Peter Norris

Yesterday in San Francisco Facebook launched Facebook Platform. Facebook Platform allows you to add and use popular applications and websties like Twitter, FeedBurner, Veoh, and Box.net. In total there are about 70 new applications available at this time. Some of them are outlined below.

Twitter: Update you Twitter status from within Facebook and view your friends status updates. Your updates appear in your Facebook mini-feed and also on Twitter.

Veoh: Instantly share your favourite Veoh videos with your friends.

Red Bull Roshambull: Play Rock Paper Scissors with your friends and keep track of your wins and loses.

Another update that Facebook launched was Facebook Video. You can now upload videos with a max length of 10 minutes and tag your friends who are in the video, much likee you do with pictures. However, video doesn’t appear to be available for use yet, but it likely will be within the next week or so.

Another very quiet update is the ability to change the layout of your profile page. You can now rearrange most of the elements (such as pictures, groups, and your wall) to where ever on your page you want them.

At the event, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg gave a presentation outlining some stats about Facebook, such as Canada having 2.5 million users, being the second largest (after the U.S.), it is the 6th most visited site in the U.S., and about 100,000 people sign up every day.

You can find out more about the new features and more stats at these sites:

Mashable article on Facebook Platform
Mashable article on Facebook Video
Mashable article on the Facebook event
Techcrunch

All pictures from Mashable.

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Well watching CommandN, I heard about an interesting new site on the tubes. Joox takes the Youtube idea to a new level, although probably not in a legal manner. Joox streams movies and tv shows on their site, and allows you to download them as .divx files.

The site features episodes of many popular TV shows like Family Guy, 24, and The Office, as well as movies like Die Hard, American Pie and Dodgeball. They also have some documentaries, but I didn’t recognize any of the titles.

The quality of the videos is very good, but they can take a long time to load depending on the size of the video and your internet connection. They also seem to take a lot of processor power to load and buffer, as Safari crashed a couple of times on me as I was trying to load a couple of videos and write this post.

Despite the fact that this is clearly illegal, it gives you the chance to catch up on TV shows and movies you’ve missed, without having to worry about downloading them. And if you do want to download them, this can serve as an alternative to BitTorrent.

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I went to write my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam today, but came out without a certification. You need an unimaginable 849 out of 1000 to pass, and I had 734. I knew the exam was hard, but in my opion it was too hard. There were a couple of things on there I don’t even remember ever doing in class at school which covered the material.

There was also a simulation question in which I had to configure something on a simulated router. I had to configure an access control list to permit and deny HTTP traffic from different users. I had access to one router only, which was the one I was supposed to configure it on. This should have been simple to do, however the ip access-list command needed to do this was “not supported in this version of the Ciso IOS”. How am I supposed to configure an ACL on a router that doesn’t support the command needed to do so? I think this question was worth a lot of marks, which isn’t fair because I couldn’t even answer it! I know I should have done more studying than I did, but I don’t think that would have helped. Now I’m out $70.

I can attempt to write it again but the next time it will cost me about $170. Next year we do the material for the CCSP certifications, but in order to go for that I need my CCNA. I don’t even know if I want to go for that though. To get my CCSP I have to write 5 exams and pay close to about $700 probably. I don’t think it’s worth it. Being certified in using a Cisco firewall (one of the exams) doesn’t seem like something that will get me a job. I know the exams cover non-Cisco material, but they are very Cisco specific. There are other companies out there other than Cisco. I’d rather spend my time and money on vendor-neutral certifications, some of which are even more recognized than Cisco certifications. I might decide to go for my Network+ and Security+ certifications instead. These cover the same principles as the Cisco exams but do not focus on configuring and using any specific device, which I can easily learn if the need arises.

I want to do security consulting and research, not network administration. I don’t think I need have vendor specific certifications. This is going to require some thought (and $$$), so I’m going to spend some time weighing the options and hopefully all will work out in the end.

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