I was doing my daily round of sifting through opensource newsbits when I came across Adeona. According to its creators, it can be described as:

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

Adeona has builds for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows ready for download and follow the installation steps should anyone wanna try it out.

Though I currently do not own a laptop or a UMPC (planning to), but this sure is a nice must-have for anybody that does have one or several. I gotta see this for myself.

Technorati Adeona, laptop, tracking, theft, opensource,
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The cost for vendor-centric certifications from the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell to name a few are somewhat highly specially for middle-wage earners like me who happens to reside in the Philippines.

So what do I do? Enlist at BrainBench. Although, there have been a lot of mixed opinions coming from all sorts of people regarding BrainBench’s certifications, I still find time to take the exams it offer. However, what I do is wait out for any “sponsored certifications” because these are for certain to be free of cost for the taker. I get to “certify” my self without paying for anything.

However, some people say that BrainBench’s certification is not truly reliable because the taker can engage in cheating at any time. I have been taking BrainBench’s certifications for a few years now. BrainBench’s exams are actually timed, plus the exam items are random. If you will spend a little more time scanning for the right answer, there’s a slim chance you’ll get the right one.

Plain Honesty
For my part, ever since I’ve started taking BrainBench’s exams I never tried to cheat on it. Why? because I am not cheating BrainBench. I’m cheating myself I’f I did. Plus the timed test doesn’t give me much room to cheat anyways.

Newly Acquire BrainBench Certification
I am not so sure about how other companies and employers perceive BrainBench’s certifications whether they will honor it or not. Regardless, I have taken another of its certification, the Apache 2.0 Administration exam, and passed it. I got a 3.17 mark.


Test: Apache 2.0 Administration
Date: 12-Sep-2007
Score: 3.17
Weights: 100% Apache 2.0 Administration
Elapsed time: 29 min 23 sec
Apache 2.0 Administration
Score: 3.17
Percentile: Scored higher than 52% of previous examinees

Demonstrates a solid understanding of core concepts within this topic. Appears capable of working on most projects in this area with moderate assistance. May require some initial assistance with advanced concepts, however.
Strong Areas

* Securing Web Server
* Server Configuration

Weak Areas

* Tracking Server Activities
* Customization

Bottomline
I’m not really sure how serious companies are with regards to accepting BrainBench’s certifications. Of course, I still have my eye on taking CompTIA’s A+, Linux+, and Network+. I also got my eye on LPI’s own set of certifications. However, my pocket’s not that deep right now and instead of paying for certifications, I need it to buy food for the table. BrainBench’s exams are a great mental exercise for me and my skill anyways and I don’t expect to get a perfect score from it nor do I ambition to.

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