Ben's Ramblings

Rough Weather continues....

The strength of SAS, software as service, especially in the form of personal and free services has really come along way. When I first showed up for this class I brought a notebook some pens and a highlighter. While I was waiting for things to get started, it occurred to me that I didn’t really want to keep the notebook around to go dig it up when ever I needed to renew the certification, nor did I want to have to keep track of multiple pages of notes or the notebook I was given. 

Wiki’s are by default have a degree of learning curve to display data the way you want. The problem with this of course that every different wiki software has a markup language that is a little different. This is where some SAS providers have stepped in and created online wiki’s that allow a user to create his or her own personal wiki, and have a rather full featured web editor instead of requiring the user to learn the details of the markup language.

PBwiki allows users to create wiki’s, make them public or private, and gives them 2gb of space to upload pictures, attachments ect. This is all for free also. A paid service gives granular control over each page, as well as a large storage space bump, but for notetaking… 2gb space is practically unlimited for just text files only. But most importantly, I now have an online backup of all my notes, that I can access from anywhere, and if I wanted to could let others access. This is just one service that exists in a sea of similar offerings as well. 

Oh and did I mention the weather was terrible?

Rough Weather

Started a crash course for the CompTIA Security+ exam  today. I’m taking a two day course which is being provided by CBT Xpress, and NITTCI. My experience from my undergrad security concentration has proved to have already covered almost every page so far in the book which we were given and in far more depth. 

Curiously in the introduction the instructor attempted to dissuade people from digging too deep into a subject, citing the general lack of time in the course for someone to learn everything. The obvious problem with both the testing idea and the crash course idea is people who have minimal experience on any of the subjects can now gain the certification without actually truly understanding the topics, while people who understand the topics must take the crash course to pass the nit picky questions posed by the test.

The course runs a full week and covers the A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications, but I skipped the first two parts. After completion of the Security+, with the base knowledge I have gained through my undergrad at RIT I expect to be able to pick up both certifications without any subject training to the test. It will be interesting to me to compare the differences between the crash course and undergrad courses that i’ve already taken and how different the depth of understanding on each topic which is provided in both.