On Wed, 17 Jun 2015 16:24:27 +1200, David Nicholls wrote:
So... What exactly is the Fairfield Lab? Where is it set up? a few details to elaborate on it's background might be helpful. I know someone with teaching (primary) and tech quals who might be useful.
That would be very handy--I’m sure any additional help would be welcomed. Te Whare O Te Ata is the community house <http://fairfield.org.nz/> located at 60A Sare Crescent. At the rear of the place is a building with ten machines in it. They are elderly PCs (nothing better than dual-core, some even 32-bit) donated by Genesis Energy, but still quite usable, running Linux. They are networked to a common server, and there is also a copier/printer in that room. Plus free wireless open to anybody in the grounds. The lab used to offer machine access to anybody who wanted it; for I think a $2 fee, they could spend the morning using the Internet or composing a CV (and printing it on the printer at some extra charge). Last year, on Wednesday evenings, there was a series of free sessions where people (children and adults) could come to learn Python. I volunteered to help out at these sessions. In the event, they were a bit more freewheeling than you might expect from a formal class; there was even some 3D modelling with Blender happening--at least for as long as we could keep the attention span of the kids... As I understand it, the lab was set up and run predominantly through the efforts of the now-disgraced Bruce Kingsbury. In November last year he was nabbed by the cops, and the whole service came crashing down. And it’s been on hold ever since. Yesterday, Rod Aldridge and I spent the afternoon going over the system and working out how it operates (automatic enforcement of morning/afternoon sessions etc), through a whole bunch of shell scripts and cron tasks which I thought were quite reasonably designed overall. I wrote up some notes which I sent to him and to Mike Rarere, the centre manager, (hopefully) for use in administering the system in future. Both of us are keen to see the service start up again, and Mike is also supportive.