Last night (Friday) I went to the monthly Sydney Linux Users’ Group (SLUG) meeting, after being prompted by Pia Waugh at CeBIT. Being my first LUG meeting, I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be great. The people there are interesting and friendly, and it felt good to be with people who share similar ideas about computing and software as I do.
The best thing about free software is the community. As Sean Neakums said, "I came for the quality. I stayed for the freedom." I have been an active member of the community for five or six years, but all interaction was made via the Internet. Meeting people face-to-face felt positively wondrous.
Nobody is excluded from LUG meetings. After the initial introduction and presentation, the LUG splits into a group for newbies ("SLUGlets") and another for more experienced users. Not being particularly interested in a presentation on statistical computing, I went with the SLUGlets. Aside from the presentations, the meeting was extremely informal. You were free to talk about just about anything.
Following the meeting, a bunch of us went to an Indian restaurant near Central Station. The food was ordinary (as far as Indian food goes), but it was fun getting to know people and having face-to-face geek-talk. When I talk to most people, I have to dumb-down what I’m saying so that they can follow. At SLUG, if anything it was the opposite. It felt good to be around people who truly knew what they were talking about and I know I can learn a lot from them.
So what is the moral of this story? If you like Linux and/or free software, join a LUG!
I have never placed much faith in the quality of CompTIA certifications. Now that I have both an A+ and Network+, I must reiterate that opinion. The exams aren’t designed to test your knowledge, they are designed to trip you up.
The best way to study for a CompTIA exam is to complete as many practice questions as you can. There’s not much need for any real study or understanding of the issues at hand (although it can help). That is the view I took when studying for the Network+ exam. I began by reading the textbook which had been supplied to me, but I quickly gave up on it and turned to practice questions. After 400 questions, I felt ready to take the exam. Mind you, I did have a lot of prior knowledge and understanding, but I’m certain that most people who take this approach do not. In fact, at least 10% of the questions in my exam were identical to practice questions I had done earlier.
How skilful can you expect a CompTIA certification holder to be if the testing method is so pointless? Will they be able to apply the ‘knowledge’ gained from memorising multiple choice answers to real-life situations? Overall, I don’t believe they can.
Case in point: for several months I have had trouble connecting to a couple of Web sites. I knew they were up, but my Web browser would time out whenever I tried to connect. I have known of the existence of the traceroute tool for many years (and I even used it several times), and its use was covered in Network+. However, I only put one and one together relatively recently. Prior to this, I never considered using the tool to troubleshoot my connection to those sites.
Of course, upon realising this I whacked myself on the forehead for my ineptitude. I’m not normally that slow. It got me thinking, though. If I - who knew about the tool even before studying it for the exam - did not think of using it, what were the chances for the average Network+ certification holder? You know, the people who do the cert just to get a job and not because they have any real aptitude or interest?
I’m glad to be doing something else now. Structured programming is a challenge, which is far more than I can say for the CompTIA certs.
The CeBIT show was in the Darling Harbour Convention Centre this week. Computer Power were good enough to give us a leave of absence to attend. It only made sense: attending an IT show gives us a feel of the IT industry as a whole. The exhibitors covered just about everything under the sun (at least under the IT sun, which might more accurately be described as a dwarf star).
It wasn’t a particularly spectacular show. I still have fond memories of the excesses of the dot-com days: loads of givaways, free capuccinos, etc.. This time the giveaways were mostly restricted to pens. There was coffee, but to be eligible you had to be ‘customer’ of the group running the booth. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian each had booths, and you could pick up free copies of their respective papers. Besides that, there were the obligatory ‘booth babes’ and plenty of staff who couldn’t speak English. w00t.
At the end I decided to return to a booth I had spied earlier: Open Source Victoria. There, I got to talking to a nice girl there. It turned out that she was Pia Waugh, wife of well-known GNOME hacker Jeff Waugh. Not that she should be known just for that, though. She is doing some truly interesting work in trying to further the use of open source software in government and education. We spoke for about half an hour, during which time she invited me to go to the monthly Sydney Linux Users’ Group (SLUG) meeting, which conveniently was on that Friday (i.e. yesterday). I had been meaning to go to one for years, and this was the kick up the backside that I needed.
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