Had my final exam today. Have another one in a week, but that’s only more like a friendly chat that only counts 10-15% of the grade - won’t affect what I’ve already done much with other words.
My exam today was an oral one in Security Management. Briefly told it is about planning and implementing information security in an organization with basis in security standards such as AS/NZS 7799, COBIT and ISM3 and so on.
Boring stuff made interesting just because of our teacher; Milton Baar. Had to explain how I, as an Information Security Officer, would have implemented a information security framework in an organization, how the organization could be certified + lots of details.

So now I’m just relaxing, not thinking about having to set my alarm clock every morning, knowing that I can whatever i want in freedom without having to plan my life around the university, and can think about partying, having fun and going on vacation!

Put some pictures from last weekend when we 1. celebrated having finished our presentation in ITEC810 - Information Technology Project, and 2. ehh.. just partied :p

The pic above is of some of the people in my project class after our presentation; Frank Moisiadis (.au/.gr), Michael (.au), Markus (.de), Oksana (.ru) and me Jan (.no).
On Saturday we were VIP guests at Home nightclub - actually there was at least 100 VIPs, so we didn’t feel that ‘VIP’. They got a nice view over Sydney Harbour (since its located at the waterfront):

It was Home’s 7th birthday, so the place was packed, and Sneaky Sound System were playing among other DJs;

And to finish of that night, Tanja and Markus;

The rest of the pics are available in the Gallery. All photos taken by Markus Spillner.

The rest of this week I’ve been working on my ITEC831 - Advanced Internet Programming assignment. Had to develop a J2EE application for a high school data entry&reporting system. Pointbase database, Sun Application Server, business logic, servlets, JSP, HTML and God knows what else I put into it. If that wasn’t enough my laptop died on me when I needed it the most. Windows just thought it was best to destroy my filesystem so that I could live at the lab at the university for the rest of the week - nicely done to keep me at the university for up to 18 hours. Well, going from frustration and almost giving up I at least looking at a decent score - I think.
Being that stressed the last month I just had to relax, which I’ve done yesterday and today - done absolutely nothing except reinstalling my laptop and watching tv-series
Starting up with exams on Tuesday. Have a written exam in ITEC852 - System and Network Security and a oral exam in ITEC854 - Security Management on Thursday. A small oral exam in ITEC831 thereafter, but I don’t really count that as an exam… more like a ‘friendly chat’ =)
Just looking so much forward to finishing of this Master in IT and have a nice summer vacation down here in Sydney, Perth-Broome, and wherever else I should end up.

And I’m having my 26th birthday on Tuesday - so expecting plenty of big green dollar bills and hard packets then (unless you’re female and give really good hugs :p)

Over at CubeSolver you can see a project where a guy actually solves Rubik’s Cube with the help of Lego Mindstorm.
First of all - just thinking about doing it is quite clever.
The next thing is of course finding out how to solve the problem, and then not just solving the Rubik’s Cube in the quickest time with the least turns, but also figuring out how to get Lego Mindstorm co-operate with a webcam and a computer program.
A webcam is used to figure out the colours on each side of the cube as it’s spun all around. The colour-recognition software sends it data to another program that figures out the quickest way to solve it, and then instructs the engines in the Lego model to do it.
It’s not a fast process, but it works. You can even look at a video where the inventor tells a bit about the project.

There are also more fun and interesting Lego projects at the main page, such as the famous ‘Tower of Hanoi’ problem (every IT101 student should at least know about it), dog robots and ‘Boatman’.

It’s also interesting to know that there are many schools that actually use Lego Mindstorm to educate students in programming and logics.

Another release of one of my project reports.
This time a report on WAP Push Technology in ITEC851 - Networking Technologies. The first part of the report is a requirement documentation (quite boring), but it consist the outline of a scenario with a WAP service in Qantas.
The project is a individual group project (doesn’t that sound strange?! We’re actually not delivering a group report- everything is individual done - we only have a common scenario), but thanks to Thilini, Amit and Andre for their input

A excerpt from the report:

WAP – Wireless Application Protocol - is a collection of standardized protocols, and is not a protocol as the name suggest. It relies on protocols developed by organizations such as W3C, IEEE and IETF.
WAP’s main goal is to develop an open international standard for applications used on mobile devices. It is maintained by Open Mobile Alliance [7] (formerly WAP forum [10]), and was founded by Ericsson [11], Motorola [12] and Nokia [13].
WAP is meant to be used on small devices with small screens and little processing power and battery lifetime. It is therefore critical that all protocols used are optimized for this scenario. Most protocols chosen for WAP are based on Internet-standards where the normal scenario is a desktop computer connected over a small/medium/high bandwidth link, and where the user has an adequate sized screen. WAP has then used rewritten protocols in their standard to customize them to small mobile devices. Instead of for example HTML, WAP uses WML which is based on XML and provides a website-developer with means to write WAP-readable web pages. For each layer in the TCP/IP-stack we will find a corresponding layer with similar functionality in the WAP stack À€“ and vice versa.
WAP is meant to be interoperable without concern of the other layers in the stack, something that especially is noticeable with the physical layer. WAP works independent on any carriers used between the client and server.
One of the major concerns when developing a standard for small mobile devices is to make the presentation of information usable. This is especially true since mobile users mostly need the information quick and in a concise format – the drawback is having a screen that is not capable of showing much text or any other multimedia. The challenge here lays on web designers to offer mobile users nothing more or less information than what is expected and which is optimized for the user’s device.

The report can be downloaded here (Adobe PDF format, 715 kB).

Please adds comments to this post if you have any questions or remarks.

Have been working on a project in my “Networking Technologies” course for a couple of weeks now. And it is finally finished - Yippee-ki-yay! Going to deliver it today.
I don’t see any point in keeping it to myself, so here it is for everybody who wants to read it, and perhaps critique it.

The assignment is a “Request for tender” for a local area network and wide area network for a fictious company called CACIT in Canberra, Australia. It’s a company that deals with military logistics and therefor requires a high security network.
The assignment you can read in the document Assignement, with the floorplan here: Floorplan.pdf. Information in these two files are property of Macquarie University.

My report you can download here: Request for Tender (1 MB).

All files are in Adobe PDF format. If you do not have a reader for PDF-files, you may download one from Adobe.

All information from my report is free to use - including text, ideas and figures, but under the requirement that you credit me for the work by linking back to this website with my name.

My request for tender is in no way proof of a 100% secure system, so you are welcome to critique everything by adding comments to this post.

(IE-users: You see that big empty space to the left? It’s actually a image there, but your lousy webbrowser is so incompatible with standards that it isn’t capable of showing it! Switch browser as fast as you can! And read Portable FireFox while you are at it.)