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| Warning for any system administrators thinking of deploying the newly released Adobe Reader 9.0, or it's big brother Adobe Acrobat 9.0: if your users have Group Policy applied that uses Group Policy Folder Redirection to move their Application Data directory to a network share (with or without Roaming Profiles), it will cause Adobe Reader/Acrobat to crash almost immediately after launching. I have had this confirmed by Adobe UK Support as a known issue, and there is currently no ETA for a fix.
The issue has been reported by a handful of users on the Adobe Forums and some of my users ran into it after I began a test roll-out of Acrobat on our site yesterday.
( Lengthy technical diagnosis within )
Unfortunately, Adobe were only made aware of the issue very recently, and there is currently no ETA for a fix. I later got a follow-up email from Andrew which stated the following:
"Unfortunately because of the new-ness of the software we are unable to provide you with a direct solution to this issue as all solutions are experimental at this time."
Translation: we're still testing the patch for this. I was told I will be contacted again when a fix is available, but for the meantime, I would strongly advise you do not deploy Adobe Reader 9.0 or Adobe Acrobat 9.0 if your users' have their Application Data directory stored on a network share. | |
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| You've probably picked up before now that I work in a school. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of my friends are teachers. I'm well aware that a few of them will read this, so to them I say, this isn't anything personal. That said, I am now going to rant about my #1 pet peeve about teachers. It's fair to say that teachers' holidays are somewhat infamous. The general public views them as having an enormous amount of holiday time, in particular the 5-6 weeks during the summer, but also the week or two at Easter, Christmas, and the week in the middle of each term. On top of that, they have their mystical short hours because 'they go home at 3.45'. Most people who don't work in education do not factor in the late hours many teachers put in at home after school on a regular basis, or that many do lesson preparation during the aforementioned holidays. Teachers themselves are the first to rant whenever there's a discussion about 'how easy teachers have it with all that holiday', which is why what I am about to describe pisses me off even more. Whenever school restarts after a break (and I guarantee this will happen on Monday, the first day back after half term) someone will ask me, "Did you have a nice break?" ( No, I did not have a nice break. ) | |
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| In all the excitement, I almost forgot to mention the thing I've been having to keep quiet about for over a month.
Last week I put in an application for a new position at work, and following an interview earlier this week, I have been appointed IT Support Manager at Challoner's, effective 1st February (i.e., next week).
To cut a long story short, I approached my boss a couple of weeks before Christmas to express my interest in doing further internal training and taking on more responsibility, although there was no real position to fulfil that as the IT roles that existed at Challoner's were 'IT Technician' (the job I already had) and 'Network Manager' (the position which my boss isn't planning to vacate any time soon). It turns out that senior management had seen this day coming and had already discussed what to do about it, so in quite short order the wheels started to turn to create a new position that could I slot into. Huzzah! etc. | |
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| We recently ran into a problem at with a few kids at school who had 'accidentally' activated High Contrast Mode in Vista by accidentally pressing Shift+Alt+PrtScrn, and couldn't turn it off again. I say 'accidentally' because we've recently seen kids doing this to each other deliberately as this month's Favourite Game of the Month™ (previous winners of Favourite Game of the Month™ include using a hotkey to rotate the screen so it is upside down, and vandalising Wikipedia).
High Contrast Mode is an accessibility feature in Windows that causes the desktop theme to switch off of Aero (or whatever is currently set) onto an almost completely black scheme with white text. It also disables the desktop wallpaper and changes the background colours of applications like Word to black, so it appears the user is typing white text onto black paper.
Despite repeated use of the Shift+Alt+PrtScrn shortcut, High Contrast Mode refused to turn off. Their desktop wallpaper did return, indicating that it was trying to switch out of High Contrast Mode, but not fully succeeding. Our students tend to have much of the Control Panel locked down (as I outlined above, the little bastards cherubs like to fiddle and break things), so the Control Panel applet to turn this off was not available to them, but even making it available and using the applet did not work.
I couldn't find any mention of this via Google, and so it took me a little while to work out what was going on. I eventually traced this problem to an incorrect setting in the Registry. ( Here's what it was, and how to fix it ) | |
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|  While tidying IT4 today, we found a long-lost IT technician in hibernation. | |
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| The Thames Valley Police Helicopter has been hovering very low right over the school for the last 20 minutes, and there's a police car parked round the back of the tennis courts right now... UPDATE 11.01: Staff and police have sealed off the rear of the site to pupils. The Head has just made a PA announcement that police are searching for someone on the run (presumably in the fields to the rear of the school), and that as a precaution, all students are being kept indoors and off the playgrounds and tennis courts during break (now). UPDATE 11.32: Fire evacuation alarm sounded briefly, followed by an urgent announcement for everyone to remain inside. This was apparently caused by the builders, who are on site at the moment, digging through a fire alarm cable. This isn't remotely surprising, as in the last week they have dug through a mains electricity cable, a telephone cable, and two different water mains. We're hearing reports of a heightened police presence all around the New Town area in Amersham. UPDATE 12.02: Helicopter left about 15 minutes ago, but can still be heard in the distance along with sirens intermittently from the town. There's a police unit stationed in the school car park still wearing an all-black short sleeved uniform. This isn't the normal police uniform, and the last time I saw it in Reading train station, it was being worn by an armed officer. No sign of whether this is the case here or not. UPDATE 12.18: We've just received an 'all-clear' from the police and the school timetable has been returned to normal. | |
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| On Friday, the DCGS IT team, plus a few extras, were led across the country on our mystery team-building exercise. Only the drivers and managers in the group were privy to the information of what we were actually doing. The only information we lackeys had been given was the following: From: Janet John
Date: Sun 13/05/2007 16:29
Subject: bonding event We will need to leave school at 1:45pm, no later, on Friday.
We should be back at my house for 7:30pm for a BBQ.
Hopefully it will not be raining, but we will go ahead anyway so be prepared.
You need solid shoes, ones with ankle supports are recommended though solid trainers would be fine.
Don't wear clothes that you care a lot about. After leaving at the appointed hour, there followed a trek down the M25 and M3. As we neared, we realised that we were passing an awful lot of signs for Birdworld, eventually culminating in driving right up to the entrance. Our driver Steve started to wind Mat up by putting his indicator on as we approached the turning, to which Mat exclaimed "It is Birdworld!", only to fall back into his seat dejected when we drove straight past. Instead, we ended up at a place called Go Ape, for what can be best described as a high-wire assault course. Of course, this had some implications which I felt were necessary to disclose to our team leader: Me: "Janet, would this be a bad time to tell you that I'm scared of heights?" Janet: "Yes." As it turns out, I'm not actually scared of heights, as I had though when getting very dizzy on top of an Army assault course scramble net several years ago. At the time I had attributed this to nearly dying aged 11 when I fell 6 feet out of a tree. However, it seems that I am in fact scared not of heights but of falling, so once strapped into the compulsory safety harness I was in fact one of the least worried people there. Mat got knackered and wimped out after the first 3 courses, but this was in fact an advantage to the rest of us as he spent to rest of the afternoon shooting photos, mostly of me looking cool: ( Photos ) | |
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| That's how much space I've freed up on the 500GB student storage drive in the last couple of days by locating and deleting the kids' illegal MP3 collections, videos, warez, N64 emulator ROMs, and copies of Unreal Tournament & Half-Life, along with an assortment of other games.
I dare one of them to come and complain about missing files.
In other news, I gave blood today. It has since occurred to me that the proportion of blood taken is quite close to the proportion of the student storage drive that I liberated... | |
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| This last week, the Network Manager, a.k.a. my boss JD, has been on a skiing holiday. Given that he is the only person who can access certain systems or has any knowledge of how they work, there was always the possibility of something breaking that would remain broken until his return. He left emergency access passwords with the deputy head, but, of course, the knowledge could not be left in trust with anyone. When I arrived on Monday morning I could tell it would be an interesting day ( before I even left the car park. ) | |
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| As seen on the printing report system this afternoon:  | |
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