02/13/2007 - 12:10AM Central Time

Dagnabit, has it been that long since I last updated this quasi-blog? Here is an update on a couple of topics:

I took my Cisco SNPA certification on October 16, 2006 and passed it. I am not going to gloat about the score, but let us say I did not miss any of the questions *grin*

Regarding encryption for USB devices, I recommend Truecrypt for your needs. It is open-source and it will work on both Linux and Windows. It also allows you to create a single file that you can use to "simulate" a drive, or you can just encrypt your entire drive if you so desire.

I also have gone ahead and added a "Movies" section to the site, I will probably add reviews here and there. I am also trying to get my digital camera back from a relative so I can start posting images of my crazy world on the site.

As far as I can remember, I have tried to get more organized with my time and to do list and stuff. Unfortunately, most of my attempts end up failing because I don't keep whatever time-management system up to date. In the past, I used just a regular 8.5x11 sheet of paper, but nowadays if I do that, the sheet never leaves my backpack. I have tried using both Palm and Axim devices, and the same applies. It is of little use when I don't carry the things with me, or they don't come out of the bag once I get home. I have also tried using Outlook with the calendaring and task list options, but most of the times, I can not keep it updated since I am away from my computer. The other day, I was searching for a plausible solution and ran into D*I*Y Planner. This basically allows you to create your custom planner. I am using the Hipster PDA version, and so far it is doing better than the electronic PDAs. *grin*

Regarding the lack of updates ... umm ... I don't think anyone checks this thing, so I don't see much of a point really ... if you would like me to keep adding content then let me know that you read this post ... the secret word is: PANCHOBOTS!

07/18/2006 - 11:14PM Central Time

Yes, I know. I have not updated this stuff for over a month. In any case, I am done reading the Cisco ASA and PIX Firewall Handbook. Currently, I am elbows-deep reading the CCSP SNPA Official guide and taking copius notes. Unfortunately, it is not going as fast as I would like, but I am slowly getting there. The tally of read pages as of right now is: 189/658 pages. It is probably going to take me a couple more months until I can actually take the exam.

Regarding technical stuff, I have been researching a lot about encryption of USB devices and laptops. Unfortunately, I am not quite ready to post my recommendations here on the site, so drop me a line if you wish to hear about those.

05/22/2006 - 11:23PM Central Time

Not much to add, as stated in my previous post, I am in the process of pursuing my Cisco CCSP certification and studying for the SNPA exam. If you must know, here are the texts that I am using to prepare for this monster (yes, it is late at night and I don't want to bother linking them):

   Cisco ASA and PIX Firewall Handbook, First Edition

   CCSP Flash Cards and Exam Practice Pack

   CCSP SNPA Official Exam Certification Guide (3rd Edition)

In what little spare time is left, I have started playing Harvest Moon 64 again, thanks in part to my kid brother-in-law playing it when he comes over to visit. There are a few walkthroughs around for it, but I think I may roll my own.

That reminds me, I did run into a funky issue the other night with a network hub and a halogen lamp; turns out that plugging a halogen lamp into the same power outlet as a network/dsl hub causes issues to the network equipment. I came to find that out the hard way after the poor hub crashed time and time again every time that I turned my halogen lamp on :o)

05/07/2006 - 10:15PM Central Time

Just a quick update on my final Fedora Core configuration: I went with Fedora Core 4 and decided to install VMPlayer on it and have been playing around with a Windows XP image. It is awesome for research purposes. Basically, you can infect that image with your favorite piece of spyware and test things accordingly. Once you are done, you erase the image and restore an old copy and back to normal. I can not stress how much the typical home user would benefit from this *grin*

On another note, the version of the IPCop firewall that I am evaluating is doing a fantastic job, even as it has been running from the flash drive. It has been up for 11 days so far without any issues. I will be conducting some stress-testing this week with the help of my wife, but so far, I am very pleased with the way this is going.

Other than that, I ended up doing a whole bunch of chores this weekend and I am happy to announce that I can finally see my desktop (actual desk) at home. I am not sure how much more technical things I may be able to pursue since I will be elbows-deep in Cisco CCSP certification stuff (SNPA) fairly soon. I already received the first batch of books and I am waiting for the actual study guide, but I will be starting to hit those this week *grumble grumble*

04/26/2006 - 01:06AM Central Time

For starters, I did install Fedora Core 5 on another system. My observations on the install were that it was probably the easiest Fedora Core install yet. However, I ran into issues running a particular Java application and reverted back to Fedora Core 4 instead. From what I keep hearing, Fedora Core 5 has a lot of issues like this and issues with video card drivers that continue to plague it. The thing that I thought was cool was their "Add/Remove Software" feature which is very similar to Ubuntu :)

Now, Ubuntu has come up with a new version of their distro, and I believe they have another one on beta (Edgy Eft).

And one more final note, I spoke with a couple of friends at work regarding some issues that I kept having with my IP address changing constantly, more like several times a day. At first, I attribute it to people hitting the web server hard, but the more I thought about, the more I started suspecting my "cheapy" Linksys Firewall Home Router. My theory is that when people hit the web server, they may be overwhelming the little router, thus causing it to restart.

In any case, I thought about installing Smoothwall onto a machine and using that machine as a firewall to test my theory. Luckily, "t3h buds" at work showed me another more interesting product called IPCop. This product goes above and beyond the typical firewall suite. It has traffic shaping and IDS capabilities. Additionally, it shows you a slew of status and historical graphs about the firewall activity.

I just installed the machine with IPCop a couple of hours ago. Let us just say it was not the easiest thing I have done since I wanted to outdo myself and decided to use a 256MB flash card instead of a regular hard drive. The system picked it up fine. Additionally, I ran into issues because SBC uses PPPoE to setup my DSL connection, but after a couple of quick searches on the web, I was able to configure that correctly. So I will continue to evaluate this and share my observations accordingly.

04/10/2006 - 12:04AM Central Time

The recompilation in the previous post proved successful and I did manage to get IE working correctly. I also installed it using another laptop and got it working there. Unfortunately, I also noticed that getting IE to work created problems and managed to make Ultima Online crash quite often. Since I did not wanted to deteriorate the stability of the Ultima Online client, I decided to uninstall everything and not install IE at all. Things worked fine after that.

Now, for another quick update: this weekend I ended up reformatting my external 80GB usb drive. It used to be NTFS, but Linux is a little bit touchy with this file format. Most flavours of Linux will let you read it, but it you want to write to it, you have to recompile your kerlnel. Instead, I opted to reformat. Of course, it took me a while to find which new version of file system was preferable, but in the end I went with FAT 32 as this format seems to be compatible with windows, linux, and Macintoshes. Good for portability.

Oh yes, and one more update: I installed Fedora Core 5 on another laptop. I will write more in another post as I continue to use it.

And yet another update: I know I have commented about adding "comments" to this quasi-blog, but until now I was not sure if I wanted to install additional software for the authentication piece to avoid spammers. I may "code" something like this: Kitten Authentication, but I won't be using kitties, maybe Ultima Online avatars or something like that :)

(geez, instead of overwhelming my readers with one mondo post, I should post more regularly ... ah ... leave me alone ... it is not like anyone checks this anyways)

03/22/2006 - 11:54PM Central Time

I have been working on a small, but annoying, issue with my Gentoo Linux install: I have been trying to install Internet Explorer 6 under wine for a variety of reasons (fine, fine, one of my newer games under Windows requires it). Unfortunately, the newer versions of wine appear to have a bug which prevents one from installing ie. What is a geek like myself to do? Try a whole bunch of fixes until I get it working. Now here comes the interesting part, apparently, there is an error in the code that is creating the bug. And this is the beauty of open source, I went ahead and corrected the bug and I am recompiling as we speak. I shall let yall know what happens when it is done as I am leaving it recompiling overnight.

03/19/2006 - 07:45PM Central Time

Welp, I was off on vacation this past week and ended up catching up with chores for the most part *yuk!* On the technical front, I did not end up doing much of anything unfortunately.

02/27/2006 - 11:14PM Central Time

Not very much going on technically, except that I have been fussing a lot lately with the firewall on my desktop computer trying to get it to behave correctly with some sites. Other than that, I have been asked to write a tutorial for our Unreal Tournament clan's page on how to install the clients under Linux. That is the next thing on my to do list as soon as I finish up with some chores *choke choke*

02/21/2006 - 01:27AM Central Time

I was not very pleased with the CSS not being displayed correctly under IE. I got some good ideas during the day, so I knew what I would be changing as soon as I got home. One of the things that I also wanted to achieve was to ensure that the site was W3C compliant. Of course, for that to happen, I had to rewrite a good part of my CSS. No biggie, but a little annoying, but both the html and css finally passed the validators (yay me!). I also added some banners to the footers that I think look nice.

Additionally, I also figure out a way to run Unreal Tournament (GOTY) under Linux with sound and all. I may post the steps to get this up and running one of these days.

I will probably won't add an update for a couple of days as I need to tend some chores *yuk*. However, with the new changes to the site adding the updates is really easy to do, so I may be able to add updates while I take some breaks :-P

02/19/2006

Personal site meet CSS ... But seriously, after doing some reading and playing around with a lot of the CSS elements, I have finally gone ahead and converted the entire site to CSS: no more tables here! At first I was very skeptical, but soon enough I found out why CSS is so powerful: first, because with one change in your stylesheet, you can change every single page in your site, and second because of browser inter-operability. I will not sit here and tell you about the countless times in which a site looks fine under one browser and it is completely messed up under another one.

And just as I had finished working on the site, I loaded it up using IE and lo-and-behold: it looked utterly messed up. Yet, once again why we wish to use CSS instead of tables and such *grrr*

02/12/2006

It is alive! After about 2 weeks of evaluating various Linux versions for my home laptop, I am happy to announce the winner: Gentoo Linux.

Click here for the reviews
Screenshot 1 |  Screenshot 2

Additionally, after careful consideration, I will be redoing the design on this site fairly soon. Currently, it is a pain to do add these updates, and the formatting of the tables is quite touchy. Additionally, I will ensure it is W3C/Any Browser compliant. I will also be using CCS to keep all the pages the same and try to keep things as simple as possible.

01/27/2006

It has been a rough couple of weeks for my site. I was using the web server machine to test various flavours of Linux since I am getting ready to switch completely to Linux at home after the WMF debacle. In using the web server, I soon realized that my "testing" would be futile since my server has very different hardware than my regular desktop (laptop). I decided to get my web pages back on the server and let it be. I also proceeded to get a new version of the OS while I was at it (open source baby!)

10/31/2005

My personal site finally got a new home ... yay! Of course, you know what this means: more updates and more pointless ramblings from yours truly :P I also updated the "Games" page to reflect my current gaming interests. And if you are wondering, I may turn this into a blog including allowing people to add comments and all that. I may also add additional sections such as topics in the information security world and other stuff.

10/06/2005

I was part of an Unreal Tournament "tournament". UTPA Staff vs. students. We put up a fight, but in the end the students whipped our butts. Check out the UTPA Staff clan site

02/14/2005

Have started working for the University of Texas Pan American.