Category: Technology

Web development with Catalyst

I have some web development to do for the past month and I came across Catalyst framework for perl which simplifies the job a lot. It is an MVC framework which does all the routing one need, plus it has support for such good modules like Template Toolkit, Class::DBI and others. Another big advantage is that it has a small web developers web server which helps to troubleshoot many aspects during the development process and then the whole thing can be migrated to apache with a couple of moves only.

Brainbench certificates

I was planning to take a couple of tests and pass certifications from Brainbench for a while already but I never came back to actually do it. This Friday I occasionally got near by the Brainbench site and finally went to the test section. I found all the free/sponsored tests and I took almost all of the ones I thought I had some knowledge in. I ended up with 9 certificates:

  1. Linux Administration (General)
  2. MS Office 2003 Fundamentals
  3. Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98)
  4. HTML 3.2
  5. Computer Fundamentals (Win XP)
  6. PHP 5
  7. Cisco Routers Fundamentals
  8. Network Security
  9. MS Windows Server 2003 Administration

Only two of the above (no 7 and no 9) are not very well, but still ok due to the reason that I am not too much into Cisco (consider myself a beginner) and I am more a Linux administrator, so I do not spend much time on Windows Servers and that is why my Windows Servers test was not as good.

Anyhow, I think that it is quite good for the time being. I hope that I will get better results on the two not-so-good tests and that I will take more tests later on (especially if they will be free/sponsored).

My transcript number is 6210735 and my results (and other stuff related to Brainbench) can be seen here

Win XP Install after Linux

Although I do not like doing it, sometimes I have to install Windows XP on machines which have Linux installed on them. Mostly when I have an option to give a newer machine to Linux, I do so and an older machine often gets Windows XP installed to be given out to a user.

For the past couple of times I have noticed that it is not so easy to install Win XP and to replace FC5. If going the normal way and booting from Win XP SP2 CD, it gets up to the point where it tells you \”Inspecting Hardware Configurations\” (which is right at the begging of install), then it shows just black screen and freezes there. I\’ve been fighting with this problem for long time trying to disable different devices from BIOS (I though I had problems with devices if install freezes right after hardware detection stage), but nothing helps. The solution to the problem was to remove all linux partitions from the drive and then everything works! I really hate this!