Order of the Bath

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Installing/Upgrading to AVG8 Free (Windows)

4 May 2008 18:01 by Rick

Now that it is available, upgrading from AVG 7.5 to AVG 8 is a logical step but there are some decision points to be made along the way so it is best to be prepared for them.

[Note that the Free edition has some quite rigid conditions about home use only.] First you have to find it. The link I gave before is still good but it is a few clicks of Grisoft determinedly trying to get you to buy the full suite. Some of the links on the way are a bit misleading. One says that AVG Anti-Spyware is being discontinued but others that it is now included with the Anti-Virus package. The eventual download location is either their own site or C|Net downloads.com.

When you come to install it there is no need to un-install the previous version. You will need to login to an admin account. Leaving a lot out, the sequence of events is:—

Standard or Custom install—you will need custom if you don’t need the email scanner.
For the Custom install, Un-tick the email scanner if you don’t want it.
Un-tick the AVG Security Toolbar if you don’t want it. Everyone seems to want you to get one of those and if you loaded them all you wouldn’t have enough window left to browse in.
Un-tick the “Enable Daily Scanning” box if you don’t want it. I find that it is a long process and very heavy on resources (though they have put in some sort of load-limiter now). I would rather do them when I want to—and certainly not daily.
There is a tick box for informing AVG about potentially dangerous web sites that you come across. I haven’t checked the privacy statement for this yet so I would be cautious.
Definitely SKIP the updates at the moment as the install is not really ready for them.
Skip the registration for the time being.
Now you will need to reboot (it prompts you).
When it comes back the System Tray icon will probably be red. Right click to open the AVG User Interface.
Click Update Now and it should go ahead and do it.

That is the install complete but you need to check one other thing. One of the features of AVG 8 is the AVG Search Shield, sometimes called the Link Scanner. This intercepts results from the search engines (Google etc.) and inspects them for malicious content—try it and see the little green icons after every hit. Quite how it does that I am not sure but it seemed to take a long time and have a lot of internet traffic. I would imagine that on a dial-up connection it would be impossible. The search engines themselves do some quality checking, if this is doing it real time then it would be better but at what cost. The other thing that bothers me about this is that it could be that you are automatically visiting sites that you wouldn’t otherwise touch with a barge pole (porn etc.) and it will leave the evidence of this in your cache even if it never displays it.

If you decide that you don’t want this facility there are two ways to switch it off. You can use the AVG interface, but if you switch it off there it will forever say that AVG is not fully functional. The other way is with the browser controls. It works using a browser plugin (both IE7 and Firefix, I don’t know about Opera or Safari) and these can be disabled. Go to Tools —>Manage Add-ons—>Enable or Disable Add-ons in IE7 or Tools —>Add-ons in Firefox. This will need to be done on EACH ACCOUNT on your computer.

Now you can register at leisure, if you can figure out how. I haven’t yet! It is worth remembering that, despite all my griping, this is still a free service for which we are grateful.

Update: 20 Jun. As far as I can tell, the Firefox plugin which drives LinkScanner is not Firefox 3 compatible. It will be interesting to see how they update it.

Posted in Browsers, email, Security, Technical, Windows | 4 Comments »

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop

2 May 2008 14:22 by Rick

Doing a search with those keywords reveals a number of guides but most are now either old, incomplete or refer to the Ubuntu Server Build which has most of it pre-installed. My requirement was to put Linux (Ubuntu), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (programming language) onto an existing desktop build (under VMware Fusion on a Mac) to serve as a WordPress development test-bed to save me having to keep uploading to a sandpit region on my web host.

The references used to achieve (and write) this were LAMP Installation On Ubuntu, Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 7.10 and Installing and configuring LAMP on Ubuntu.

The process will will mostly be done in a terminal (shell) window and a browser. The latter can be on a separate system on your network, in which case subtitute the Ubuntu IP address for “localhost” in the instructions below.

sudo apt-get install apache2
Change the ownership of the web area using
sudo chown -R [your Ubuntu account] /var/www
and test it by pointing a browser at http://localhost/

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Restart Apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart), create a file /var/www/phpinfo.php containing the line <?php phpinfo(); ?> and test from the browser (http://localhost/phpinfo.php).

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin
During this process you should be asked to set the MySQL root password. It is very important.

Edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and insert the line extension=mysql.so (watch the spelling, the comment in the file is wrong) so that PHP can see MySQL. Also Apache needs to be told where myphpadmin is so edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and add the line
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf
Restart apache again and test by going to phpmyadmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/). The login is root and the MySQL root password (I think).

My immediate requirement was to use it for WordPress. Although you can download a WordPress package using apt-get, I found that this was rather out of date so I did it manually. You will need a database so login to phpmyadmin, create a database by entering the name (e.g. WordPressDB) in the box and click the create button. Now click the SQL button and execute the following command where WordPressDB, WPDBaccount and WPDBaccountPW are your choices.
GRANT ALL ON WordPressDB.* to WPDBaccount@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘WPDBaccountPW’;

Now in the WordPress directory (say /var/www/wordpress) copy the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php and edit it thus

// ** MySQL settings ** // define('DB_NAME', 'WordPressDB'); define('DB_USER', 'WPDBaccount'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'WPDBaccountPW');

Now finish the install by surfing to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
It will give you a WordPress admin password on the way.

That is it—the only problems I found were keeping track of which password was which and went where.

By the way, it is only for use on your home network, there are other things you will need to do if you are planning to set it up as a real internet visible server.

Posted in Technical, WordPress | 3 Comments »

At last I have seen one

25 Apr 2008 13:33 by Rick

I thought that these stupid error messages were mythical but this one is genuine and it is likely to be around for a while as it must be coded into the BIOS.

The mouse is plugged into the keyboard connector.
Press <F1> to continue.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on At last I have seen one

Blame the victim

22 Apr 2008 10:28 by Rick

A new anti spam solution by Abaca aimed at ISPs and large corporations has what they claim is a unique and effective method of reducing errors, particularly false positives (that is marking perfectly good mail as spam in error). What they say is that, in addition to well known detection techniques, their ReceiverNet box looks at the reputation of the recipient to assess the likelihood that the mail is spam. The theory is that if you are promiscuous (or unlucky) with your address and you get a lot of span anyway, then there is a greater chance that this new one coming in is also spam. If, however, you normally receive very little rubbish then the chances are that this slightly suspicious one is ok.

I suspect that there is also a bit of psychology here as well. If you get a lot of spam then you are much less likely to complain if the odd mistake is made. Personally, I would be happier if these bulk filters had a coarse mesh, only trapping the obvious spam and viruses. This would be sufficient for their purposes of reducing network and server load. Leave it to me to fine tune it with a Bayesian algorithm which can learn the sort of mail that I receive and want.

Posted in email, Technical | Comments Off on Blame the victim

Flying Low

10:04 by Rick

If someone you passed in the street stopped you to point out that your trousers were undone, you might get a bit embarrassed as you quickly did them up and you might stutter a bit as you thanked them. What you would certainly not do is flag down a police car and report your informant as a pervert for looking in the first place.

So why, when someone with a bit of knowledge discovers and reports a weakness in a web site, do some major organisations immediately call in the lawyers and take them to court on “hacking” charges. This has got so bad that security researchers, even professionals, are now wary of reporting such flaws direct to the owners. Instead they must publish publicly and anonymously to protect themselves. That means that the criminals have access to the information at the same time as the administrators making them much more vulnerable to attack. To be convicted of theft it has to be shown that you not only took something but also intended to permanently deprive the owner of it. Something similar needs to be added to the various computer misuse laws around the world.

However, in a far sighted move, Microsoft have said publicly that they will not take action in cases like this. Indeed they positively welcome being told.

Posted in Security | Comments Off on Flying Low

HTML Validator extension for Firefox

17 Apr 2008 17:22 by Rick

This *is* available for Mac OS X despite the Firefox Add-ons page saying that it is not. Go to the author’s page to find it.

This is an excellent plugin to check web pages that you have written or other sites for conformance to standards.

Posted in Browsers, Mac, Technical | Comments Off on HTML Validator extension for Firefox

Migrating to Mac (Part 1)

17:12 by Rick

As I said earlier, the internal debate about which system to switch to has been decided and I have bought a Mac Pro (base specification + an extra 2GB memory) with VMware Fusion for virtualisation. Not that there was anything wrong with Ubuntu that I discovered but I needed new hardware and this was good value and has a reputation for quality and reliability. The alternatives were big name PC brands like Dell who wouldn’t guarantee that anything but Vista would work (or sell it without an OS) or independent box builders who don’t seem to stay around long enough to provide backup.

My first impressions were, not surprisingly, very good; Apple have the capacity to Wow! you at first look. Then came the period of terror when I wondered if I would ever get used to it. After three weeks (one of which I was away) I think that I am mostly over that but a few things are proving a bit difficult. I am not getting on very well with the Mighty Mouse. Having configured it to get rid of the Dashboard popup every time I press the scroll nipple too hard and configuring a proper right click, I still have problems controlling it. Scroll; forward is ok but keeping it smooth on the way back is quite hard, and some applications require you to be very accurate. I may need to get a third-party rodent.

Some little things:—I wish full-screen really was full not just big! The desktop icons are a bit big for you to have many on the screen. Command(Apple)-X, C and V are a bit awkward for Cut, Copy and Paste. Giving the machine a sensible name was tricky (I am still not sure I have done it right). I would like my mounted disks to reconnect when I log back in.

I struggled for ages trying to get the TimeMachine backup system to write to my NAS until I discovered that it is not supported, so now I have put on a spare FireWire external drive (called Tardis 🙂 for this. Using it for just account files rather than the whole system uses very little space.

The sleep system is very good but had an unfortunate side effect. The power consumption in sleep mode is so low that it triggered my Intelliplug to shut down, switching off power to all peripherals. This should be a *good thing* but one of these was the aforementioned FireWire disk. When the system was woken up it refused to recognise that a drive was even connected. I tried everything; unplugging, switching on/off and rebooting in various orders but finally what fixed it was using the other FireWire socket on the drive. I don’t know if the first one was damaged or if it was something else as I haven’t tried switching back and now have the drive on permanent power.

A surprising thing I have noticed is the number of updates I have been getting. I expected the initial batch after first switch on because it would be impossible for them to ship fully patched systems but I have had 13 since then in ones and twos including 3 to firmware. Also an unexpected number of them require reboots, even ones for the Safari browser—not the unix style at all. Otherwise they do install very easily and I am impressed with the Sudo based admin password system. It is much easier than keeping a separate Admin account.

A major change from the initial ideas was to scale back the virtualisation to just a single XP guest. I realised that my plan based on a guest machine for each functional task was going to prove very difficult to maintain as there were a number of applications that would need to be on all of them to make it usable. The overhead of keeping them all up to date was going to be too much. A correspondent has also pointed out CrossOver Mac which works a bit like Wine for Linux i.e. allows Windows applications to run in the OS X environment as separate windows and without needing an XP guest (or licence). None of my troublesome applications are on their compatibility list but I am told that WaveCorrector works fine so I will give it serious consideration when I have completed the migration.

What I will do now is detail the application migration using the categories I used in the initial proposal post. You may ask why I don’t use more of the standard built in programs—well, I am used to others and, anyway, I still have to use a PC at work so the more that is common the better.

Browsing/Web

Firefox. Very few problems, though some extensions are clearly not relevant. I thought that one of my favourites, HtmlValidator, was Windows only but on a second look there seems to me a Mac version so I will give it a try. I hardly used IEView (and I should test using a genuine Windows version anyway) but losing AutoHide will be a shame.
CuteFTP I haven’t bought the Mac version yet as I thought someone said that seamless FTP was built into Finder but I haven’t been able to locate it.
Zoom search engine generator. Installed in the XP guest but not yet tested. I am hoping that it will be quite a bit quicker.
HTML Tidy Not tried yet. I mostly use it in the FireFox plugin and in the (sadly missed) NoteTab.

eMail/IM

Thunderbird. Remarkably easy. Some extensions are not relevant but transferring the mail and configuration was just a matter of finding the profile and copying it across. The official guide and this blog post helped a lot. To quote the cliché “It just worked.” The only minor detail I had to tweak afterwards was to locate the Signature files. This is an application that is very sensitive to inaccurate mousing. See below for the Enigmail extension.
PopFile anti spam system. It works fine but it was not easy to install—I have written a separate post about this.
Pop Peeper minimal POP server status. For the moment, I have installed this on the XP guest. This is not entirely satisfactory as I need it more often than I have the guest running. I am wondering if there is a Thunderbird option to download the titles only from a POP server (which is what this program does). I use it to let Mary know that she has mail waiting as I am connected a lot more than she is.
Exodus Jabber IM client. I am using the built in iChat at the moment. This works fine but doesn’t open my rooms automatically when I login.

Document processing

OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. I have installed NeoOffice, the Mac dedicated version of OpenOffice and I have found no problems so far.
PaintShopPro for picture editing. I haven’t done anything here yet.
NoteTab for plain text editing. I have been using a combination of the built in TextEdit and vi but I miss the real thing as it was so fast and flexible. Hint: to convert from a Windows file to a Mac one, use the terminal command tr -d '\r' < input > output. Most programs ignore the differences but some, like shell scripts, are fussy. Oh, and by the way, the # key is Alt-3 hidden behind the £!
Adobe Reader. The built in Preview seems to be adequate.
OmniPage Pro. OCR. Installing the printer/scanner drivers also put on OmniPage LE but I have not tried it yet.
CutePDF pseudo printer driver. All applications I have used so far have a native “Output as PDF” feature so I haven’t needed it.
DjVu image viewer. Not tried yet.

Family History

Family Tree Maker for Windows. Installed in the XP guest but not tested yet.
Resource File Viewer. Installed in the XP guest but not tested yet.
Ged2HTML. Not tried yet.
Some home grown software. I haven’t tried compiling my own code yet. I suspect the only problem may be the user interfaces.

Music preparation

Rip—Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip. Not tried yet. Without direct access to the CD-Rom drive I can’t see this working very well.
Digitise—Wave Corrector. Installed in the XP guest and it works fine for editing files except for a little graphical display lag. I haven’t tried it for analogue recording. This is an applications that requires rapid and accurate scrolling and I am finding that difficult with the the supplied mouse.
Encoding—LAME. Multi-platform but currently only installed in the XP guest for Wave Corrector.
Edit—Audacity. Not tried yet but it looks easy.
Library & Tagging—MediaMonkey. Installed on the XP guest with no problems. I have no intention of getting into iTunes.
Control—Sonos Desktop. The Mac version was installed. The version on the supplied CD didn’t work at all, a known problem with Leopard I think but I can’t recall the details. The downloaded version was fine.
Download—µTorrent. Bittorent (which I always thought was only a commercial port of µTorrent) has a Mac version but it is very lacking in facilities compared to the Windows version. I am also having router firewall problems so it is not tested properly yet.

GPS/Mapping

Garmin MapSource. I have tried to install it on the XP guest but it doesn’t seem to work. This needs more investigation.

Presentation

As this category primarily mirrors the church Windows system, it will remain on the Windows legacy system.

Security

AVG anti virus. Although it will have very little use I have installed it on the XP guest and it works fine.
ZoneAlarm firewall. Installed on the XP guest and works with no problems. The OS X firewall configuration is a bit opaque. I tried switching it to the most secure mode and all my access to the NAS and other network shares stopped working so it is obviously *too* secure. I will need to look into it more to see if it is possible to configure it but it doesn’t look as easy as ZoneAlarm.
GnuPG encryption. The dedicated Mac version was installed using the excellent instructions at Zeitform. Only the base product, Preferences (for configuration) and DropThing were installed but I will probably add FileTool later. The Enigmail Thunderbird extension interfaces to GnuPG seamlessly and also provides key management. The only glitch was at the Windows end. I found that the GUI application wouldn’t export all my existing keys in one go (bug) so I will have to use a command line instruction.
PINS password manager. Installed on the XP guest with no problems.

Programming

I haven’t tested it for my own software, but I have installed the optional Xcode developer kit on the Mac which should provide all the facilities I need,
MinGW Minimal GNU for Windows with compiler etc. I will need to install this on the guest if I am to continue to maintain Windows versions of software I have written.
Tortoise CVS versioning system. As above.

Backup/Restore

Backup4all. Installed on the XP guest but not tested yet (tut tut). The Mac TimeMachine backup mechanism is running and seems to do the job but I have gut worries about a full system recovery using it.
Pen Drive Manager—replicates and backs up memory sticks. Installed on the XP guest and it works seamlessly but I can’t see this TSR type program working with CrossOver Mac!?
WinZip. Installed on the XP guest because it may be needed. OS X has a built-in facility though I have not tried creating ZIP files yet, except via the command line

Other software

Eraser—file and disk blanking system. Not considered yet.
FreeUndelete—File recovery. Not considered yet.

Hardware

2 x 1280×1024 LCD monitors running an extended desktop. During the migration I am using one screen on each system. The dual head graphics card on the Mac should give no problems although the Mac desktop is geared up to wide-screen.
The Mac Pro is reputed to come with a high quality sound system including digital in/out but I have not tried it in earnest yet
SCSI connected Canon Scanner. This will probably remain in limbo though I will leave the interface card and software on the legacy system.
External NAS for music store and backup. No problem except as noted above for TimeMachine.
Network connected Canon MP600R Printer/Scanner. The supplied Mac drivers and software installed without problems, though a lot of the utilities have not been tested.

That is many of the applications covered but, except for mail, browsing and a little document processing, I haven’t migrated the workload yet with all it’s associated data. Watch out for the Part 2 update in a few weeks time.

Posted in Mac, Technical, Windows | Comments Off on Migrating to Mac (Part 1)

Installing POPfile on Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard)

15 Apr 2008 21:09 by Rick

As you may guess from the title, I have made the decision on how to switch away from Windows. It is not that Ubuntu had any problems but, having discovered that I would need to get new hardware anyway, the Mac PRO seemed to be the most reliable option at the best price. Yes, I spent more than I intended but they have jolly good salesmen who know their stuff down at Western Computer.

I have also scaled back the virtualisation plans to just a single XP guest running under VMware Fusion but I will talk more about that in a future post.

In general, installing software on the Mac is just as easy as on a PC; in many cases easier if you do the PC properly with a separate admin account—you don’t need to on OS X because of the Sudo based “run as admin” facility which really works. But some of the more obscure open source packages don’t have proper installers, probably due to low demand and/or lack of resources. One of these is the POPfile email classification (anti-spam) system. It works fine but is a pain to install with a dozen pre-req bits and pieces, some of which need to be compiled from scratch and even the documentation is a bit out of date. Having now done it, I will make my contribution to the project and publish an install script. Not a full blown installer, because I don’t know how to do that, but a scripted version of all the little bits that have to be done which will make it much simpler … [more]

Posted in email, Mac, Technical | 1 Comment »

Virtualisation/Ubuntu – Progress

24 Mar 2008 08:15 by Rick

These are some rough notes on my progress and developments in this project.

The first job was to download Ubunto 7.10 workstation i386 and cut it to a CD, a little tricky because I lost my CD Writer software on a previous rebuild but ISOrecorder came to the rescue. Then an experiment booting from the CD. That was a curious experience, all the initial graphics, logo and whizzing orange stripe, worked fine but when it all stopped I was left with a plain off white screen and a mouse pointer (which worked). Nothing else. I can only assume that there is some problem with my graphics card that it doesn’t support. I did a similar experiment with a very old Win98 machine and the result was similar except that the finished result was a plain while on black terminal, no graphics at all despite the boot time graphics all working.

For the next stage, I installed the free VMware Server edition. I can’t see any differences to the workstation edition which costs money but that can always be a future route. There are two parts to the download; the platform software (Win or Linux) and the tools. I haven’t found any use for the latter as all you need is built into the base product. When installing on Windows it complains if you don’t have IIS (web server) installed. You can ignore this as it is only needed for remote control of the system (as you would in a real server environment). Installed, as usual, under admin authority, it runs without any problems under a limited user account creating all the run-time files in C:/Virtual Machines

VMware lacks any “Quick Start” instructions but diving in it quickly became apparent what was needed. I created two virtual machines, one for XP pro and one for Ubuntu taking all the defaults. I booted the first and it immediately recognised the CD in the reader and proceeded to install. I used the same key as the host machine and there were no complaints. The performance was sluggish to the extreme but improved considerably once the VMware tools were installed on the guest using the button provided—This is very slick, what it does is to mount a pseudo CD-ROM onto the guest O/S which initiates an Autorun and proceeds to install. I also spotted that the default memory size that VMware gives XP is 256MB which is a bit low. Increasing this to 512MB improved things. Another thing learned by experience was not to go to full screen mode until the virtual machine is fully booted and the O/S loaded. Doing it before can get you stuck there as it doesn’t respond the the CNTL-ALT hot keys to break out. As soon as you can you need to turn off any screen saver and disable hibernate as it is not only pointless but also can use up all the host CPU resources when activated. I have also seen a recommendation not to activate the Windows install until after all the “hardware” customisation and VMware Tools is installed else it could trigger the MS alarms about pirated software.

Installing the Ubuntu guest was similarly easy though the install of the VMware tools wasn’t as slick. It required using a command line instruction (which I have now forgotten again) to actually initiate the install. It does say that you should be experienced with the Guest operating system, which is fair. Another thing that surprised me (about Ubuntu itself) were the 201(!) security patches that it wanted as soon as it settled down—and these took a couple of hours to download and install. I agree that it is now as easy as Windows Update but I wasn’t expecting that quantity. I presume it is because it is a fully loaded distro with many packages pre-installed. At least they are all handled by the same system. A minor glitch is that it complained about a proprietary driver in use. This turned out to the the VMware Ethernet emulator. For smoothness this should be incorporated or whet ever is necessary. The default guest configuration for Ubuntu was 512MB and it worked just fine. Both had a fixed size 8GB disk which was plenty for a base O/S install and a modest number of applications but you would need more if you were storing data there as well. Suspending a running O/S (of either sort) was very easy and they were very quick to restart and be ready for action.

Both machines were also quick to boot from the start but the Ubuntu login was a bit slow. A disconcerting feature of VMware is that, as the machines boot, the window size jumps about both in shape and size as the graphics emulator allows for the resolution requested by the guest. It is probably possible to fix this but it is OK when you get used to it. The finished size is set using Display properties in XP as usual but is set by the VMware tools for Ubuntu. I would suggest that if you plan to use your guests full screen then you chose the same size as the native host but if you plan to use cascaded windows then chose a size smaller to avoid scroll bars (which are impractical) and allow room for the window furniture.

Running both together was very very slow. My system has only 1GB memory and running the host and two 512MB guests was too much for it. Future experiments are to get the sound working (that is not in the default guest config), test things like cut and paste, USB connections, storage on the host file system and duplicating these sample builds to create working versions with the required applications.

Meanwhile…

The PC has become even more unstable to the extent that I can’t continue with the trials. I spent an afternoon refreshing the BIOS and all the hardware drivers and, if anything, it got worse. It has crashed once while writing this, during which it seems to have un-configured all of my Firefox settings. Grrr. This means that I will need to replace the hardware now, accelerating what was to be phase 2.

In the light of the performance issues, the specification of the new box needs to be: As fast a processor as economically sensible, 2GB+ memory, dual head graphics, decent sound and RELIABLE.

Curiously this matches very closely with the base level Mac Pro: 2.8GHz quad Core Intel Xeon processor, 2GB 800MHz memory, dual head ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, 320GB SATA drive at £1,429.

As a comparison the DELL XPS720 configured with 3.0GHz quad core Q6600, 2GB 800MHz memory, dual head Nvidia 8800GT, 2x250GB SATA raid 0 disk system comes to £1609 and the difference in performance probably wouldn’t show. There are no guarantees that it would run Ubuntu either as, although they do sell them now, there are only two and relatively low specification.

Posted in Mac, Technical, Windows | Comments Off on Virtualisation/Ubuntu – Progress

IT in schools

17 Mar 2008 14:16 by Rick

The school English department has two roles. One is to teach the beauty of the language that we live with. To do this they will use the great writers of history and the present day; the poets, playwrights and novelists. They will teach metaphor, irony, meter and the structure of a novel and encourage the pupils to write in various styles both emulating the best and displaying originality of their own. The second role is to teach grammar and spelling, the use of a dictionary and thesaurus, how to construct a sentence and compose an essay. This is needed both to complement the first role and also because the kids will need it in their other studies. To understand text books and write their essays and course work for other subjects ranging from Religious Studies to Physics, including, occasionally, Maths. Both aspects are taught simultaneously and interwoven; I don’t think there is much separation of Language and Literature these days.

Similarly, there are these same two roles for the IT department. Computers are ubiquitous in society today and children need to know how they work, what they can do and how they do it. They need to understand how they are linked together in networks and their relationship with servers, the internet and business processes (I am guessing here, I hope that they are taught this). But, just like their English lessons, they also need to be taught the mechanics of “how to do things on the computer” for their other courses. They will need to discover how to create a document on a word processor, how to draw a graph using a spreadsheet. They pretty soon discover how to obtain information using the web browser! More advanced pupils may also need to study hardware design, operating systems, programming, human-computer interfaces and usability. It is a challenge for the IT department to integrate these aspects into a coherent curriculum.

A major different between the two subjects is the relative uniformity of the English language, and the wide variety of computer systems available. I am sure Microsoft would be very happy if IT meant Windows and word processing meant MS Office—they spend considerable effort in trying to convince Schools that this is the case—but that would be to give in to commerce. Are schools in the business of education for life or training for work?

The first aspect of IT teaching is hardware/software independent. There is little practical involvement except for demonstration purposes so the question doesn’t really arise. It is the second part, the practical application, that causes a problem. The kids not only need to be taught how to do these things on the equipment provided by the school, they also need to be able to replicate it on whatever systems they have access to at home. This constraint can place conflicting requirements onto what and how things are taught. Miss Posh Bentley may have been given a new Vista laptop for her birthday whilst Mstr. Rusty Ford may use the family machine cast out from a local shop, others may have none at all. This is the real digital divide. Where does the school place itself in this environment?

What are the options, taking into account their pupils needs and the limited budget? It is true that there are alternatives available, mostly at a much lower capital cost and, arguably, cheaper in the long run too. There are freely available operating systems, office packages, databases and most other applications needed.

BECTA have already said that they can see no benefit in schools installing MS Vista or Office 2007. Schools doing so will either face a complete replacement of all their computers as it demands a very high specification or will have to live with a mixed environment. However as time goes on the latter will be more likely as older systems become unavailable for replacement. The “training for work” view doesn’t stand up to inspection anyway as, by the time they need it, any particular system that they have been taught will be obsolete.

Although it may seem attractive to have a connected network of uniform systems, this is not possible in the long term. It may be just about possible for a single subject class but across the whole school it will be impractical. I believe that schools should take advantage of this now and convert some systems to use free products. Start with those systems that you would otherwise have to retire, install something simple like OpenOffice Writer, a modern fully functional word processor and put them in to a class where only text document creation is required. Then, on the next purchase round, negotiate a system with new hardware but free software and use the savings to make the budget go further.

Footnote

An additional burden often placed on school IT departments is having to support the day to day maintenance of the school systems from finding lost mouse balls to deploying new networks. Other subject staff are required to prepare and present material in digital form, from reports to lesson material so they need systems in the staff room. These also need to interact with office systems for secretarial and finance. With the move to wireless networks, an online presence for PR and, now, work-from-home teaching materials this world is getting ever more complex and demands an adequately resourced and dedicated IT infrastructure support independent of the academic staff.

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