Archive for March, 2009
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03.22.09
national rail iPhone app
I suppose it was inevitable given that they have been ordering people to take down their iPhone apps providing the same functionality, but National Rail has launched an iPhone app. At £4.99 it is expensive as apps of this nature go, although so far it has nothing but rave reviews. I have to say I’m shocked about that.
I mentioned in a previous post that National Rail have previously ordered other folks to take down iPhone apps and websites providing a far superior experience for discovering train info than their own website, and using their data to boot. I am shocked that people seem to be very pleased with their iPhone offering considering their website for the very same thing is nothing short of utter shite. I would have thought that a sensible thing for them to have done would be to buy out the most successful app already in existence, rather than chugging away at a new version of the good old wheel.
I still hang on to my older apps which I managed to get before they were torn down from the store, the best of which I got for free. I’m afraid you won’t be getting a review from me of the National Rail version of it as there is no way that I’m shelling out 5 quid for something which should be freely available given that they probably want people to be using trains. The alternative is to put up with their damn awful website, which rather than improve they’ve decided to advertise on to bring in revenue. Tip for the rail folks: if people could easily and efficiently get accurate information about their train journeys on a consistent basis, the revenue would come from customers, bums on seats, you know the sort.
Just an idea.
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03.17.09
bad day at the office
It’s been a bad day at work today. We authorised a change to our filtering system which upset a lot of people, and then when those people complained, we pushed back against the complaints. Bad news all round – a lot of extra work for my team, and lots and lots of unhappy customers, a definite big fat FAIL.
I should start by saying that up front I was in favour of the change, we actually thought that the change was already in place, and it was a surprise to us last week to learn that it wasn’t, so after some internal debate we raised a change to fix the situation. However, minutes after the change went live this morning there were people calling in to complain that we had taken away some of their access, and that they wanted it back. After about the third report of this I threw it over to our project team.
What I had hoped and campaigned for was that we would revoke the change, admit error, take it back and re-think. What I got was a decision that this was policy and that we should run with it. I instructed my team accordingly and we got on with it.
The end result was that each of us took call after call, email after email from people unhappy about the change, and we had to deal with it. It’s easy to make unpopular policy decisions when you don’t have to deal with the consequences, isn’t it. It’s a bad day when every call you take is from someone who wants your head on a plate and tells you that you’ve screwed up their day.
Come the end of the day certainly the folks in my team had had enough. The change was made with the intention of furthering protection for children, which it does certainly achieve by denying access to the resources, but at what cost. Sometimes you have to make a decision based on cost/benefit analysis and not based upon Utopian ideals that “everything should be this way so let’s force it to be this way,” it just doesn’t work.
Tomorrow is another day.
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03.16.09
iPhone 3.0 announcements march 17th
Apple are giving the public a preview of what is to come in the new version of the iPhone OS tomorrow which will be version 3.0. As I’ve previously mentioned I’m a huge fan of the iPhone and am excited by the new stuff that they will include in what ought to be a markedly different version, given the major version number change to 3.0 from the current 2.2.1.
As usual there are rumours floating around as to what these new features will be and Kevin Rose is throwing his hat into the ring to tell us what will and won’t be happening (he was bang on with the iPod Nano stuff last year, although has previously been way off). I don’t really care what actually makes it in, but what does I’m expecting to be great stuff. Apple has a great reputation for innovation and creativity which is what gets people excited for these events, there is always such a buzz around them.
We’ll see tomorrow I guess. Check out theiphoneblog.com for live coverage of the event!
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03.08.09
a weekend of relaxation
After my two week training course it has been nice to get back to normality this weekend and do things at a slower pace, catching up with household chores, arranging vet visits for pets, reading etc. Having done a few things around the house I’m now gearing up for a run, which will be my first for some time having been off the radar for a little while.
In September my friend Chris and I ran the Cancer Research 10k in Finsbury Park in London. I quite enjoy running but do need a kick to get myself up and out of the house. This year I set myself a goal of competing in three more races – one more 10k and two 5k races. Eventually I would like to be able to run in half marathons and maybe even a full marathon.
I’m hoping that there will be some local races starting soon that I can join in. I’m not necessarily interested in the competitive element, but rather having a target to work towards and therefore a reason to get myself out and on the road. If anyone who knows of a good place to find races in the Ramsgate area I’d be pleased to hear from you.
Right now I need to get into my running gear and get on with it! Then back to the chores….
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A colleague has alerted me to a useful TechRepublic article which details how to transfer your Cisco PIX configs to the ASA platform. You can read about it here.
With the PIX now end of sale and due to be end of support in 2013, those looking at hardware refresh programmes might find this tool useful. Another angle for those of you who don’t necessarily run a watertight ship would be to start from scratch and eliminate what you no longer need from your rule base.
From the same article, it seems Cisco will stop software maintenance on the PIX in July this year, so whilst support may continue to 2013, that isn’t much use if you have a bug that needs fixing.
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03.03.09
cisco ccnp certification, done.
I’ve just returned from completing my Cisco CCNP training at Firebrand’s flagship training centre in Wybotson Lakes, Bedfordshire. Thankfully I have emerged from the experience unscathed, and with the CCNP qualification as a tremendous bonus.
As I mentioned in my previous post the course was structured intensively, aiming to get through what would traditionally be four one-week courses in just thirteen days. A rather ambitious task you might feel, and you would be correct.
Wyboston Lakes is a dedicated training and conference centre in Bedfordshire. The accommodation and training suites are all in one site and provide an immersing experience, ideal to provide the setting for intensive training. There was no worry about transport or organising meals, just turn up and learn. The facilities were great – modern equipment, clean, well decorated classrooms, nice lounge areas, a bar, a great looking golf course, a restaurant, free coffee/tea/soft drinks/biscuits/fruit – all good stuff. Not that there would be any time to enjoy these lovely surroundings….
The four courses involved in CCNP are BSCI, BCMSN, ONT and ISCW, and we tackled them in that order, beginning with BSCI on Monday February 16th. BSCI is the routing course – OSPF, EIGRP, IS-IS, RIP, BGP and all that jazz, with a bit of IPv6 thrown in for good measure. The pace of this was extremely intense, non-stop from the morning of day one until the morning of the exam on Thursday three days later. BGP is an enormous topic and highly complex, but incredibly powerful. The others are all fairly straightforward once you’ve looked at them for long enough. For the first three nights I don’t think I was in bed before midnight once, staying up to complete labs or review the day’s activities or do practice tests. Thankfully I was fortunate enough to make it through the exam. Tests were scheduled for 5pm, so after dinner at 7 we had a night off from studying.
BCMSN is the switching course – spanning tree, VLANs, gateway redundancy, multicast etc. This was two full days of lecture with the exam scheduled for Sunday, and again very highly paced. The content was harder to swallow in some places as you have to learn about deprecated protocols just because it is still on the test, but it was very interesting with lots of labs. Having passed BSCI there was a little pressure to pass the BCMSN. Some others were due to be taking the composite exam in the morning anyway having missed out on the first test (you can either sit BSCI and BCMSN separately or take the composite – Firebrand recommend taking the separate tests initially so that you have another chance if you fail either of the first two), so in a way the BCMSN result didn’t matter a great deal, although of course everyone wanted to do their best.
I failed the BCMSN test by one point, and was a little annoyed to say the least.
What annoyed me more than failing was that having come so close to the mark I had clearly not absorbed as much of the material as I had hoped – I would have been disappointed to have passed by one point, but probably not quite as much if I’m honest. Failing meant that I had to get up with the others and take the composite when I had had my fingers crossed for a lay in (and on my birthday too!). Thankfully I passed the composite with a good score and was back on track to the begin the ONT course later that morning.The ONT is the smallest course, lightest on material, but heavy on memorisation. There are no practical elements to the exam, whereas the others all contain simulation items. ONT concentrates on VoIP, QoS and wireless technologies. There is some bizarre exam content with some questions asking what can be found on certain tabs on Windows wireless clients, which is quite irritating (my first thought was “I don’t know, show me and I’ll tell you”). The tutor wasn’t very keen on these strange inclusions, but of course if they are on the test you need to know them. I definitely found this course to be a much more relaxed pace than the first two. I also found the content very interesting: QoS and VoIP go hand in hand and wireless is here to stay and we need to implement measures to reduce risks and secure it.
ISCW was last, and again much more gently paced than the first week. It covers security technologies such as IPSec and IPS, and MPLS. Again the content is very interesting and very much applicable to today’s large networks (except the stuff on Cisco homeworker links – hands up if you have a Cisco router at home to connect you to the office?). Thankfully I managed to finish up having gotten through the last two tests ok, and so finished with my CCNP.
Overall it was a fantastic experience. The other guys on the course (no girls – sorry girls) were all great to spend the two weeks with and the tutor was absolutely first grade, he knew the subjects in a depth that was truly impressive. I’m not quite sure how I’d feel about the whole thing if I had not come away with the certification, but I’d hope that I would say the same. It is very hard work, and you have to be prepared to cut yourself off from the world for two weeks and work late every single day you are there, no weekends off or early finishes (except maybe on exam days when you might get to finish at 7 after the test). It is definitely something I would repeat, and absolutely recommend. If you do though, you have to be prepared to work for it.