I’m going to be travelling a bit in the near future and wanted an easy, laptop-based Juniper device and Junos Space instance to mess with. I’ve recently made some headway with CLI configlets and wanted to build on what I’ve got working.
I already run VMware Fusion on the Mac in order to run Ubuntu and Windows, so I figured that was the best thing to use. What I wanted was two VMs that could see each other and be accessed from the host machine, but without them being dependent on the host’s interfaces being up. Wifi access would be chargeable, and wired impossible – without making an ethernet loopback plug to bring the Mac’s interface up artifically, that is. So that ruled out both bridged and NAT type connections. What I needed was some kind of internal network within the host – Fusion seems to call this a ‘Private to my Mac’ connection.
My version of Fusion is 7.1.2 – it doesn’t seem to be the ‘Pro’ version, but I can’t confirm this. For some reason, the help isn’t vey helpful. You do some Googling and VMware Workstation information comes up, or help pages about what appear to be Continue reading
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First in this series is the subject of Algorithms. This topic is very interesting to me because when I first strived to understand what exactly they were, I was expecting something a lot more complicated than what they turned out to be. I think, shamefully, that Hollywood may have had an influence on this, as the term “algorithm” is one of many terms abused by “cyber” movies and the like, portrayed to be some sort of ultimate cyber weapon in the war against Ellingson Mineral Company.
The reality is much simpler. “Algorithm” is defined as “a set of steps that are followed in order to solve a mathematical problem or to complete a computer process”. It really is that simple. Think of a mathematical problem that you’d need to solve yourself (ignoring for the moment that there’s likely a 3rd party library that has already done this).
A common example is the calculation of the Fibonacci sequence. Forget about writing code for a minute, and think about the problem in plain English. Given a starting sequence (1, 1), how do you continue calculating and adding numbers to this sequence, to produce N number of Fibonacci numbers?
Historically, my background is far closer to the systems side of things, but as I’ve picked up software development experience over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate the fundamentals of computer science that others in my shoes may not have been exposed to. That said, I have been working on a pseudo-formal blog series on computer science fundamentals.
These fundamentals have a wide variety of applications. Those with more of an IT-focused background will learn that even if you don’t use graph theory, or optimize algorithms in your day job, many of these concepts are at the crux of many of the technologies that we use every day. If, like me, you’ve become bored with the endless cycle of IT certifications, learning these concepts could be a great addition to your skill set, as you can leverage these concepts to extrapolate details from some of the “closed” products we use from IT vendors.
Finally, it’s important to remember that the most important part of any of this is how this knowledge is applied. As you read the posts that I’ll release in the next few weeks, remember that understanding how to optimize a piece of code is useful, Continue reading