'Til All Are One

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.