papamike writes:  

This is a excerpt from http://www.routerfreak.com and is informational.

Decisions, Decisions
When configuring high availability gateways between multiple routers you only have a couple of options to choose from. If you have all Cisco routers chances are you will be configuring and using HSRP to provide redundancy between your routers. If you have Juniper, Foundry (Brocade), or any another router you'll most likely use VRRP.
Oh sure, there's CARP or GLBP that you might use depending on the situation. But almost always you'll choose between HSRP and VRRP.
So which one is best? Or does it really matter?

Southern writes:  

codepad is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool.

Paste your code below, and codepad will run it and give you a short URL you can use to share it in chat or email.

codepad

Southern writes:  

Several tech companies and online communities have come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a recently proposed piece of legislation that many feel will bring unnecessary censorship to the web. But much less attention has been given to how the bill will affect the overall landscape of business and innovation.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith in late October, gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. So for example, a website that provides a collection of links to sites that illegally stream copyrighted video content could get shut down and taken to court under SOPA, despite the fact that the site isn’t streaming the content itself.

If the government had the sole responsibility of policing websites that violated copyrighted intellectual property, it would be a much different scenario. However, because the copyright holders also get to enforce the law (under SOPA), it allows them to push around anyone who may compete with them under the guise of upholding the law. Giant media companies — music labels, television networks and movie studios in particular — could easily take advantage of this situation.

more: Venture Beat

Southern writes:  

Connection strings can be a bit obscure and is not often defined in a consistent way. This article straighten things out and sheds some light on how connection strings are used to connect an application to a data source.

Introduction

When your application connects to a database or a data file you let ADO or ADO.Net utilize a provider to do the job for you. The connection string contains the information that the provider need to know to be able to establish a connection to the database or the data file. Because there are different providers and each providers have multiple ways to make a connection there are many different ways to write a connection string. It's like the address when sending a regular mail. Depending on the origin and destination and who is going to make the transport you need to write down the address in different ways.

more: Connection Strings

see also: The Connection String Reference

papamike writes:  

I ran across this valuable website today. They let you download lots of cheat sheets.

Point your browser here.

papamike writes:  

A good friend of mine, Jorge Noon-ya, an IT genius, sent me the following, very interesting web link.

http://smithsonian.yahoo.com/index.html

For those of you who are interested, you will get a listing of dates and events as they occurred and as they relate to the world of computers. Excellent website.