Archive for February, 2009
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02.15.09
ccnp training course
I’m now away at a training centre in Bedford, a long way from home. I’m here to do my Cisco CCNP course, but not in the conventional manner. I’m here on a boot camp style training course – 13 days solid training, 14 hours per day. Usually the CCNP is done over four, one week courses. There are four exams to pass, which here are built into the course structure, but usually are taken in your own time once you have completed your week and had time to revise.
I’m very much excited, but also quite anxious about underachieving. I am fairly knowledgeable on the subject matter and work in a job that this is useful for, but I currently have little applied practical experience, mostly I deal in theoretical practicalities.
I completed the CCNA in April 2007 and managed that relatively comfortably (although had to re-take due to missing a whole chunk of questions on a multi-question page and failing my first attempt by 0.1%), and since then have had further exposure to different technologies, so I’m hopeful that I’m at a level where I won’t get left behind.
I’m doing the training through Firebrand and this course is based at Wyboston Lakes. Although I’ve just arrived and haven’t really look around properly yet it would seem to be quite a nice place. Let’s hope I still feel the same way in two weeks time when I’m finishing up…
Sadly I won’t have any real opportunity to update my blog or Twitter while I’m here as I think the 14 hours each day will take it out of me, and I’m going to need all the energy I can save to help me through the experience. I’ll give an update though when I’m done, and give some feedback on the boot camp experience and the quality of the course so folks thinking of giving it a shot have an idea of what to expect.
See you in two weeks…..
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02.12.09
wordpress 2.7.1 update
Yesterday I noticed that WordPress 2.7.1 had been released, and keen as I always am to take advantage of updates and fixes in software (as I write this I’ve noticed that the auto draft saving thingy now displays the right time, yay) I applied it straight away, before toddling off to work. Later in the day I took a look at the old blog stats (as I tend to constantly do, hoping for some Google love, or just love generally to be honest) and noticed that the site didn’t look quite like what it oughta.
The upgrade had of course made adjustments to files within the theme that I was using and replaced the files with updated versions. My CSS was gone, and my header image had vanished. Nothing looked quite right. Initially I panicked and thought that I would never remember all the little changes that I had made and sulked. Later, I started to work my way through and slowly the site came back to life. Hopefully now is all restored as it was.
If I hadn’t have customised the view of the theme then I guess things would have all gone swimmingly, as basically things defaulted back to the out of the box look. I’m now hoping to find some magic plugin that will dump my WordPress install into source code control in case I cock it up like that in the future.
Teach me for blindly installing updates I suppose. I’ll know next time.
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02.10.09
valentine’s day
Soon to be valentine’s day again, hip hip hooray. I like the sentiment, I think that lavishing your loved ones with attention is a great idea. It’s just sad that we need a special day of the year to encourage people to do it.
I was listening to a podcast this morning (You look nice today) where the guys on it were talking about their Christmas present buying methods. Now this is a comedy podcast, so this may not necessarily be true…. However, one of the guys put forward that he and his wife buy each other nothing and Christmas, birthdays, Valentines etc. Instead, at random times for no reason at all they would buy each other gifts. This is a brilliant idea! Everyone loves a surprise, and nice as it is to get gifts on dedicated days it’s all rather predictable, but you can’t fail to be touched when someone buys you something or does something for you out of the blue.
Mrs Tom and I haven’t ever dined out together for valentine’s. Thankfully she appreciates that restaurants will server poor quality food (because they ram in as many people as they can and can’t possibly provide good service to them all, sadly even the nicer ones), and charge far more than they usually do. I’m not going to harp on about this point, because most people know this and it’s been written about thousands of times. However, there do seem to be a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this, and they are the people filling the restaurants. Let’s call them….. “idiots.”
Mrs Tom and I are heading out tonight for dinner (if Mrs Tom remembered to book it – romantic aren’t I). It is a special valentine’s menu, but it’s at one of our favourite restaurants – The Indian Princess in Margate. Let’s not say too much about Margate. Yes, that’s about enough. The Indian Princess however is exquisite. It is a gourmet Indian restaurant of a quality rarely found outside of London. It is very well reviewed and I’ve enjoyed the food thoroughly every time I’ve been. Even Adam Curry and John Dvorak would enjoy it, and that is saying something. Perhaps they’d like to drop by one time and take me there and I’ll show them. Just a thought.
I wish people would treat each other the way they do on valentine’s day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays and all those other special days every day of the year. Then maybe we wouldn’t have to listen to Wizzard every Christmas singing about it being Christmas every day (although I do actually quite like the song).
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02.07.09
what is it with twitter?
Twitter is a social networking site with a very limited focus. Its sole reason for being, say its authors, is to allow its users to answer the question “what are you doing?” Think of it as your Facebook status. That’s it. Really. It has been dismissed and mocked by those that do not quite understand it, only later for them to succumb to the temptation themselves. More recently, ‘celebrities’ have been signing up in droves, joining the throng in what looks to be this year’s new toy.
In fact Twitter has been around for at least a couple of years, and was for the longest time a niche exploited by Silicon Valley tech folks like Leo Laporte (twit.tv, leoville.com, @leolaporte) and his friends. Even John C Dvorak (dvorak.org/blog, @therealdvorak) was late to the party, rubbishing Twitter for the longest time before finally succumbing to its advances. Now he’s a regular user and happy to be so.
So what is it about Twitter that makes it so popular? Different strokes for different folks, it has to be. People with a huge following like Dvorak or Laporte can use Twitter to their advantage, to crowd source or get a message to a huge number of people almost immediately. The folks who are following them are hoping to find out something new, interesting or funny from someone they admire or have an interest in.
There is an element of voyeurism too. Jonathon Ross and Robert Llewellyn are happy to share with you their day-to-day activities in a way which brings their followers closer to them, and allows them to directly interface with their fanbase. It brings a feeling of being connected. For the less famous of us, Twitter is about the following, and an opportunity to get a reply from a person that you would likely otherwise never have the opportunity to meet.
Stephen Fry is a phenomenon. He does little more than provide an insight into his daily schedule and provide some of his clever wit, yet he has amassed a following which at the time of writing this is second only to the president of the USA in the twitter rankings. Fry does little if nothing in the way of self promotion, so it would appear his following is nothing short of a reflection of the adoration his public has for him.
Twitter is replacing blogging in many places. This no doubt has a lot to do with the ease at which one can contribute – updates can be made via the web and many many clients for both handheld devices like the iPhone as well as PCs and Macs. There is also the 140 character limit, which has led to this form of communication to be referred to as micro-blogging. Short sharp ‘tweets’ are much easier to throw out than thoughtful, considered blog postings.
There is something for everyone in Twitter. Get signed up and follow some folks you like.
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I’m trying to get onto the Cisco website to obtain latest software for an ASA firewall I am going to deploy, but I can barely even get to the front page. When I can see the front page, if I try to log in or get to any other pages it goes nowhere.
C’mon Cisco, sort it out, you are the bloody internet!
UPDATE: It’s fixed now, minutes after I blogged it.
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02.03.09
nationalrail.co.uk sucks
The National Rail website for UK travel information is awful, truly awful. It’s badly designed to start with, and functionality is worse. Trying to find the times of trains on their website is a cumbersome business because of the way they have put this thing together.
It’s refreshing then to see other people putting together sites and applications which feed on the information available via nationalrail.co.uk but do a much better job on presentation, speed and ease of use. I have an iPhone, and have a couple of applications I use to look up train times, Trains and MyRail which has become my favourite. If you follow either of those links you’ll find that neither application is available any longer.
National Rail is incredibly protective about their data. I’m not sure why, it’s already in the public domain via their website. If they did a good enough job of providing the information in the first place then people wouldn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel, but their service sucks and so people do.
Trains and MyRail are not the first or last to have been pulled due to National Rail asking for the service to be removed. My buddy Chris Roos setup a National Rail Twitter Service which he has now had to take down due to a request from National Rail, and other services will come and go.
Somehow, Matthew Somerville has been allowed to persist with traintimes.org.uk, a slimmed version of the main National Rail website. The horrid usability has been replicated but Matthew’s site does seem more responsive and has ‘bookmarkable URLs‘ which the main site does not. How Matthew has been allowed to continue where others have not is a bit of a mystery though. I should clear up now that I am not advocating the removal of Matthew’s service but rather a uniform application of policy and allowing everyone to access this publicly available data paid for by their customers.
The National Rail service also suffers from obvious scaling issues in times of high demand such as now when we have very bad weather. I’m in IT, and I understand that you do not normally scale a website to cope with absurd peaks just in case Stephen Fry mentions your site on Twitter. However, a service like this which a heck of a lot of people depend on should be able to cope with high demand – the operation of the country depends on it.
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02.02.09
conficker/downadup virus
Schools in Kent appear to be suffering quite a bit with the conficker / downadup virus. This first sentence immediately signifies a problem with the anti-virus community – different AV vendors give different names to the same virus. F-Secure describe the virus as downadup, Sophos, Symantec and McAfee all describe it as conficker. Some other vendors call it something different from either. If there was a universal name for every virus it would be simpler to convey messages to the public – AV industry, fix this. Decide on a standard and move on.
The conficker virus spreads using mapped network drives, portable storage devices (USB keys, camera flash memory etc), a vulverability in Windows (patched by Microsoft in October), network admin shares with weak passwords, an HTTP server generated by the virus itself. It’s a comprehensive virus, as smart as I’ve ever seen. It’s spreading very fast too, currently estimated at over 10 million hosts.
What is worrying people is that other than propagating itself and preventing access to security update sites (the virus prevents access to Windows update and anti-virus updates to try to prevent you from removing it) is that there is currently no payload to the virus – it doesn’t actually do anything. Viruses usually affect some kind of activity upon their hosts. In years gone by you had the Blaster worm which attempted to bring down the Microsoft Windows update site and would restart computers, and the Netsky family of worms which disrupted the user experience. The reason the conficker virus is worrying is that with 10 million hosts infected, if its author decides to affect a payload, the effects could be devastating – these hosts are sitting awaiting further instructions from their creator . Imagine 10 million people trying to access the same website at the same time. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. Whatever the chosen target is for the attack will be brought to its knees.
I’m awaiting the continued story of this virus with interest.