Few days ago I was asked if I can review on of uCertify prepkits. I wrote a review some time ago for a different prepkit – full review here XK0-002: Linux + PrepKit – and at the time I was impressed with the quality of the kit. So I agreed to do it again. This time, I picked the prepkit for the Certified Ethical Hacker or CEH certification. For those of you who don’t know it, this is the Chuck Norris of security certifications.

I downloaded the Windows executable version of the prepkit, in hope that I will be able to make it work on my Macbook. No such luck. I tried Wine and CrossOver, but it kept on crashing. After several hours of frustration I emailed back the guys at uCertify with the issue. They suggested using the web version of the prepkit – at the the time I didn’t know there was a web version – which worked like a charm on all platform. So, first lesson learned – if you have a Linux / Mac system – go straight to the web version.

Usability, look and feel

I found the prepkit to be particularly easy to use. The interface is really straight forward, very clean, with good typography that doesn’t tire your eyes. Typography is particularly in this case, as geeks – myself included – wear glasses and don’t like hard to read “artistic” fonts.

The information is structured in a logical manner, everything is where you expect it to be. Just have a quick look to the screenshot on the right!

Maximum score to usability & ease of use.

Features

The information is divided into 3 main areas: Learn & Practice, Study Material and Performance Assessment and Analytics and each section is divided into multiple sub-sections.

The Learn & Practice section is comprised of various tests, which can be used to mimic a real life exam (Test mode), study (Learning mode) or to review your knowledge (Review mode). Screenshot to the right!

Study Material is comprised of:

• Subject/Exam Standards & Objectives
• Study notes
• Articles
• Flash Cards
• Key Terms
• Glossary
• Online Reference Library
• Study Tips

…and Performance Assessment and Analytics of:

• Study Planner
• Progress reports
• My Activity
• Daily Snapshot
• My Focus
• Performance on Practice Tests
• Readiness Report

Some of the features are really cool, I especially liked the Study Planner, which helps you plan and keep track of your progress, a very important tool as we all know that IT guys are generally lazy and don’t like reading manuals.

Although getting messages like:

Your preparation is about 0.5% complete. You took 1 days to complete 0.5%. At this pace you will need another 6 Months, 2 Weeks, 5 Days, to be fully prepared for the exam.

might be a bit demotivational.

Usefulness

To make things clear from the start, this is not an online course for beginners. The prepkit targets experienced professionals, not learners or script kiddies. But that’s not necessarily bad, as the last two categories are not even eligible for certification according to EC-Council’s eligibility form.

As I have yet to take the CEH exam, I can’t say how accurate or useful the questions are in a real life scenario, but given uCertify’s vast experience in the area of preparation kits for top IT certifications, I’m sure it’s useful.

Conclusion

I found the prepkit easy to use, filled with high quality information and well structured. I think it’s a good deal for $119.99 (aprox. €91 / £75), especially since uCertify offers a full refund if you fail the exam. Give it a try. Or if my review didn’t convince you, try it for your self. There’s a demo version available here.

I came across this article yesterday. The author – who calls himself Uncle Bob – has a pretty interesting biography, but that article proves that even the best of us can come up with really weird ideas. I’m not sure if regulating software development is worst than SOPA or not.

After reading a letter from another developer which tells a story about a greedy & careless (like any other) manager who jeopardizes the life of several patients by sacrificing good practices in order to hit a deadline, “Uncle Bob” comes to the conclusion that software development should be a regulated profession. And here is where things become weird.

Who can regulate software development? Who is to say that John Doe is a good developer and James Doe a bad one!? Except the market?

And further more, how will this be done? Through academic assertion? Everyone will agree that this idea is incredibly dumb, as most industry icons don’t have college education. Here are some examples:

• Steve Jobs (dropped out)
• Bill Gates (dropped out)
• Larry Ellison (dropped out twice)
• Michael Dell (dropped out)

… just to name a few. Who can say that these people can’t work in technology because they didn’t pass some lame tests?

Or let’s just have an independent body – like the WWW Consortium – which regulates the industry. Who will fund it? I for sure am not going to pay a share of my salary to keep some boring bureaucrats in office just to tell me what I can and cannot write.

And what happens with new – yet unregulated – technologies? Can we use those? If a new framework appears, do we have to wait until it gets tested and approved? That could take years, the W3C is working on the HTML5 specs since 2004…

I agree that we all should be held accountable for our actions, but there are enough regulating bodies out there. If you’re developing medical software, then it should be clinically tested like any other medical equipment or if it’s software for cars, the bodies that issue car licenses will test it. The same for software managing nuclear power-plants or airplanes. In order to say that a nuclear reactor is safe to use, the people testing it will just have to test the software also – which I’m sure happens anyway.

If it fails, the company that wrote the software gets fined, the product is banned and the people involved get sacked. And if you get canned enough times, then nobody will hire you.

Problem solved, the profession is regulated. No bureaucracy needed!

Finally, after two months of incredible effort, StoreBeez, the startup I was working on with 3 other friends – is…tam tam tam…online!

Written entirely in PHP on Zend Framework, with the frontend relying on jQuery, the app took around 10 weeks to complete, it’s still in beta and a bit buggy, but hey, it’s a MVP. Cosmin was in charge of the payment gateway – so if you’re experiencing problems with the payment system, it’s his fault

If you want to find out more about StoreBeez, click the link or watch this video:

I’ll be writing more often on our company’s blog, at blog.storebeez.com. Check it out.

I was going over LinkedIn It’s been a over hundred days since my last post this blog. While I didn’t abandon it, I just couldn’t find the time to write on my blog. I moved from Spain to Romania and now to the UK.

I moved here to take part in the Oxygen Accelerator with StoreBeez, a startup project I’m working on with 2 friends. UK so far is pretty cool, except their banking system. Everything else is pretty okay! Even the weather. It’s not that bad…if you compare it to the North Pole.

This might just be the most challenging assignment so far, so I’ll keep you posted. Also, check out my twitter feed: @motanelu.

A really cool movie:

…more clips on RSA’s channel.

I’ve went today to a conference held by Adobe Romania at the Intercontinental Hotel. Of course, I’ll start with the most important aspect of this kind of conferences: the food. The food was decent, better than Microsoft provides at its events but still, an Oracle presentation from a few years ago still remains the unbeaten champion.

Now that that’s covered, I’ll move on to the more technical aspects. It had lots of presentations held by Adobe evangelists, some from the romanian team and two presentations from an adobe senior evangelist – Ben Forta – a really funny dude despite his long beard that might suggest a grumpier person. I’ve liked his presentations a lot, especially the one about Cold Fusion, an Adobe (former Macromedia) product first launched ages ago before technologies like PHP or ASP even existed, but not very popular nowadays. Never the less, it can prove quite a lifesaver sometimes. I also liked presentations held by Mihai Corlan and Mihai Pricope about AIR and Flex. There was a really boring speech from one of their VPs about…well…nothing, but apart from that, I’ve really enjoyed this conference.

I entered in one of their weird contests – the prize being a Flex Professional licence. Apart from which one might expect from a company like Adobe, this contest had nothing to do with programming. It’s like this:

1. go to Mihai Corlan and get 5 posters with Flex and AIR APIs
2. choose any bar or pub you want
3. go to the bartender and convince him to let you hang 2 posters there

Sounds easy, 3 simple steps, but it’s not. Developers are by nature antisocial beings and walking to a bar and convince a bartender to let you hang the Flex API on his wall requires a lot of courage and people skills. Lacking those qualities, I’ve decided to…cheat my way to the licence. Actually it’s not cheating, because they didn’t say that the bartender must be a total stranger. So, I’ve hung 2 posters in Interbelic, a nice bar in the middle of Bucharest’s “old center” . I just happen to know the people there

Here are some pics to prove it:

Waiting for that Flex Builder licence…

I’ve changed my job. Starting Tuesday, 21^st of April, I’ll start my new job at Ninespices as a developer. I’ve left Zitec after an year of working there, manned by the desire to try new things and acquire new expertise in other programming languages than PHP.

At Ninespices, aside from PHP, I’ll going to work with Flash, ActionScript, Flex and maybe some RoR. I can’t wait to begin

I’ve attended the first PHP GeekMeet in Cluj (for those of you that are geographically impaired, this is Cluj). I’ve held a presentation on Zend Framework, a long yet not as boring as I thought, 2 hours long presentation. My colleague Alex Novac from Zitec also held a presentation about optimisation techniques in PHP and disassembled a simple == operator call to see what happens below . The other presentation, although not strictly PHP related, was held by Andrei Gheorghe on scalability techniques.

I consider this edition of GeekMeet to be a succes and I congratulate Mihai for it.

PS: my presentation can be downloaded here.

In this post I’m going to review the XK0-002: Linux + PrepKit from uCertify. Since I haven’t taken the real exam yet – but I intend to in the following months – I’ve evaluated the kit from the candidate’s perspective. Hopefully, in May or June, I will post a follow up and evaluate the kit’s performance from the point of view of a CompTIA Linux + certified engineer

Also note that the kit is not meant to teach you how to use Linux or to prepare you for a sysadmin job. Its stated goal is to prepare you for the CompTIA Exam, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to learn the inner workings of *nix operating systems, this kit isn’t for you, but if you already know how to use linux and want to get the ComTIA certification to prove your skills then using this kit to get acquainted with the exam’s requirements and methodology is a fairly good idea. Read the rest of this entry »