A fraction of the working population in the United Kingdom are claiming to be happy in their job. Inevitably, huge numbers will just stay there. The fact that you’re reading this at least suggests that you’re considering or may be ready for a change.

Image by freefotouk via Flickr

We’d strongly advise that before you start any individual training program, you discuss your plans with a person who is familiar with the working environment and can give you advice. They can look at aspects of your personality and help you find your ideal job to train for:

* Do you want to interact with other people? If so, do you like working with the same people or are you hoping to meet new people? Alternatively, do you like to deal with your responsibilities alone?

* What do you require from the market sector you work in? – We all know that things have changed, look at building and banking for instance.

* Is this the final time you envisage re-training, and therefore, do you believe this career choice will allow you to do that?

* Do you want your training course to be in a market sector where you know you’ll have a job until your pension kicks in?

The biggest industry in the United Kingdom that fulfills the above criteria is the IT sector. There’s a demand for more qualified people in the industry, simply have a look at a local job site and there’ll be a long list. Don’t let people tell you it’s full of techie geeks gazing towards their screens all day – there are loads more jobs than that. The majority of employees in the computer industry are just like the rest of us, with jobs they enjoy and better than average salaries.

Looking at the myriad of choice out there, there’s no surprise that nearly all trainees get stuck choosing the job they will enjoy.

As without any commercial background in IT, how should we possibly be expected to understand what someone in a particular job does?

Often, the key to unlocking this question appropriately flows from a full chat, covering several different topics:

* Our personalities play a starring role – what kind of areas spark your interest, and what are the areas that put a frown on your face.

* Are you aiming to pull off a specific objective – like being your own boss in the near future?

* Is your income higher on your wish list than anything else.

* With everything that computing encapsulates, it’s obvious you’ll need to be able to absorb how they differ.

* You need to understand what differentiates all the training areas.

The best way to avoid the barrage of jargon, and reveal what’ll really work for you, have an informal chat with an industry-experienced advisor; an individual that can impart the commercial reality whilst covering each qualification.

Adding in the cost of examination fees upfront and offering an ‘Exam Guarantee’ is popular with a number of training colleges. However, let’s consider what’s really going on:

Certainly it’s not free – you’re still footing the bill for it – the price has simply been included in the whole thing.

We all want to pass first time. Going for exams in order and funding them one at a time sees you much better placed to get through first time – you revise thoroughly and are aware of the costs involved.

Don’t pay up-front, but seek out the best deal for you when you take the exam, and save having to find the money early. You’ll then be able to select where you sit the exam – so you can choose somewhere closer to home.

A great deal of money is netted by a number of companies that take the exam money up-front. For quite legitimate reasons, a number of students don’t get to do their exams and so they pocket the rest. Believe it or not, there are companies around who depend on students not taking their exams – as that’s how they make a lot of their profit.

It’s also worth noting that you should consider what an ‘exam guarantee’ really means. The majority of organisations will not pay for you to re-take until you’ve completely satisfied them that you’re ready this time.

With the average price of Pro-metric and VUE exams in the United Kingdom costing around 112 pounds, the most cost-effective way to cover the cost is by paying when you need them. There’s no sense in throwing away maybe a thousand pounds extra at the start of your studies. Study, commitment and preparing with good quality mock and practice exams is what will really guarantee success.

One thing you must always insist on is comprehensive 24×7 direct-access support with expert mentors and instructors. It’s an all too common story to find providers that only provide support to you inside of office hours (typically 9am-6pm) and sometimes a little earlier or later (but not weekends usually).

Never accept certification programs which can only support trainees with a call-centre messaging service after 6-9pm in the evening and during weekends. Colleges will try to talk you round from this line of reasoning. Essentially – support is required when it’s required – not as-and-when it’s suitable for their staff.

Keep your eyes open for providers that utilise many support facilities across multiple time-zones. These should be integrated to offer a simple interface as well as 24×7 access, when it’s convenient for you, with the minimum of hassle.

Always choose a training school that offers this level of study support. Only true live 24×7 round-the-clock support gives you the confidence to make it.

Finding your first job in the industry can feel more straightforward with the help of a Job Placement Assistance service. Because of the great skills shortage in Great Britain at the moment, it’s not too important to get too caught up in this feature though. It’s not as difficult as you may be led to believe to find the right work once you’re properly qualified.

Help and assistance with preparing a CV and getting interviews might be provided (alternatively, check out one of our sites for help). It’s essential that you update that dusty old CV right away – don’t leave it till you pass the exams!

It’s possible that you won’t have even got to the exam time when you will be offered your first junior support position; but this can’t and won’t happen unless your CV is with employers.

If you don’t want to travel too far to work, then it’s quite likely that a specialist locally based employment agency might be more appropriate than some national concern, as they’re far more likely to know what’s available near you.

A slight aggravation of many training course providers is how hard people are focused on studying to become certified, but how un-prepared they are to work on getting the position they’re qualified for. Don’t give up when the best is yet to come.

Technorati Tags: advice, career, computer, Computer Help, education, games, hobbies, home, money, self improvement, shop, software, technology, web, work

We are big fans of alternative VistaSwitcher by ALT + TAB, but unfortunately a recent ruling has made almost unusable for many of us, with many Windows in white that appears in the list. Here is how to fix it with a quick configuration change.

Naturally we are confident that the excellent programmer VistaSwitcher you created will be fixing this bug soon, but has also included a feature that solves the problem and quickly you will see that it is not his fault anyway.

Open the preferences and head to the exclusions tab.From there, you’ll want to click the new button.

You’ll quickly notice something strange here: there are a lot of Windows without title, and when you expand them, you will see that each of them has the window “Internet Explorer_Hidden” class .these embedded Internet Explorer Windows are what is causing the problem.

What you’ll want to do is remove the checkbox next to “Process name” and delete that cuadro.A then give it a name such as “Hidden IE” and check the rest of settings here:

Click the OK button and close the preferencias.En this point should be noted that Windows in white are finally past VistaSwitcher.

This example is obviously just a strange in the latest IE and not an error of VistaSwitcher all change, but it is good to know how to use this feature to hide all Windows that don’t want to see.

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Technorati Tags: blank, VistaSwitcher, windows

Encryption has a long history dating back to when the ancient Greeks and Romans sent secret messages by substituting letters only decipherable with a secret key. Join us for a quick history lesson and learn more about how encryption works.

In today’s edition of HTG Explains, we’ll give you a brief history of encryption, how it works, and some examples of different types of encryption—make sure you also check out the previous edition, where we explained why so many geeks hate Internet Explorer.

Image by xkcd, obviously.

The ancient Greeks used a tool called a Scytale to help encrypt their messages more quickly using a transposition cipher—they would simply wrap the strip of parchment around the cylinder, write out the message, and then when unwound wouldn’t make sense.

This encryption method could be fairly easily broken, of course, but it’s one of the first examples of encryption actually being used in the real world.

Julius Caesar used a somewhat similar method during his time by shifting each letter of the alphabet to the right or left by a number of positions—an encryption technique known as Caesar’s cipher. For instance, using the example cipher below you’d write “GEEK” as “JHHN”.

Plain:  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Cipher: DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABC

Since only the intended recipient of the message knew the cipher, it would be difficult for the next person to decode the message, which would appear as gibberish, but the person that had the cipher could easily decode and read it.

Other simple encryption ciphers like the Polybius square used a polyalphabetic cipher that listed each letter with the corresponding numeric positions across the top and side to tell where the position of the letter was.

Using a table like the one above you would write the letter “G” as “23”, or “GEEK” as “23 31 31 43”.

Enigma Machine

During World War II, the Germans used the Enigma machine to pass encrypted transmissions back and forth, which took years before the Polish were able to crack the messages, and give the solution to the Allied forces, which was instrumental to their victory.

Lets face it: modern encryption techniques can be an extremely boring subject, so instead of just explaining them with words, we’ve put together a comic strip that talks about the history of encryption, inspired by Jeff Moser’s stick figure guide to AES.  Note: clearly we cannot convey everything about encryption’s history in a comic strip.

Back in those days, people do not have a good encryption method to secure their electronic communication.

Lucifer was the name given to several of the earliest civilian block ciphers, developed by Horst Feistel and his colleagues at IBM.

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is a block cipher (a form of shared secret encryption) that was selected by the National Bureau of Standards as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1976 and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally.

Concerns about security and the relatively slow operation of DES in software motivated researchers to propose a variety of alternative block cipher designs, which started to appear in the late 1980s and early 1990s: examples include RC5, Blowfish, IDEA, NewDES, SAFER, CAST5 and FEAL

The Rijndael encryption algorithm was adopted by the US Government as standard symmetric-key encryption, or Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES was announced by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001 after a 5-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated before Rijndael was selected as the most suitable encryption algorithm.

Many encryption algorithms exist, and they are all suited to different purposes—the two main characteristics that identify and differentiate one encryption algorithm from another are its ability to secure the protected data against attacks and its speed and efficiency in doing so.

As a good example of the speed difference between different types of encryption, you can use the benchmarking utility built into TrueCrypt’s volume creation wizard—as you can see, AES is by far the fastest type of strong encryption.

There are both slower and faster encryption methods, and they are all suited for different purposes. If you’re simply trying to decrypt a tiny piece of data every so often, you can afford to use the strongest possible encryption, or even encrypt it twice with different types of encryption. If you require speed, you’d probably want to go with AES.

For more on benchmarking different types of encryption, check out a report from Washington University of St. Louis, where they did a ton of testing on different routines, and explained it all in a very geeky write-up.

All the fancy encryption algorithm that we have talked about earlier are mostly used for two different types of encryption:

To explain this concept, we’ll use the postal service metaphor described in Wikipedia to understand how symmetric key algorithms works.

Alice puts her secret message in a box, and locks the box using a padlock to which she has a key. She then sends the box to Bob through regular mail. When Bob receives the box, he uses an identical copy of Alice’s key (which he has somehow obtained previously, maybe by a face-to-face meeting) to open the box, and read the message. Bob can then use the same padlock to send his secret reply.

Symmetric-key algorithms can be divided into stream ciphers and block ciphers—stream ciphers encrypt the bits of the message one at a time, and block ciphers take a number of bits, often in blocks of 64 bits at a time, and encrypt them as a single unit. There’s a lot of different algorithms you can choose from—the more popular and well-respected symmetric algorithms include Twofish, Serpent, AES (Rijndael), Blowfish, CAST5, RC4, TDES, and IDEA.

In an asymmetric key system, Bob and Alice have separate padlocks, instead of the single padlock with multiple keys from the symmetric example. Note: this is, of course, a greatly oversimplified example of how it really works, which is much more complicated, but you’ll get the general idea.

First, Alice asks Bob to send his open padlock to her through regular mail, keeping his key to himself. When Alice receives it she uses it to lock a box containing her message, and sends the locked box to Bob. Bob can then unlock the box with his key and read the message from Alice. To reply, Bob must similarly get Alice’s open padlock to lock the box before sending it back to her.

The critical advantage in an asymmetric key system is that Bob and Alice never need to send a copy of their keys to each other. This prevents a third party (perhaps, in the example, a corrupt postal worker) from copying a key while it is in transit, allowing said third party to spy on all future messages sent between Alice and Bob. In addition, if Bob were careless and allowed someone else to copy his key, Alice’s messages to Bob would be compromised, but Alice’s messages to other people would remain secret, since the other people would be providing different padlocks for Alice to use.

Asymmetric encryption uses different keys for encryption and decryption. The message recipient creates a private key and a public key. The public key is distributed among the message senders and they use the public key to encrypt the message. The recipient uses their private key any encrypted messages that have been encrypted using the recipient’s public key.

There’s one major benefit to doing encryption this way compare to symmetric encryption. We never need to send anything secret (like our encryption key or password) over an insecure channel. Your public key goes out to the world—it’s not secret and it doesn’t need to be. Your private key can stay snug and cozy on your personal computer, where you generated it—it never has to be e-mailed anywhere, or read by attackers.

For many years, the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol has been securing web transactions using encryption between your web browser and a web server, protecting you from anybody that might be snooping on the network in the middle.

SSL itself is conceptually quite simple. It begins when the browser requests a secure page (usually https://)

The web server sends its public key with its certificate.

The browser checks that the certificate was issued by a trusted party (usually a trusted root CA), that the certificate is still valid and that the certificate is related to the site contacted.

The browser then uses the public key, to encrypt a random symmetric encryption key and sends it to the server with the encrypted URL required as well as other encrypted http data.

The web server decrypts the symmetric encryption key using its private key and uses the browser’s symmetric key to decrypt its URL and http data.

The web server sends back the requested html document and http data encrypted with the browser’s symmetric key. The browser decrypts the http data and html document using the symmetric key and displays the information.

And now you can securely buy that eBay item you really didn’t need.

If you made it this far, we’re at the end of our long journey to understanding encryption and a little bit of how it works—starting from the early days of encryption with the Greeks and Romans, the rise of Lucifer, and finally how SSL uses asymmetric and symmetric encryption to help you buy that fluffy pink bunny on eBay.

We’re big fans of encryption here at How-To Geek, and we’ve covered a lot of different ways to do things like:

Of course encryption is far too complicated a topic to really explain everything. Did we miss something important? Feel free to lay some knowledge on your fellow readers in the comments.

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Wikis are an excellent way to communicate and work on a project with other people, but hosting your own wiki can be tricky to work with. Today we’ll show you how to set up your own Wiki with Google Sites page.

Note: of course this post serves for beginners, so more advanced users should probably skip this one.

We need to sign up for an account at Google, that we can create a Wiki with Google Sites.Once you have your Google account, go to Google Sites, and click the ‘ site ‘ button to start creating their own Wiki.

Google Sites have different templates that you can choose from our site Web.seleccione ‘Project Wiki’ to start creating your wiki.

Specify a name that better describes the purpose of your wiki.

We can even make a visually attractive wiki with a selection of themes.

Google gives us the option to share our wiki and share your wiki with a group of people that we are working with publicly.

Adding partners and members in the wiki is quite simple.seleccione “Sharing this site” from the more actions drop and enter the address (s) email partners you want to add.

You can invite people to collaborate on your wiki by sending e-mail invitations.

We can even provide different permissions to each person you invite you to modify our wiki.

There are a lot of customization we can do with our Wiki.Iniciar by accessing the site management editor by clicking the menu “Manage site”.

The editor of the site allows us to customize the layout of the site, color, fonts, and theme.

Click on the “Colors and fonts” menu to change the background colors, header, image, and sources of site.

Google Sites is tightly integrated with other products from Google, such as Picasa, spreadsheet calculation, documents, presentations, etc.To begin to insert these elements into your Wiki, begin by clicking on the ‘Edit page’ or ‘Create page’ button.

Click the ‘Insert’ menu and choose the product from Google that we want to incorporate into our wiki.

The great thing about Google sites is that we can put our Google documents (spreadsheet, presentation) or album in Picasa photos in all the sites created in Google sites.

Google Sites is easy for us to create Wikis without any knowledge técnico.Tiene a friendly UI that allows you to create visually appealing and easy to use Wiki, just take a look at this site Wiki.

You can now use Google sites to create your own Wiki and use in their work.

Google Sites

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Technorati Tags: Create, google, knowhow, technical, without

Our monitor only gives us a limited space to edit Word documents. Jump from one page to another, too time consuming, so today we’ll show you some simple tips to maximize the area for a better experience writing editing Microsoft Word.

Open the view tab to access the ‘Split Window’ icon and position bar Division just below the part we want to keep static.

With the document which was divided into two panels, we can work on a panel holding another static panel for reference.

Each pane of the window acts as a separate window and we can adjust each look and feel for each panel.Por example we can establish different levels of zoom for each panel.

We can even set different designs in each panel for best editing. for example, we can keep the upper pane in design ‘Print’ while working on the design of ‘Outline’ in the bottom pane.

Click the ‘Remove split’ button to remove the window Division.

Click the button to arrange everything to two Windows Word document stack vertically.

Organizing multiple Windows word in a tile is very useful when we are working on two documents and we have to refer to both documents at the same time.

Click on the button ‘to the side’ that Word aligns two Windows vertically so that we can compare two documents and work on them more effectively.

We can set Word to move both Windows at the same time for easier navigation by clicking the button synchronous scrolling.

Microsoft has designed the view tab to simple solutions to maximize the area edit Word for our simple tips increase escritura.esperamos experience the productivity of our readers with Word.soltar us some comments if you have any other tips productivity with Word.

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