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Written by Devin Akin
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Thursday, 01 January 2009 |
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If you haven't heard of Dr. Randy Pausch, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, then here's your chance. His life lessons and his outlook on life are remarkable and valuable. Someone gave me his book (www.thelastlecture.com) for a Christmas present, and it's simply fantastic - recommended for everyone over age 0. I identify with this guy in more ways than I can count. I'm only sorry that I'll never get to meet him (he passed on July 25, 2008 of Pancreatic Cancer). In his book, he even has the same #1 rule as me: no whining. How could you not love a guy like that? His stories about Coach Graham are priceless. Fundamentals, hard work, head fakes, and experience. That's gold, Jerry! Gold!
If you like to read, the book (which is based on his lecture) is very well written and gives more content than the lecture - though the lecture is superb. If you'd rather watch the lecture itself, there's a link directly on his website (noted above). This book and lecture were just too valuable not to share. Here's Dr. Pausch's website, and the Diane Sawyer interview video (bottom/left) is great. http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ Enjoy. |
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Written by Devin Akin
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Monday, 29 December 2008 |
Something I've noticed lately is a big lack of Wi-Fi gadgetry. Most Wi-Fi gadget makers do pretty well. Some Wi-Fi gadgets have turned into very successful solutions. Take MetaGeek's Wi-Spy and ZyXEL's AG-225H (which now has clones like Linksys's WUSBF54G) as examples - both have been very successful. A security researcher over at AirDefense built a little Linux-based Wi-Fi hacking box about 18 months ago that's one of the coolest things I've seen so far. Why isn't anyone building more of these things? Has everyone run out of ideas? I doubt it.
I've come up with a couple of different items that I think would be way cool. I don't have the time to build such gadgets, but I'd sure buy one if they existed. I'm writing about them here just to give you an idea of the types of gadgets I'm talking about. |
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Written by Devin Akin
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Monday, 22 December 2008 |
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First, there was Autonomous, then lightweight, and now...there's Collectonomous, from the word, "Collective." Think, "The Borg" - a hive mind. If you're not familiar with The Borg, change careers and then go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borg
The object of my focus is Aerohive's new HiveUI. It's a GUI built into their 802.11n APs that is capable of managing up to 11 APs (including itself) with the limitation of a single hive (group of coordinating APs). With a snazzy UI, snappy initial configuration, APs that coordinate data forwarding among themselves, and enough features to fit almost any SMB scenario, it's a paradigm shifter. Given that there's no separate controller appliance/software or licensing beyond just buying the modestly-priced APs, getting buyer's remorse should prove difficult. If you want to scale beyond 11 APs, buy Aerohive's HiveManager appliance, and voila - you've scaled. To avoid confusion, HiveManager isn't a controller, but rather a WNMS. |
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WEP crack again, 
