iPhone SDK Development Book (from Pragmatic Bookshelf)

The further I get into this book (iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson) from the Pragmatic bookshelf. The more I feel like this book was rushed out the door. Yes, it does have a great amount of content, more than any other book in the market. It covers allot of things, but I get the impression that this book was targeted for beginners, yet there's a few things gone wrong. There's not allot of code explanation, as to what method is doing what. They do assume that you have at least a little ObjC background, but that does not mean that just because you understand the language; you automagically understand every method or what they're trying to accomplish.

If you're a beginner in iPhone Development like myself, you're probably better of getting started with (Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche) from Apress. Both books are about the same in pages per book, yet Beginning iPhone 3 Development covers less subjects which leaves more room for explanations and understanding. The Pragmatic book is in my way of seeing it more like an extremely good Tutorial Reference and not a Beginners tutorial. Once you finished Beginning iPhone 3 Development then move on to the Pragmatics iPhone SDK Development.

You wont be disappointed with either as long as you know what you're getting into and what to expect. I hope you find this useful and if you don't completely agree feel free to drop a line and tell me I'm all full of *h*t :).

CYA

Redistribution notes

Through all the reading and practice labs, these are some redistribution notes that I thought were very useful and helped me allot. So I'm sharing and maybe it'll help someone understand or see things differently.

Redistribution

• When redistributing from OSPF in to BGP, by default, BGP only accepts internal routes not external type-1 or type-2.
• When redistributing into OSPF all redistributed routes get a metric of 20, except BGP gets a metric of 1.
• EIGRP needs a default-metric command or a metric when redistributing with route-map or with the redistribute metric xxx command.
• Watch for RIP metrics set to redistributed routes, might end up with 16, use metric, again in route-map or redistribute metric command.
• Watch for administrative distance problems, especially since EIGRP has lower distance than OSPF.
• Beware of the metric used by RIP
• Redistributing in to RIP requires a metric or default-metric or it may get set to 16.
• Always filter routes when doing redistribution the use of route TAGS is extremely useful and sometimes necessary (to conserve time and headaches).
• BGP only redistributes eBGP routes by default (bgp redistribute internal) to change that.
• Make note of routes in routing table and from which protocol. Only routes in routing table get redistributed.
• Always watch for multiple points of redistribution and routes from a higher AD protocol going into a lower AD protocol then back into Higher AD, use route TAGS as well for this.
• Only change Protocol AD if absolutely necessary.
• route-maps are extremely useful in redistribution as in BGP.

If you have further notes that are useful and wish to share, well then go ahead an leave me your thoughts. I'm working on a screencast of my own pitfalls and practice. Will post it up as soon as I can.

How do you study for CCIE?

Reading allot of blogs out there, there seem to be quite a few different approaches to studying for the CCIE. Some people read entire books, go through full COD type classes and then go on to either protocol labs or multi protocol labs. Others well read and wing the exam, some are actually successful some are not. Some just do Mock Lab type scenarios.

I for one do this, first I'll read a chapter in a book about whatever subject I happen to be on. For this I'm going to use OSPF. I read that chapter on lets say, Routing TCP/IP by Jeff Doyle.. (Awesome book!). Rather than read the whole book, I go to lets say my Internetwork Expert COD and go through the OSPF videos. Then afterward, I open up an OSPF specific protocol lab, in this case Internetwork Experts' VOL1 labs. Then go through my notes during the lab practice or after, refresh on anything and move on. Only after I've fully done all protocols in this scenario, do I move on to full protocol labs or mock labs.

What is your study habit? How do you prepare? Any pointers, comments or advice more than welcomed.

Visor Terminal for OS X -- Very cool plugin

So I was fiddling on Google and stumbled on this very cool App or plugin. It's actually a bit of both, a stand alone OSX input manager that supports plugins. This one in specially for the Terminal Application. Here's a video of it in action on my desktop. Basically you can pop the terminal in and out of the screen with a hot-key combination mine being alt-cmd-spacebar cause it's readily available. I have it coming up from the top and stretched in the video, but basically you can set it for any side of the screen.

Terminal from Yandy Ramirez on Vimeo.

If you're interested on getting it to work, below are the links. Good luck and Enjoy!

The main APP (InputManager) page

The Visor plugin for Terminal


And HERE are special instructions for making it work on Snow Leopard.

Good luck and hope you like this. :)

Snow Leopard and Spotlight

Well I've made the move and upgraded to Snow Leopard I mean only $10 cause a recently bought MBP. One of the things I noticed right away was that my Spotlight search was all jacked up. And by jacked up I mean it would not find applications, wouldn't even try. So like any other techie guy, rather than going the simple route... well I didn't. I went and deleted all my ".Spotlight-V100" under "/" root directory. Forced Spotlight to re-index in like 30 different ways.. and nothing. Took me about 2 hours to realize, hey let me just go into "System preferences" and uncheck and check the Applications option to index. After that, all seem to magically work.

Now I'm a big quicksilver user, and there's plenty of links out there already about that and Snow Leopard. But I like to have Spotlight as a nice back up. So if you are having problems with Spotlight and your Applications under Snow Leopard, then Check and Uncheck the Applications box under Spotlight System Preferences.