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More Cisco CCNA, CCENT, and CCNP candidates than ever before are putting together their own home labs for their certification exam study, and that’s a great trend - there’s nothing like learning on the real thing!

Part of putting a home lab together is getting the right cables and understanding their usage. In this new Cisco home lab series, we’ll take a look at the different cable types and how each fits into your home lab. The first cable type we’ll look at is the multi-purpose DTE/DCE cable.

When I say “multi-purpose”, I mean that while the cable will always perform the same task, it can be used in several different points in your home lab network. If you’re going to have a frame relay switch - and you should get one if at all possible, since having your own frame relay cloud is a tremendous boost to your home lab studies and your exam score - you’re going to need a DTE/DCE cable.

You can also use a DTE/DCE cable to directly connect two Cisco router serial interfaces and configure HDLC (the default) or PPP encapsulation over that point-to-point link.

Most of today’s DTE/DCE cables have “DTE” clearly stamped on one end of the cable - actually, “DTE” is probably embedded into the connector itself. Naturally, the other end will have “DCE” clearly indicated. It’s the DCE end that will connect to your frame relay switch. If you’re going to use a direct connection to run PPP or HDLC, it almost doesn’t matter which end of the cable is connected to a given router.
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It seems everyone these days is talking about blogging. Everywhere I go, I find articles and forums devoted to this craze. I also have heard from many moms who are trying to figure out what a blog is and how they can use one to their benefit.

The term blog is short for weblog, which just means an online journal or log. You can jot down personal thoughts and notes, post articles youve written or keep track of interesting websites you find. The sky is the limit, it seems, when it comes to blogging. A blog is something entirely of your own creation and you can use it to share your thoughts with the world, well.with anyone you can get to read it anyway.

One of the main debates going on about blogs is whether blogging can be done to improve Search Engine rankings for businesses or to create a buzz about business websites. Both of these can be true if the blog is used correctly. Many resources show that once a blog is created, many times it is listed in Search Engines within 48 hours. This was true of the blog I created for Christian Work at Home Moms.

These are many ways to create a blog. The easiest by far is to use one of the free tools available online, such as Googles Blogger. You can create your blog for free using their online tools and templates(nothing to download). After you have created the blog, you can then publish your blog through them and Wa-La your blog is posted online for the world to see.

Once youve created your blog, you will need to decide how you will use it. Will it be a personal blog, full of thoughts and comments for yourself alone or maybe your family? Or will it be a business blog, with articles and tips for potential customers? If you want your blog to be found by others, blogging experts recommend that you begin by setting the title and descriptions for your blog. These are similar to the the title and descriptions you set for your website. Try to make them meaningful because they are what people will see when your blog is returned in a Search Engine. If your description is simply my blog, you may not draw the attention youd like.
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The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn’t yet support.

Number 1, you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that “grunge” work for you automatically.

Number 2, Wordpress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and for the search engines.

Let’s say the topic of your site is Widgets. You could create a Category for black widgets, one for orange widgets, and one for green widgets.

Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by Category.

So if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, they can easily find all your posts on green widgets. They don’t have to go through your entire archives to find them. With a blog that has been around for awhile and has hundreds of posts, that would be pretty discouraging. Using Categories makes it very easy.
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The stock market is in a tumult. Actually, it has been for about a year, ever since the subprime fiasco (anyone take a look at Moody’s performance over the past year?) Now that that particular issue has been beaten to death, other mortgage related issues are cropping up. Most of the stuff covered in the media is financial in nature, but some of those mortgage related issues do concern information security.

It’s no secret that there are plenty of companies in the US that discard sensitive documents by dumping them unceremoniously: leave it by the curb, drive it to a dumpster, heave it over the walls of abandoned property, and other assorted mind boggling insecure practices. In fact, MSNBC has an article on this issue, and names numerous bankrupt mortgage companies whose borrowers’ records were found in dumpsters and recycling centers. The information on those documents include credit card numbers and SSNs, as well as addresses, names, and other information needed to secure a mortgage.

Since the companies have filed for bankruptcy and are no more, the potential victims involved have no legal recourse, and are left to fend for themselves. In a way, it makes sense that companies that have filed for bankruptcy are behaving this way. (Not that I’m saying this is proper procedure.) For starters, if a company does wrong, one goes after the company; however, the company has filed for bankruptcy, it is no more, so there’s no one to “go after.” In light of the company status, this means that the actual person remaining behind to dispose of things, be they desks or credit applications, can opt to do whatever he feels like. He could shred the applications. He could dump them nearby. He could walk away and let the building’s owner take care of them. What does he care? It’s not as if he’s gonna get fired.

Also, proper disposal requires either time, money, or both. A bankrupt company doesn’t have money. It may have time, assuming people are going to stick around, but chances are their shredder has been seized by creditors. People are not going to stick around to shred things by hand, literally.

Aren’t there any laws regulating this? Apparently, such issues are covered by FACTA, the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, and although its guidelines require that “businesses to dispose of sensitive financial documents in a way that protects against ‘unauthorized access to or use of the information’” [msnbc.com], it stops short of requiring the physical destruction of data. I’m not a lawyer, but perhaps there’s enough leeway in the language for one to go around dropping sensitive documents in dumpsters?

Like I mentioned before, inappropriate disposal of sensitive documents has been going on forever; I’m pretty sure this has been a problem since the very first mortgage was issued. My personal belief is that most companies would act responsibly and try to properly dispose of such information. But, this may prove to be a point of concern as well because of widespread misconceptions of what it means to protect data against unauthorized access.

What happens if a company that files for bankruptcy decides to sell their company computers to pay off creditors? Most people would delete the information found in the computer, and that’s that-end of story. Except, it’s not. When files are deleted, the actual data still resides in the hard disks; it’s just that the computer’s operating system doesn’t have a way to find the information anymore. Indeed, this is how retail data restoration applications such as Norton are able to recover accidentally deleted files.

Some may be aware of this and decide to format the entire computer before sending it off to the new owners. The problem with this approach is the same as deleting files: data recovery is a cinch with the right software. Some of them retail for $30 or less-as in free. So, the sensitive data that’s supposed to be deleted can be recovered, if not easily, at least cheaply-perhaps by people with criminal interests.
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With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla’s Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

Origins

The truth is they never did have total dominance, but at times they have come very close. Microsoft actually entered the Browser Battle quite late on. Infact a man named Neil Larson is credited to be one of the originators of internet browsers, when in 1977 he created a program – The TRS-80 - that allowed browsing between “sites” via hypertext jumps. This was a DOS program and the basis of much to come. Slowly other browsers powered by DOS and inspired by the TRS 80 were developed. Unfortunately they were often constricted by the limitations of the still fairly young internet itself.

In 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel created a simple, fast browser called Hytelnet, which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogues of over five thousand libraries around the world – an exhilarating taste of what the internet, and web browsers, would soon be able to offer.

In 1989 the original World Wide Web was born. Using a NeXTcube computer, Tim Berners-Lee created a web browser that would change how people used the internet forever. He called his browser the WorldWideWeb(http://www., which is still likely to sound familiar to internet users today. It was a windowed browser capable of displaying simple style sheet, capable of editing sites and able to download and open any file type supported by the NeXTcube.
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Today’s telecommunications networks are a delicate blend of clients and servers that together offer virtually endless possibilities when it comes to services and applications. For every new client developed, there seems to be a score more on the way — from mobile handsets, PDAs, terminals, telephones, video phones, IP set-top-boxes, and so on.

There are essentially two types of servers that connect between clients on large networks: Proxy servers and Back-to-Back User Agent (B2BUA) servers. The more prevalent Proxy servers feature predictable behavior — simply connecting between clients. Effectively, B2BUA servers are much stronger and intelligent entities that perform actions which Proxy servers cannot. Moreover, B2BUA servers provide a flexible solution for a wide range of applications and services and are becoming the primary engine for more and more SIP servers in NGN and IMS networks.

The difference between Proxy servers and B2BUA servers is sometimes not fully understood. In this article, we will explore what makes B2BUA servers such an appealing alternative to standard Proxy servers. Better understanding of B2BUA servers can help managers understand the value, and the tradeoffs, of choosing a B2BUA server, as well as the frameworks needed to develop a wide range of SIP applications and SIP services using it.

Figure 1 - Architectural difference between Proxy servers and B2BUA servers

B2BUA Server Defined
B2BUA servers are used to provide value added features for point-to-point calls and manage multi-point calls. The power behind a B2BUA server is derived mostly from the fact that it has a very generic definition, which gives it almost unlimited power. However, this same characteristic is the root of the controversy surrounding it.

IETF standard (RFC 3261) defines a back-to-back user agent as “a logical entity that receives a request and processes it as a user agent server (UAS). In order to determine how the request should be answered, it acts as a user agent client (UAC) and generates requests. Unlike a Proxy server, it maintains a dialogue state and must participate in all requests sent on the dialogues it has established.”

B2BUA servers have capabilities that far exceed those of other types of SIP servers, and answer the need for developing sophisticated value added SIP applications that cannot be implemented as Proxy applications.

Some of these capabilities, which are unique to B2BUA servers, are outlined below:

3rd Party Call Control (3PCC) Features
3rd Party Call Control (3PCC) is the ability of an entity (usually a controller) to set up and manage communication between two or more parties. 3PCC is often used for operator services and conferencing.

3PCC actions are important capabilities, exclusive to B2BUA servers since “passive” non call-stateful elements, such as Proxy servers, cannot initiate these types of activities. Some examples of 3PCC services are online billing, QoS, resource prioritization, call transfer, click-to-dial, mid-call announcement and more.

3PCC actions can be initiated automatically by B2BUA server applications, like disconnecting a call following credit expiration in an online-billing system. Or they can be initiated by remote administrative control (OSS), e.g. invite parties to a multi-point conferencing session.

Figure 2 - Schematic outline of B2BUA server offering 3PCC functionality

Inter-working Function (IWF) for Interoperability
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One of the great debilitators in online business is simply the perceived (or real) lack of time. Business owners are used to moving forward. An online web presence can make them feel tied to an office chair learning skills they aren’t sure they want to know.

It’s not uncommon for those who deal in full time web design to have individuals contact them for a site design, but have absolutely no idea what they want. Furthermore when the designer questions them the response might be, “I don’t know, just make it look nice.”

Let’s not forget the core values or mission of the business. Many business owners have no idea how to answer those kinds of questions. They may stare blankly for a moment or two and there’s no more time for further deep thought so they go back to action – without answers.

In many cases it is possible to answer some of the questions needed, but it may require taking time away from a familiar setting. It may also require more time than you think you want to give.

If you can get to a place of concentrated contemplation you are likely to find yourself stripping ideas to their core to find out what your business is trying to accomplish and what your ultimate goals might be.

As with almost any project you can turn frustration around if you will just take the time to come to terms with your vision.
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The best role of business online is that of interdependency. We’ve all heard the old saying, “No man is an island.” When it comes to online business this is especially true.

If a business owner who takes their business into the online world determines they will be self reliant and never accept the help of anyone then that individual will not be in business long enough to change their minds.

It is accepted fact that the greatest tool for long-term exposure to your website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Without it potential customers can’t find you. It is unreasonable to expect that you can adequately develop a website without optimizing your website for the best possible search engine ranking.

Search engines also place a high value on sites that have links placed on existing sites. These ‘backlinks’ demonstrate to search engines that others trust your site. By placing your link on their website these other businesses indicate a trust and recommendation for your site.

In effect the two strategies listed above rely exclusively on what others can do for you when it comes to your online business.
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Google ile hızlı hesaplama
Firefox‘un içerisinde birçoğumuzun bilmediği pratik bir hesap makinesi bulunmakta. Firefox kullanırken google da hızlıca arama yapmak için kullanılan sağ üst köşede duran arama bölümünü isterseniz bir hesap makinesi olarakta kullanabilirsiniz.

Basit bir çarpma işlemi için

Yada üs’lü sayıları hesaplamak için
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Yahoo, bu yıl Barselona’da duyurduğu oneConnect’inin iPhone sürümü ile birlikte, Java, Windows Mobile ve Symbian cihazlar için geliştirdiği Blueprint Mobil Platformunu kullanıma soktu

Yahoo, geçtiğimiz şubat ayında Barselona’da gerçekleştirilen Mobil Dünya Kongresi etkinlikleri çerçevesinde duyurduğu oneConnect’inin iPhone sürümü ile birlikte, Java, Windows Mobile ve Symbian tabanlı telefonlarla birlikte mobil web tabanlı da çalışabilecek Blueprint mobil platformunu hizmete sunduğunu açıkladı.

San Fransisco’da gerçekleştirilen CTIA Kablosuz Bilişim Teknolojileri ve Eğlence fuarında yapılan açıklamaya göre; Yahoo Blueprint’in http://mobile.yahoo.com/developers/roadmap
günümüz mobil dünyasının en büyük problemlerinden biri olan “her platform için yeni bir yazılım geliştirme baş ağrısı”nı çözeceği ifade ediliyor.
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