CCNA™ 5.0 Lite simulator

5 test scenarios

70 CCNA™ FlashCards

70 Free CCNA™ exam prep questions

One Free hour to practice with 70 online scenarios ($10 value)

I've always felt kinda bad I don't know IOS. Can anyone recommend a model that I could get off e-bay thats cheap, but can run a modern version of IOS that I can play with?

RouterSim Product List - CCNA Router and Network Simulator - Free Software

Research Tools - Stripe Snoop is THE tool for research. It includes a raw mode to allow for reading and attempted parsing of non-standard track information (such as NYC's Metrocard). It support for different readers is growing, allowing for different readers to use the same standard interface. It comes with extras tools that allow for the bitstreams to be captured, modified, and exported. This exported data can be analyzed on a different machine running Stripe Snoop, with no reader necessary! This allows for researchers around the world to trade magstripe data and research with each other without needing their own readers, or without shipping the actual card.

Stripe Snoop :: Why use it?

The MT-85 is a LoCo manual swipe magstripe encoder-reader that allows financial cards, ID badges, or passbooks to be instantly encoded and issued to customers.

Its compact footprint and rugged design make it an ideal choice for magstripe card, badge, or passbook issuance at financial institutions, schools, businesses, and government environments. An RS-232 interface and simplified command set allow for quick integration with software applications. An LED provides clear status indications to the operator. Available in either Track-2 only, or Track 1, 2, 3 configurations, the MT-85 encodes and read-verifies magnetic data per the ISO 7810 low-coercivity magstripe standards.

These guys give C code driver examples. They ROCK.

MT-85

Business Week: "This is one hell of a book"
Bruce Sterling: "This classic has no rival in its field"
Don Norman: "This will be the book"

Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object--beautiful or utilitarian--but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider's viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews--including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop--have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.

Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm's handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO--how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.

Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.

Interviews with:
Bill Atkinson • Durrell Bishop • Brendan Boyle • Dennis Boyle • Paul Bradley • Duane Bray • Sergey Brin • Stu Card • Gillian Crampton Smith • Chris Downs• Tony Dunne • John Ellenby • Doug Englebart • Jane Fulton Suri • Bill Gaver • Bing Gordon • Rob Haitani • Jeff Hawkins • Matt Hunter • Hiroshi Ishii • Bert Keely • David Kelley • Rikako Kojima • Brenda Laurel • David Liddle • Lavrans Løvlie • John Maeda • Paul Mercer • Tim Mott • Joy Mountford • Takeshi Natsuno • Larry Page • Mark Podlaseck • Fiona Raby • Cordell Ratzlaff • Ben Reason • Jun Rekimoto • Steve Rogers • Fran Samalionis • Larry Tesler • Bill Verplank • Terry Winograd • Will Wright

Purchased.

Designing Interactions

ZFS Best Practices Guide

Great blog on administering ZFS.

ZFS Best Practices Guide - Siwiki

Creating and Destroying ZFS Storage Pools

By design, creating and destroying pools is fast and easy. However, be cautious when doing these operations. Although checks are performed to prevent using devices known to be in use in a new pool, ZFS cannot always know when a device is already in use. Destroying a pool is even easier. Use zpool destroy with caution. This is a simple command with significant consequences.

Making ZFS Storage Pools.

docs.sun.com: Solaris ZFS Administration Guide

RAID-Z

The original promise of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) was that it would provide fast, reliable storage using cheap disks. The key point was cheap; yet somehow we ended up here. Why?

RAID-5 (and other data/parity schemes such as RAID-4, RAID-6, even-odd, and Row Diagonal Parity) never quite delivered on the RAID promise -- and can't -- due to a fatal flaw known as the RAID-5 write hole. Whenever you update the data in a RAID stripe you must also update the parity, so that all disks XOR to zero -- it's that equation that allows you to reconstruct data when a disk fails. The problem is that there's no way to update two or more disks atomically, so RAID stripes can become damaged during a crash or power outage.

To see this, suppose you lose power after writing a data block but before writing the corresponding parity block. Now the data and parity for that stripe are inconsistent, and they'll remain inconsistent forever (unless you happen to overwrite the old data with a full-stripe write at some point). Therefore, if a disk fails, the RAID reconstruction process will generate garbage the next time you read any block on that stripe. What's worse, it will do so silently -- it has no idea that it's giving you corrupt data.

There are software-only workarounds for this, but they're so slow that software RAID has died in the marketplace. Current RAID products all do the RAID logic in hardware, where they can use NVRAM to survive power loss. This works, but it's expensive.

There's also a nasty performance problem with existing RAID schemes. When you do a partial-stripe write -- that is, when you update less data than a single RAID stripe contains -- the RAID system must read the old data and parity in order to compute the new parity. That's a huge performance hit. Where a full-stripe write can simply issue all the writes asynchronously, a partial-stripe write must do synchronous reads before it can even start the writes.

Once again, expensive hardware offers a solution: a RAID array can buffer partial-stripe writes in NVRAM while it's waiting for the disk reads to complete, so the read latency is hidden from the user. Of course, this only works until the NVRAM buffer fills up. No problem, your storage vendor says! Just shell out even more cash for more NVRAM. There's no problem your wallet can't solve.

Partial-stripe writes pose an additional problem for a transactional filesystem like ZFS. A partial-stripe write necessarily modifies live data, which violates one of the rules that ensures transactional semantics. (It doesn't matter if you lose power during a full-stripe write for the same reason that it doesn't matter if you lose power during any other write in ZFS: none of the blocks you're writing to are live yet.)

If only we didn't have to do those evil partial-stripe writes...

Enter RAID-Z.

We deploy RAID Z with our solutions. I know there are some storage gurus on memestreams. Thoughts?

RAID Z : Jeff Bonwick's Weblog

Conclusion

It seems like Rails is roughly 62% faster than Catalyst at this time. Keep in mind this benchmark does not take into account the ORM performance. This benchmark tests how quick the frameworks themselves dispatch methods and render views.

Also take into consideration when choosing a framework you need to look at the problem at hand. Catalyst can feed off Perl's vast CPAN resource library. Catalyst has features that Rails does not have. Catalyst's DBIC ORM supports multi-column primary keys and can do relationship mapping just by reading the schema! You don't even have to bother writing any has_many belongs_to definitions!

I am going to have to take a look into Django see how well it fairs in this benchmark. Perhaps an update on this?

Catalyst is still kind of slow. It allows you to harness the power of the CPAN, and you get ORM, MVC, etc. But its kinda slow. This doesn't whatsoever matter for my application, where lots of numbers are crunched, and so the DB is the limiting factor, but it is noteworthy.

I'm sure mst and crew are working on it.

Catalyst V Rails :: Speed

How to Change the IPv4 Address and Other Network Configuration Parameters

How to change the static IP of Solaris 10 boxen.

docs.sun.com: System Administration Guide: IP Services

PAR is a Cross-Platform Packaging and Deployment tool, dubbed as a cross between Java's JAR and Perl2EXE/PerlApp. It was developed by Audrey Tang. Currently, it is maintained via an active mailing list [par@perl.org] with help from numerous UsersAndContributors.

Update: The PAR distribution was split into two distributions with release 0.970: PAR and PAR-Packer. PAR-Packer contains all development tools such as pp, parl, etc. and requires a C compiler to install. PAR itself is now pure-Perl and can be installed even without a C development environment.

* PAR offers a wide set of Features.
* Current version of PAR: 0.970, released on approximately 2006-12-4 Download | ChangeLog | Requirements | CPAN page
* Current version of PAR-Packer: 0.970, released on approximately 2006-12-4 Download | ChangeLog | Requirements | CPAN page
* Repository - Accessible with SVK, Subversion, WebDAV, or any HTTP clients | Instructions for getting the development version
* CPAN Request Tracker: Bug and feature request queue for PAR. Get involved!

Note: Contrary to popular belief, you do not need a C compiler on Windows to install PAR – just follow the "Download" link, extract it to some temporary directory, and install it like any other perl module by following README's instructions. An incomplete compatibility list between PAR binary releases and Win32 Perl versions can be found here.

Main Page - Perl Archiving Toolkit - A Wikia wiki