The wonderful things about wibbles….

So I’m still on this CCIE course, and this morning we’re doing DLSW and IP Custom Queuing (the later is quite nice, once you get past the complicated maths involved). In order to do DLSW and then custom queue the traffic based on SAP type, you must use TCP so that you can have several queues where by you stick priorities in or something like that. I’m too confused at this stage to make more sense of it than that – so I won’t.

The main reason for writing though was to rant. I’m pretty good at this. We were doing a complex discussion of DLSW and my head was hurting. Anyway, a discussion of Web editors came up and I was asked for my opinion on MS Frontpage. Being a normally polite person (ha!) I refrained from expressing my full feelings on the subject, confining myself to the observation that it was a pile of crap and the questioner should consider something (or indeed anything) else.

There’s someone in the room that clearly has a MCSE background, and he says “Frontpage is alright, and its easy to use”. That’s not the point – it produces crap html, and has server extensions that leads its users to believe that this is a normal part of web editing. I wrote my first web page using vi, but I suppose in this modern day and age thats not good enough. Dreamweaver or Homesite would be much better choices for doing web pages.

I’ve been spending the last week and a half at a CCIE lab training course. I’d strongly recommend it – it’s an excellent course, and it’s amazing the amount of stuff you learn. Whats even more interesting is Cisco’s adoption of the Perl slogan – there’s more than one way to do it. And the chances are that in the exam, the three ways you know will all be excluded so you have to work a fourth out.

Anyway – in a moment of insanity I’ve decided to try for the lab exam on April 15th. I’m scared – I thought I was okay on the routing stuff last week, but the bridging stuff is new, and the amount of new dial stuff I’ve learnt, is amazing. And I’m supposed to be good with this stuff.

Pron has been hassling me for a few days to do this – seems to me to be better to use a blog here than the old one at http://www.wibble.to/wurble.

Anyway, I thought I’d start with a rant about the anti war movement. I would start by saying that I am opposed to the war, but mostly because I’m concerned it will destablise the region and the US don’t seem to have had a coherent plan for what to do when they win.

But the debate in Ireland is reaching the depths of pure banality – there’s a statement that as a neutral state, we shouldn’t be involved in the campaign. This is idiotic – Ireland has never aspired to the level of neutrality that the likes of Switzerland have (Switzerland only join the UN a few months ago). We’ve simply refused to join NATO – but all this does is allow us to make our own decisions rather than being part of some alliance. Neutrality in an Irish context means we should make decisions on a per case basis, rather than NATO membership which means we’d have to go along with the consensus despite our reservations because thats what we’d signed up to do. A few months ago there was a serious discussion about pulling peacekeeping troops out of Kosovo because the UN mandate was under threat (due to the US threatening a veto over a dispute over the International Criminal Court). But this is daft – this is saying our foreign policy is dependent on the US, the UK, France, China and Russia all behaving like responsible countries and agreeing not to veto each other.

Neutral because we’re neutral is a daft argument. Yet it seems to be what is passing for debate in Ireland – at least if some of the letters to the Irish Times are anything to go by.