I'd grown increasingly paranoid over the past few weeks by the lack of comments on my blog. I realize it has been a while since I have blogged regularly, but I was sure I hadn't become completely irrelevant and boring...well I hoped not anyways. Alas, thanks to a message via the contact page I realized that my comments have been broken ever since I upgraded to the latest version of BlogCFC. Seems I forgot to add a column to the comments table. All is fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience as I know you've all been clamoring to leave a note for me on my wonderful posts.

For quite a while now I've had no luck getting the Active X version of Flash Player 10 to install on Vista Home Premium. I tried for about an hour last night again to no avail, but I had an epiphany this morning that led me to finally get it installed.

After growing quite tired of the old theme here at 'ye old blog' and since I had nothing else to do on Friday night last week I gave the site a new theme and upgrade to the latest version of BlogCFC.

Don't worry, I didn't dare attempt to design it myself. I found this decent looking WordPress theme at SkinPress and modified it to work with Ray's excellent blogware.

Hope y'all like it. Please report all bugs at the following URL:

http://cfsilence.com/goaway/nobugs/exist

Happy Tuesday.

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Just a quick note to let folks know that I've finally gotten around to moving my RSS feed over to Feedburner. If you are a subscriber, please make sure you point your reader at the new feed. Thanks a lot!!

I just realized that I've never offically blogged the fact that I'm on Twitter. Not that my feed is overflowing with tons of insight and knowledge, but I did want to let readers of my blog know that you can follow me if you are so inclined. I've been making a habit to tweet pretty regulary. My interface of choice has been mostly just the mobile web version, but I do use Twhirl occassionally.

I also maintain another account just for SlideSix that auto tweets each new public presentation. I try to post updates/ideas to that stream too, but it's hard to live the double life in Twitter so sometimes I forget to cross post to that account.

For best results, just follow both!

This application layer interfaces directly performs application services for the application processes; it also issues requests to the presentation layer. Note carefully that this layer provides services to user-defined application processes, and not to the end user. For example, it defines a file transfer protocol, but the end user must go through an application process to invoke file transfer. The OSI model does not include human interfaces. The common application services sublayer provides functional elements including the Remote Operations Service Element (comparable to Internet Remote Procedure Call), Association Control, and Transaction Processing (according to the ACID requirements).

Above the common application service sublayer are functions meaningful to user application programs, such as messaging (X.400), directory (X.500), file transfer (FTAM), virtual terminal (VTAM), and batch job manipulation (JTAM). These contrast with user applications that use the services of the application layer, but are not part of the application layer itself.

1. File Transfer applications using FTAM (OSI protocol) or FTP (TCP/IP Protocol) 2. Mail Transfer clients using X.400 (OSI protocol) or SMTP/POP3/IMAP (TCP/IP protocols) 3. Web browsers using HTTP (TCP/IP protocol); no true OSI protocol for web applications

I know I'm not...

The session layer controls the dialogues/connections (sessions) between computers. It establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. It provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. The OSI model made this layer responsible for "graceful close" of sessions, which is a property of TCP, and also for session checkpointing and recovery, which is not usually used in the Internet protocols suite. Session layers are commonly used in application environments that make use of remote procedure calls (RPCs).

iSCSI, which implements the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) encapsulated into TCP/IP packets, is a session layer protocol increasingly used in Storage Area Networks and internally between processors and high-performance storage devices. iSCSI uses TCP for guaranteed delivery, and carries SCSI command descriptor blocks (CDB) as payload to create a virtual SCSI bus between iSCSI initiators and iSCSI targets.

The transport layer provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers. The transport layer controls the reliability of a given link through flow control, segmentation/desegmentation, and error control. Some protocols are state and connection oriented. This means that the transport layer can keep track of the segments and retransmit those that fail.

Although it was not developed under the OSI Reference Model and does not strictly conform to the OSI definition of the Transport layer, the best known examples of a layer 4 protocol are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP)...

The network layer provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks, while maintaining the quality of service requested by the Transport layer. The Network layer performs network routing functions, and might also perform fragmentation and reassembly, and report delivery errors. Routers operate at this layer--sending data throughout the extended network and making the Internet possible. This is a logical addressing scheme - values are chosen by the network engineer. The addressing scheme is hierarchical.

The best-known example of a layer 3 protocol is the Internet Protocol (IP). It manages the connectionless transfer of data one hop at a time, from end system to ingress router, to router to router, and from egress router to destination end system. It is not responsible for reliable delivery to a next hop, but only for the detection of errored packets so they may be discarded. When the medium of the next hop cannot accept a packet in its current length, IP is responsible for fragmenting into sufficiently small packets that the medium can accept it.

A number of layer management protocols, a function defined in the Management Annex, ISO 7498/4, belong to the network layer. These include routing protocols, multicast group management, network layer information and error, and network layer address assignment. It is the function of the payload that makes these belong to the network layer, not the protocol that carries them.