Forensics - not just dead bodies

Well, we are half way through the semester and the classes are interesting and gearing up to be more intense during the last half. In the Database Modeling class, I have been told that I am getting the materials and my data flow diagrams are shaping up. Next came the Enterprise Data Model followed by the Entity Relationship Diagram. Man this stuff is confusing when you are not a database person. The funny thing about it, is I can program, I can understand relationships between data, I just can't draw the pictures to match "the story". Professor Nocolai always says "Tell me the Story". My favorite part is "The End".

As for Managing for Quality in Production, this Thursday, the class has to present materials on Strategic Planning. We have been separated into five groups of five with I think one exception - one group of six. We have to present on Who is involved with a Strategic Plan. I am going to talk about St. Jude's Children's Hospital since they are a not for profit hospital. This out to be good.

Finally, what we all have been waiting for, the title of my blog today - forensics. I have played around with Encase for the last seven weeks, trying to understand how the software works but with a limited version of the software. I have no idea half the time if what I am doing with open source or free software is netting me the same results as the Encase does since we have to use their sample files. So this week we had due a lab where we had to clone a disk drive and get a hash value. I tried to use WinHex, but that seemed to net me two different hash values, not sure if what I did was correct or not, so I switched to ProDiscover. Only to find out that I had filled my disk drive with images from all the other software that did not work correctly. Spent a lot of time cleaning up and now my system mechanic software is Bitching about all the fragmented files and disk cleanup it needs to do. So, forensics is not only about dead people, I am learning a lot about dead and live imaging and enjoying the hell out of it. I hope there is a part two to this class. I want to learn more.