Ben Hovinga

Our school is one of the few in Ontario that are trying to become an eco-school. We have been a silver eco-school as of last year and this year we are trying for the gold.

In Academic Resources there is a sign-in system. When you come into the room you must sign your name on the sheet. The problem with this system is that it uses a lot of paper and most of which is just thrown away. It was a teacher in AR that had the idea of having an electronic sign-in system using excel. After seeing it while he was still making it I just about cried by how difficult it would make things for entering and leaving the room. I decided that during my spare I would sit in AR and write a neat and user friendly php/mysql program on my laptop. For those that now what these are you would also know that you need a web server, I used xampp lite just because everything was in one place and I could run it from my USB drive.

Here are the functions of the sign-in system.
I had a nice looking home page that everyone would see when they go to sign-in. This page has three buttons, a door with the words sign-in below, a door with the words sign-out below, and a button almost invisible in the top right that says Administrator (need user and pass).

When a student would come in they would click on the sign-in door. They would do a search for their last name. If they are not in the list they can create their self (just first and last name). If they are in the list they would enter why they are here. Once submitted it is automatically time stamped and stored in the database.

When a student is going to leave they would click the sign-out door, find their name from the list of signed in students and sign-out. Again once submitted the sign-out time is automatically tracked and stored to the database.

Teachers could easily access all of this information and more from the administrator panel. Stuff like student list and a mass sign-out function for students who forget to sign-out (like me).

As I was working on this I was also learning more about PHP and a week of working on this went by and after I was done I showed the head of AR. She loved it and wanted it setup now. We setup a time to talk to the LAN tech to see if he can setup a computer at the door.

Here is the kicker. I never even showed him the program. As the computer was starting up I was explaining how I did it and what I used. When I told him that I used xampp lite he flipped out and said no servers even if its on a stand alone system (off the network).

So in the end I was learning against the the rules and I also wasted a week of my life.

If you are like me, Canadian and a Web Geek, you have noticed that all of the good Internet content is available to the US only. Some examples of this are Hulu.com, Zune Marketplace, Netflix, and Pandora are just to name a few. If you go to any of these sites from within Canada the site will try to detect your IP address and reference it to a GeoIP program. If the program tells the site that you are not from the US they will block you out.

But WHY???

If these sites did not have the GeoIP program they would not know where you are from and would let everyone into the site. Also if they did not get the GeoIP program they would get a big Federal charge against them because of Copyright Laws. You see all of the content on the site is licenced for use inside the US only and can be a pain to re-licence all of the content for all other countries. So in all laziness and confusion they won’t.

I have yet to hear of any website that blocks content from Canada to the US. I think someone should start a web company like the ones listed above and block out only the US and let other counties enjoy the content.