. I think a teenlug constitution could rectify the situation by providing a code of conduct in the community and appropriate sanctions if that code is broken (amongst other things). I posted my notes on the issue to pastebin, here: http://pastebin.ca/823685.

On the upside of linux related things, Fred Phillips (fophillips) and I are lucky enough to get a regular fortnightly editorial on the newly referbished Macteens website which is now under new managment. We will each be posting on alternate fortnights, hopefully beginning with Fred on Wednesday January 16th and me two weeks later on January 30th. I’ll be looking forward to writing for that and after Fred’s introduction of integrating Mac and Linux, I’ll hopefully be writing on Linux in the Mobile Cellular Market as a competitor to the Apple iPhone.

On another topic, does anyone know any websites dedicated to British cinema as I’m sick of Hollywood movies now and would like to know when British films are being released.

• Ruby is like vaginal sex. It feels natural, good and it runs nice and smoothly; it does what you ask it to and when it complains it gives you a real reason. You have to learn what you’re doing but it’s like riding a bike, you never forget. Ruby has some lube included so you don’t need to fumble about applying loads of 3rd party libraries as in C.
• C is like anal sex. It’s hard, rough and only for the experienced. Sometimes it can get very tough, hurt a bit and take some effort. Unlike Ruby, C doesn’t come with lube and so you have to apply a lot of 3rd party libs otherwise it can be very painful. You’ve got to be very careful with C as STIs as a result of buffer overflows are very common. Some guys are into it though!

For both C and Ruby you can buy wacky sex toys (like exotic libraries) but they’re really not necessary and only enhance the act.

• VB (and other .net languages) is a lot like oral sex – Loads of people are into it, it’s easy, fast and pleasurable but at the end of the day you’re not in control and you can end up getting your cock bitten off.

Wednesday: Get up at 4AM, go to Birmingham by train, go by plane to Dusseldorf and then by train to Bochum. Meet host families and listen to a really long (most probably boring) speech. Then we’re going on to see a musical; “Starlight Express” – I’ve heard it’s good but it’s 3 hours long and finshed at 21:30 – I think I might fall asleep in the middle of it. That’ll probably be atleast an 18 hour day at least :/.

Thursday: We’re going to Cologne (Koln) and going on a tour of the cathedrals and museums.

Friday: Following our exchange partners around school for the day and perhaps going to Hattingen

Saturday: Going to a football match – VfL Bochum vs. FC Bayern Munich

Sunday: Whatever the host family wants me to do

Monday: Following exchange partners around school and bowling in the evening

Tuesday: Following exchange parners around school again and then going home on the train and then plane and then train again

I am going to die!

Code:

cp /etc/xdm/menu/applications.menu ~/.config/menu && sudo chown $(whoami) ~/.config/menu/applications.menu

Its GUI is easy to use and has lots of nice easy and simple keyboard shortcuts to use to get things done speedily. It stores the data in wikicode in a nice .txt file.

Zim also has an exporter so that you can output the wikicode into HTML. It has both a GUI exporter (File -> Export) and a CLI exporter.

zim --export dir=/output/dir,format=html,media=copy /location/to/wiki/root Wikiname;
So, my code:

zim --export dir=/mnt/phone/wiki,format=html,media=copy ~/wiki School;

That means that I can copy all my school notes from my wiki to my phone in one easy shell script. I’ll be able to surf my whole years notes (including images) anywhere. No more forgetting notes before tests!

Today was a beautiful day to be on the water, a nice strong current to be fighting against, a cooling breeze and a nice bright sun – the only real annoyance was the fishermen and their lines. I think that soon I’ll really be needing to lose some weight otherwise I won’t be able to go out in my single anymore :\.

I also think that I need to improve my fitness so that I can start winning some regattas so that I can use rowing as a leverage to get into Uni in a few years. Maybe I  should start now – summer hols – lots of free time.