CISSP stands for Certified Information Systems Security Professional. Its is an exam conducted by International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (commonly known as (ISC)²). Its a certification for professionals growing their career in the information security domain. Its not a test of technical competence and you dont have to be a hacker to pass this exam. They say its 10 miles wide and 5 inches deep in technical knowledge.

Read this wikipedia entry for a quick overview of CISSP and the official website's information about CISSP exam. The wkipipedia's information appears to be more easy to read and understand.

Brief key points:
1. Need lot of study as preparation to cover the 10 domains of CBK(Common Book of Knowledge).

2. Qualification: 5 years work experience in security domain. See website for more details. Re certification required every 3 years, but earning points. Points (called CPEs) can be earned by actively involving in security practices and contributions.

3. Cost: Approx $600 (see official pricing list here) and $85 per year maintenance.

4. Exams held in almost all metros in India.

Happy Studying.//

Mr Kang, a Chinese gentleman happens to visit the beautiful city of Hyderabad. Guess what the local folks calls him with respect. Guess Guess!

Ans: Mr Kang-garu.

PS: I understand that people not familiar with local lingo will not be able to make sense of this.

Happy PJing.//

This week at work Vinod introduced to me that there exists a Information Security certification called the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). He is all GO on this one. On first hand, CISSP appeared to me as THE certification for a security professional after reading through many blog entries and specially after reading CISSP : Any Value, I am beginning to have second thoughts. Is this really for me, a security application developer? I havent yet concluded in for or against. In the midst of all this I am writing this short blog post.

Happy ??.//

I bet that you already knew that there are 3 ways to pass an argument to a C++ function(method). They are :

1. Pass by value.
2. Pass by address (pointer). --- which is technically a pass by value.
3. Pass by reference.

Today I realized that there is a fourth way of passing an argument which never occurred to me and none of the books I read told me about it (not that I can recall).
You can pass an argument as a reference to a pointer.

Example:
void FreeMyClass(MyClass*& ptr);

Why would you do that? Here is the precise scenario where I require it. I have functions that create pointers to objects.

Example: MyClass* CreateMyClass();

This function does a dynamic memmory allocation of MyClass and returns a pointer to the object. Consider it as a warapper to new operator, but doing some extra stuff.

The users of my API would would the pointer to do stuff and once they are finished they could call FreeMyClass(ptr);
Inside the function FreeMyClass(ptr), I want to reset the value of ptr to NULL, which I cannot do if my function signature was
FreeClass(MyClass* ptr), as pointers are passed by value.

Here is what my correct FreeMyClass function would look like.

void FreeMyClass(MyClass*& ptr) {
    
    if (ptr == NULL) {
        return ;
    }
    delete ptr;
    ptr = NULL;
   
    return;
}

The C way of doing such a thing is to have the function signature as:

void FreeMyClass(MyClass** ptr); 

This approach requires the caller to pass the pointer to a pointer of an object. I feel the C++ way is a more graceful way of doing things. With the C++ approach, you don’t have to depend on your user following the coding guideline that says, set a pointer to NULL after freeing it.

This thing is not so common in practice and so I wanted to shere it.

Happy Freeing.//

A problem which I never expected a solution seem to have been addressed.

Problem:
I use Firefox 3 for almost all purposes. But there are some sites, specially windows update, internal corporate pages, Microsoft Sharepoint for which I need to switch to IE. That was kind of an irritating thing.

Solution:
Firefox Plugin called IE Tab opens up IE inside your Firefox window. You can configure which sites should be automatically be opened using IE.

This is the coolest thing that has happened to me today -- finding IE Tab.

Having Embedding.//