It’s called Exalead, although still in beta and just trapping 1 billion pages, some features are good that people might have a neet for. I liked the feature where you can click on site summary and it will open up in the same page and color the search terms. Good luck Exalead, but you still have a long way to go.

This note is to calender the event that CertRef.com is now ready to take it’s first step. What I mean, the base is nearly ready and site is ready with License details, About details, Disclaimers, make the base Categories and all. Next is invite people again to start posting to the wiki.

🙂 I twisted the title a bit from Kevin’s tilte. Wow this is new for me as well as I did not know that some of the Microsoft Events recording can be bought out at the store as well. Ya, that’s a good facility for those who cannot afford to go to such events and also those who just cannot attend such events due to distance. Well we can know what goes on at such events, but the main part is the networking that can be done with people by going to such events. Most of the money for me is just justified when I see how many people I will meet at such events and the possibility of learning new things from them. Well one day when I have that spare cash, I will definately go and attend such event myself with my own money.

OK, have finally figured out what license to use for Certref.com site. For me as a person to understand about licensing without too much of prior knowledge was somewhat difficult. There are so many things to be kept in mind while deciding on a license. With my license selection I was more inclined towards Creative Commons licenses as I found they were a bit more simpler to understand compared to other licenses like GFDL. The jargon was simple to understand and not really as lenghthy as other licenses. Also I could not find any licenses around that said that attribution to be made to the site/entity rather than the original authors. Ofcourse Creative Common is working on it with draft 2.5. Why is it important? As much as I could understand when using licenses like GFDL and Creative Commons, attribution of the work becomes very important. On collaborated sites like wiki, it sometimes becomes difficult to find the contributors who mainly contributed to the page and also this process is cumbersome. It is much more easier just to attribute the ‘work’ (as defined in CC) to the wiki website. This will encourage people to use more text from wiki in their own work and share it alike, which in return makes the wiki more useful to general public.

Although the jargon was overwhelming in the start, I got a lot of help understanding it from Greg Maxwell on the #Mediawiki IRC channel. Also helpful were people from Creative Commons along their mailing list. Interesting thing is Greg works for Juniper Networks and told me that I should have a section on Juniper certifications as well, ofcourse I will create a category for that too :).

Devoted some more time in understanding MediaWiki product and what all syntax can be used to create new pages, categories and other stuff. Not 100% on it yet, but will learn as I go forward. Now I have the structure I want for the wiki clear in my mind and will start implementing it soon.

**Anybody willing to help me with different certifications on CertRef are welcome, please contact me by email or by leaving a comment**.

You can call me dumb, but I just found out the other day from my friend Nirav that bar codes work by using their own fonts. I did not know this and never really stressed enough to understand the lines in the bar code. Now I know it I want a bar code for myself, better I can even have a bar code for my site.

You can make a similar barcode for you at IDA Automatioin Site.

Finally here it is, a personalised Google. What a coincidence, I was going to put this request today on this blog about having a personalised Google. Personalised Google can be found at http://www.google.com/ig . Ah, this I assume is just the starting of personalisataion of this tool.

What more do I need? I need an aggregator like Yahoo or MSN will have eventually, so I can watch my most preferred feeds there. Ah, may be not as it might again make the interface more cluttery but to still have an option like that would be good. I think if Google can come up with extra little feature than most of my other requirements get fulfilled as than I can add any other site I want to the list.

What I like the best about this new feature is the integration of Gmail,Search History on the same page. The interface is way better compared to Yahoo or MSN. That’s what I like most about Google, they know how to make interface that users will like. I even saw that this news is on Slashdot on my Google’s personalised page.

Well Google you are late, but you did it again.

Blog and news reading is at the least priority at the moment and that’s why I am not at all well informed about the new happenings in this world these days. Well I found while on Vasanth’s Blog that Yahoo is offering VoIP and the new messenger with these capabilities is in Beta. Why will I care? I will care as I still have more contacts on Yahoo list compared to Skype and still I prefer to use a one single software for such purposes instead of just creating duplicate contacts on all different messengers. Well I will definately going to test the beta software tonight.

The topic of licensing was always unclear to me. With my new project CertRef I started looking for the appropriate license and still cannot find one that’s most appropriate to what I want. I have almost spent more than 10 hours reading about copyright and licenses and just to find if there is a lincense that will fit my need, but have’nt found one so far. By far the nearest match that I have found is Creative Commons Wiki license which is still in beta. As I read from their discussion list that they are working on a revision license that will answer some of the my queries.

Here are some of my questions:-

–> I want a license where people contributing to CertRef are attributing their work to CertRef as a entity, meaning CertRef is considered the Licensor and not many individual who contribute to the wiki (this will make it easy when somebody wants to attribute the work copied or used from CertRef and even use it commercially)
–> I want a license where commercial use of the material should be allowed
–> I want a license where “share alike” is a part of it

Can anybody tell me if there is a license that matches the criteria? Hmmn, back to some more research.

I was away from my blog for few days now. I was doing research and assessments on the possibility of a new project. The new project is a website. Before I go on and give you the URL to the new site, I will brief you about what this website will be.

The idea of this project started in my mind two weeks back (well it was in my subconscious mind for a long time). Some of you might know that I love vendor certifications and it is a great way to me to measure how much of a product a person knows. I always get email and requests from my blogs from people asking about resources and material for preparing for Certification exams. Most of them are for Microsoft, Cisco and other security certifications. I know many people including myself who will look for all the free and good resources on the web when they start preparing for any certification exam. I will look for information like exam objectives, exam tips, list of labs, recommendations from people, recommended books, practice questions, reviews about exams and what people think was easy and difficult in exams and any extra preparation material that can help me to prepare for the certification exam. Although I read books I still prefer to get another source from which I can read and re-instate my reading so far. I know many friends and have read about people on the web doing the same. There is a lot of time spend on the Internet just looking for resources and some of which is in accurate. Than some resources are expensive than the others and cost a lot of money. Certification exams are expensive in themselves and all these additional resources are an added cost in terms of time and money.

I know that there are many sites/forums that are dedicated to vendor certifications. Some forums are specific for questions/answers and some are generic forums. Some websites that I see have good exams tips and stuff on them. Than again people have to search for technical topics that are a part of measured skill in the exam and this can be on any site on the Internet or on Vendor’s website itself. This all again consumes and lot of time and confusion as to what is correct and what is wrong. Than again there are Microsoft User groups and others like those.

I always wanted a website that was a central resource on certification with most of the things on the same site. I wanted the information to be updated regularly. I wanted the information to be accessible by all and for free. I wanted to give a chance to everybody who has the knowledge and willingness to edit the write the stuff to be able to do so. I wanted a central website where people could share their experiences about exams so everybody can benefit from it. As I understand there is a huge pass/fail ratio for vendor exams. I wanted to reduce that ratio. I know people who have years on experience working on the product but they still fail to pass the exam as they are not familiar with what’s on the exam and they are not prepared to do enough research on the Internet about the exam. Some people just rely on one resource for passing the exam and than fail the exam. Sometimes in such cases the blame goes to vendors for making a stupid exam and I always don’t agree with that.

I have been following Wiki world for a little while now and I am fascinated with the possibilities that it provides. The advantages it holds over other forms of communication and the scalability of it. So I decided to start up a project called “CertRef” (Certification Reference) hosted at http://www.certref.com . I start this website with an intention to make a central repository for information relating to certification exams. The wiki based website will hold the following and many more features in it:-

○ Categorised vendor examinations
○ Details on each examination
○ Exam tips for a given exam
○ Study tips
○ Recommended labs that are associated for a exam
○ Videos & Podcasts ( I am excited about these)
○ Recommended external links for a given skills
○ Practice questions and answers
○ Exam reviews
○ Certification news
○ Place to discuss things
○ Brief introductions to all the topics covered in the exam which can be handy for revision and links to external sites (my vision is to expand these in to study guides in the future)
○ Case studies
○ And a lot. Bring on your requests to add to this list.

Ofcourse, being Wiki based website, it is a collaborative effort. I am not a guru in all the vendor certifications nor I have a desire to be one soon. I want this to be a website for people by people. We all can chip in some thing or the other in this project. People spend huge amount of time on forums and newsgroups answering the same question again and again. I heartily invite them all to visit this website and update the contents that will help hundreds/thousands of people preparing for this certification. I have a dream of making this website as a central reference pool (My friend Nirav also suggested to name the site as Certpool.com) for vendor certifications. I will like to have this site updated with latest and correct information so people can benefit from it. People should be well informed on what the exam is about before they go ahead and sit the exam. I want this site to make them well informed.

I myself am still learning the language of Wiki and I am sure will learn as the time goes by. I am exploring more and more capabilities of wiki system as I play more with Wiki. Well now as the site is registered, the wiki is all setup and working, the next thing on my list is to set a structure as to how things will be organised on the wiki. I think this will be a evolving thing for a while as I learn more and more capabilities of the wiki system. I decided to use MediaWiki which is used by Wikipedia. Any other recommendations on other Wiki’s and why it is better than MediaWiki? I tried TikiWiki but it is way too much and am not happy with it’s cluttered interface.

One other thing I will need help is with selecting the right license type! Is there any expert here who can help me explaining different license types and which one can go well with my intentions for this site?

So spread the word about this site and the intentions of this site. Email me if you have any questions related to Certref project and if you want to be an active participant on this site. Throw ideas if you got them for this project. Well I am all juiced up for this project! More to follow.

Some OK funny ads are there at http://funnyfox.org/. Good initiative.