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.

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!

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 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.

…more clips on RSA’s channel.

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…

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

PS: my presentation can be downloaded here.

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.

General information

uCertify is a company founded in 1997 and it specialises in creating preparation kits for major IT certification. Now their offer includes preparation kits for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, CompTIA, Adobe, Sun Java and many more IT certifications available out there. Check out their site for more info. The kit I’m reviewing in this post is written to aid candidates in taking the CompTIA’s Linux+ exam. This vendor-neutral certification specifically designed to certify technical entry-level skills for Linux system administrators.

Download and install

In order to install the preparation kit on you machine, you have to download a small Windows executable file. You punch in the licence key and you’re done. If you’re using Windows that is. If you’re using a different OS, like I am, things get more complicated. The prepkit doesn’t work well with wine. By “not well” I mean “not at all”. No matter how hard I’ve tried, I just couldn’t get it to work. The application kept freezing and I kept xkill-ing it. But, fortunately enough I still have a Windows OS installed on a virtual machine under qemu on my laptop and, as I said before, installing the kit on Windows is a piece of cake.

The kit

The kit is really easy to use, with a well designed user interface and good typography so the texts can be easily read by glasses wearing nerds like myself. I don’t think the average user will have any difficulties using it, further more a candidate for a serious IT certification.

It doesn’t have any useless “Linux was written by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds” yatta-yatta. It goes straight to the point and focuses on the exam’s objectives right from the start. When you start the application, this is what you find:

The kit has one 15 questions diagnostic test, 8 (A to H) 42 questions tests and one final test. It also provides several ways to combine the questions into new tests, according to one’s own timetable and preferences. Each test can be taken either in “Test mode” or “Learning mode”. Test Mode simulates an actual exam, you just go through all the questions and get the results and feedback at the end of the test, while in learning mode, you get the feedback on each question’s page, after you’ve punched in the answer. I took the first exam myself and…I’ve failed it! Badly…

It seems that I still have a lot to learn before taking the real life exam. And I use Ubuntu daily on my laptop, so the test is pretty hardcore and well focused on the exam objectives from CompTIA. I could find a single question mismatched from this goal. Everything is sysadmin related, nothing about wine, cedega, deCSS or other linux topics that aren’t mentioned in the objectives. And with which I’m very familiar with.

The kit also includes exam objectives, flash cards, study notes, articles and study tips. The flash cards are an imaginative feature, they are meant to help you remember notions by typing them over and over again, until they get in your head. Another fun feature: sometimes, in the tests, you must identify ports or computer parts by clicking on them with the mouse:

Is it worth the money?

With a sale price tag of 74.98 US dollars (about 60 euros), the cost of the preparation kit is about one third of the exam fee and about the same as a practice book from CompTIA. But the kit offers so much more than just a simple book. When I prepare for an exam, I find it very usefully to have some form of auto evaluation as close as possible to the exam.

When I was preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer exam, I’ve paid $30 on the pdf version of the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide and $22 for 10 mock up exams. Zend’s preparation exams didn’t offer any useful feedback, in the way that the uCertify kit does. The kit offers detailed and useful feedback on each question (Zend only offers a hint like “You should improve your knowledge of XML parsers”). The feedback page looks something like this:

Just for the record, I know what the file command does. I’ve just clicked on the wrong answer to make a point.

If you’re interested in this kit, and want to see for yourself what uCertify offers, check out the free trial.

The preparation kit is good, I’m looking forward for the actual exam. But I would like to have the preparation kit as a web based application and perhaps in the future uCertify will consider delivering the kit on the web. Flash, Javascript, I don’t care as long as I don’t have to emulate a whole Windows operating system to run the kit. This is the only downfall I’ve found so far…

I’ll post a follow up after I’ll take the exam.