Using your own laptop on our courses - now even easier!
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2013-07-05 10:54:31 - Graham EllisTen years ago, we always provided equipment for delegates to use during courses. Delegates had their own desktop systems at work for the most part, and moving those into a training room was impractical. But times have changes, and more often than not these days - for programming courses such as Python especially - most delegates use their own laptops. Not only does that mean they have the environment that they'll be using late on available to them during the course, but it also means they can retain any notes they take and examples they have written.
But the move to delegate's own computers has brought a new issue us - their systems are not loaded with the various example data files that we may use for exercises during the course. It's easy enough to download the files as they're required, but getting everyone to put in a URL each time data's needed is a bit of a bind. So - in response to customer feedback last week - I've provided a single short URL that allows delegates to grab all of the data files in one go.
http://melksh.am/coursedata
That runs a PHP script ...
<?php
# Section here that checks that whc_data is present, correct and up to date
$result = `tar czf - whc_data`;
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=whc_data.tgz");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
print $result;
?>Want to learn more about the short but clever stuff here? It's covered on our PHP courses
We remain happy to provide systems for delegates to use on ANY course, and always carry one or two spare machines with us for customer use, even if advised that they'll be using their own. For courses such as Linux, Apache httpd and Tomcat, we still prefer and expect delegates to use our machines as we reconfigure a number of admin settings during the course, which delegates won't want to do to their own systems!