Misc Security Tools

Firewall, Sniffer, Scanner, Nmap, Nessus, SAINT, Snort, Tripwire & SATAN * Cisco Intrusion Detection System, CyberCop, ISS Security Scanner, ISS RealSecure, ISS Preventia, Sniffers - Network Associates Sniffer Pro/ Sniffer Basic, Net-Xray, Ethereal, Snoop, TCP Dump, Novell Lanalyzer, Axent NetProwler, Abirnet Sessionwall, Winpharoah, Nessus, NMap, CyberCop, Internet Security Scanner, SSH Scan, Strobe,Cowpatty, Auditor, Sleuthkit, Autopsy, Helix, Snort, PortSentry, Host Sentry, Tripwire, ITA, ISS, Real Secure, Checkpoint, Cisco PIX, Juniper Netscreen, Secure Computing Sidewinder, Cyberguard, McAfee Intrushield, TippingPoint, SNORT, SourceFire, Fortinet, iPolicy, Cisco, Network General Sniffer, NESSUS, RetinaArcSight, Computer Associates eTrust, eSecurity, Intellitactics, Network Intelligence, PIX

Opinions

Opinions

-        Sometimes it can be a curse to be ‘too’ opinionated. However, I feel it is absolutely very difficult to _not_ form an opinion about many things in life. Maybe that’s just me, in which case it still is OK since this is my blog and all of these are my opinions. :D But, anyways, here is my rationale for my line of thought. Suppose we consider _any_ juncture of your life, when you are seeing new things and/or meeting new people, it is but natural to think and mull over about one’s experience with the place/person/whatever. In general, it is a natural human tendency to place one’s experience in wide ‘buckets’ of goodness/badness etc. As time passes, one’s bucket of categorization becomes narrower and narrower, in other words, it becomes more specific, which again is natural. Here I would like to note, that opinions are based on one’s experiences and/or observations. Observations can be extremely subjective and can depend on too many variables to even comment about. Some parameters can be, what was your ‘mood’ at the time of observation, how was ‘your’ reaction to the person / place in the first place, did you interact with the person with a bias, was the person biased when he/she was talking to you which ended up affecting their reaction to you and thus inturn your ‘experience’ ? Thus, we can see that there can be many parameters which can end up affecting our observations and make them less subjective / more objective. Observations lay the foundations for our opinions, thus a subjective observation will lead to a biased opinion. Hence, for one to have an unbiased (relatively speaking ofcourse since one man’s bias is another man’s neutrality) it is important to be as objective as possible during the process of observation. In other words, one must be able to stop oneself from jumping to conclusions without proper observations….

Questions...

Questions

-          Asking questions, lots of them with genuine interest is one of the best ways of learning. Before a questions is asked however, it is very important to realize however that one must try to accumulate all the possible resources and tools one has to possibly answer the question. Let me try to answer what I sat. Questions are usually asked in response to ‘problems’. Now, it is possible that at any given point of time you might have the necessary knowledge base to attack a question, but you might not have the correct direction / approach to attack the problem. Anyways, my point is that the process of self-introspection / investigation into one’s existing knowledge base is very important _before_ one asks the question because once that is done, and your question gets answered, you know _exactly_ what you were missing in your thought process and/or knowledge base and you are much better able to integrate the knowledge acquired to attack future problems. Furthermore, such knowledge is more likely to stick with you for a longer period of time.

Completely Random - but interesting websites

Compact Travel guides detailing fun things to do for certain tourist destinations

http://www.freefunguides.com/

PITA principle - about PITA co-workers !

http://pitaprinciple.blogspot.com/

Real life and Innovative ways of proposing !

http://www.willyoumarryme.ie/

Entry level Career Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/x-828-Entry-Level-Careers-Examiner

Joy

Joy == Knowing what you want, next, getting what you want because you know you want it, and finally the realization that you got what you wanted because you knew what you wanted. :)

Google Streetview comes to Atlanta

Google streetview comes to Atlanta, well now the house where I lived during my last semester at Tech is featured on Google earth, it seems like that the Google streetview car went infront of our houses at some point of time !!

The link below shows the house which I talked about earlier in this post, on Google earth.

http://tinyurl.com/63tqhr

Consulting

I am not the best consultants out there but I am learning since I have been one for just the past few months, and this post is to merely draw attention to some of the things which I have learnt as with my job till now,

Some observations.

1. There will always a gap between what the client wants and between what the developer thinks he has to deliver. Here is where the PM - Project Manager comes in. A PM's job is to be a bit of the client and a bit of the developer and a bit of ... well ... duuh a PM ! :-)) He has to be the one who realizes if a client's demands are ridiculous, and suggests the same to the client, in a much more polite manner ofcourse. In a similar manner, it is a PMs responsibility to convey to the developer that client's expectations are realistic. There can be many factors which can lead to a developer being non co-operative. Sometimes, a developer may realize that what the client wants is realistic and well within his reach, but, he may think that there is no real reason for the client to demand that feature / functionality. Therefore, it is the PMs duty to not just convey what a client wants, but more importantly, if the need maybe, *why* a client desires a particular functionality.

2. Sometimes a developer can have a really big ego and same goes for a client, and it is the PM's job to make sure that the job gets done, irrespective of the sizes of the egos of the people involved !

3. A consultant has to be a good listener. One important aspect of consulting is that pretty much every client is unique. Here uniqueness is defined in terms of: type of desired deliverables, cultural difference, organizational difference, legacy, type of business, type of technology preferred, nature of people involded, and last but not the least, the additional complications which are almost always there. More often than not, consultants are called in to take care of the uniquely special doo doo that a client is in. In such cases, previously existing solutions to problems do not exist by definition, and neither do industry wide best practices to solve such problems. Therefore, a consultant has to be willing enough to get close to the problem and realize it's unique nature.

More stuff will follow ! :-)