Tag Archives: rant

Cisco

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Cisco IP Phone ft. HELLO KITTY
melissa_sucks – Cisco IP Phone ft. HELLO KITTY

Cisco make some damn nice products, but they also make some products that make my life hell. Here is my list.

Things Cisco does right:

Cisco Switches, Routers, and Access Points

Cisco switches, rouners and access points are amazing pieces of equipment. They have lots of features, fast, secure and easy to configure. All are simple to configure using IOS and most devices can be configured to do many tasks.

Cisco VoIP Devices

Cisco phones are easy to use, customizable, and support various backends. The range includes phone that can be configured for any task.

IOS

IOS has to be the best / most usable operating system for switches that I’ve seen. It has a small foot print allowing for low lag, yet is still feature packed. It’s a shame that there are still devices floating around not running IOS (eg voice gateways and old aironet devices).

Standards

If there is a need for a protocol or standard Cisco will make one to suit the need, which gets the market moving.

Things that Cisco should be banned from developing:

Client Software

Cisco makes the crappiest client software round at times. Why does their software phone have to act / feel like a real phone. Their software is typically hard to install, hard to use, and breaks easily.

Server Software

Just like the client software, Cisco server software is hard to install, hard to maintain and hard to use. The software usually installs several services, most without descriptions, contains lots of memory leaks, bugs and security flaws and breaks with OS updates.

Web Sites

Most of Cisco software and devices contain built in web servers for easy management. The menus are hard to use, and are designed purely for IE 6 running on Windows, and break if you use another browser. Cisco websites usually contain numerous exploits.

Even worse than their devices and software, Cisco’s own website struggles. While the look actually seems appealing, their site is impossible to navigate (thank the lord for Google). A simple task of finding a firmware is impossible without reading the “Navigating Cisco Website for Dummies” book. Old content has disappeared, pages full of broken links and missing files, and new content disappearing. Finding what devices / firmware support what SFPs is impossible.

Java

Any Cisco product that requires Java requires a specific version. I am required to be running 4 different versions of Java because of this. Java software is slow to use, and usually leaves me with no memory for other programs.

Drivers

If you have used an Aironet card, you’ll understand why. The GUI is hard to use and the software can get fairly confusing.

Standards

While Cisco will make a standard to fill a gap, it usually won’t disclose the standard to any other companies without large sums of money. This forces companies to make their own, creating compatibility issues between devices.

I'm Pretty Sure I'm Unauthorized

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zzap has posted a very in-depth article on why the proposed internet censorship sucks. I agree with zzaps post completely and here are my issues and thoughts with the internet filtering.

ISPs should provide filtering by law to all customers, however, it should be a opt in case not opt out. Filtering customers, destroys privacy, impacts on security and speed and doesn’t work

Filtering cannot stop porn sites from being accessed, and filtering can also trigger false positives.

Filtering provides another place for man in the middle attacks, allowing hackers to gain access to where you go, passwords and usernames by sniffing.

Filtering doesn’t work under encrypted connections making is even more useless.

Filtering all of Australia’s internet, which is already horribly slow, will make it even more slower. This is no way to create a “world class broadband network”.

I love my ISP at the moment, because I know that my data gets from one place to another without being Fold, Bended, Mutilated or Spindled. Packets get from one place to another without going through http proxies or the like.

I can see this ISP level filtering masking my IP and most likely will cause problems with shared sites, that block by IP.

I would like to apologise for this shittyness of this post. It’s taken me 30 minutes to write this, and I can’t seem to stay focused.

This also goes against the idea’s of the Internet. It wasn’t designed to be destroyed like this.

Marriage in our law system

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Most people don’t understand that marriage is a religious ceremony. Religion should not be apart or change the laws that govern our country, although somehow people who are marriage can obtain government benefits in tax.

I don’t believe marriage should change anything to do with the law, tax or health benefits. People should treated separately and their should be benefits or loss for being a couple.

VB .net

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I was helping a friend out with his IPT assignment, which involved creating a educational game in Visual Basic .net 2005. He decided that he wanted to create a simple hangman game, which I thought was a good choice. Oh how wrong I was.

The last time I programmed in Visual Basics was about 3 years ago, and it was in VB 6. This was a big shock to me. The first step was to load a word list, and select a word randomly. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of information on the net about VB .net, but when your searching, it’s easy to pickup bits of information from VB 6. They changed Open filepath #1 as blah to FileOpen(1,filepath, blah) or something, why make the stupidest change.

Next was arrays, I wanted to put every line of the file, as a word in an array. Simple create an array, load the file by line, and append each line to the array. Not so simple, you first have to make a dynamic array, then tell it to resize to the size 0, then add an item, resize it one larger, add another line ect… Just silly, wheres the append function?

Ok, now we can make an control array of labels to display each letter. Oh, no control arrays. A bit of googling says everything is done in code now, and it’s better. Actually for me it was worse. I didn’t want to dynamically create controls, I just wanted 20 label boxes as an array. Now the websites were correct saying it was easy, but it wasn’t easier, and they neglected to say how to make the array. It took me several minutes to find the information required to make them.

The problems just kept coming and hangman took several hours to get to a very light version (no hangman yet).

So here I am thinking, I’m struggling, how is anyone else in this class gonna get this assignment done?

Silly VB .net, there is a really good reason I use python.