Renewing My GIAC Certified Forensic Analyst (GCFA) Certification
I recently began the quest to renew my GCFA certification. GIAC recently changed the way it handles renewals. The association now allows for maintaining credentials through certification maintenance units (CMUs). This follows closely ISC2‘s technique for maintenance of it’s certification programs such as the CISSP. Unlike ISC2 however the options for obtaining CMUs are a bit more challenging under the GIAC program. Those options are:
- Retaking the standard certification exam
- Attend or teach ISO 17024 related information assurance training courses, such as SANS training courses or post graduate level information assurance courses.
- Submit a published technical research paper, such as a GIAC Gold Paper
I won’t go into ISC2‘s program here, but suffice it to say that there are a lot more options to earn continuing professional education (CPE) credits. Since my time is limited, I chose option one above as my avenue for renewal. I received my study materials just last week and I’ll admit it will be a major effort to study for this test. I’m pretty excited though as I’ve been away from the forensics world for a few years and this is just what I need to brush up my skills.
New RAO Blog
Well, after 4.5 days of concerted effort the new look of the RAO blog is finally complete. Check it out. The theme is a child theme of the WordPress 3.0 default theme, Twenty Ten (as in 2010, the year it was released… those cheeky wordpress developers… pfft!). Anyways, it took a bit of researching on theme development before I was able to actually understand what I needed to do. The WordPress Codex is not as intuitive as one might think. I found the most frustrating thing to be the lack of date stamps or version numbers on the articles. I was never quite sure the information I was reading actually applied to WordPress 3.0. I muddled through it and was able to minimally change Twenty Ten to meet my goal of getting the same look and feel as RAO’s main site.
The RAO theme uses a custom header.php and footer.php and functions.php, which overrides the twentyten_setup() function of the parent theme. It also borrows from Themeshaper’s Thematic theme library of style sheets. We decided to go with a two column approach as opposed to the old three column style, but thanks to Thematic’s 2c-r-fixed.css and 3c-fixed.css templates, I can make the switch between the two with the deletion of a few comments in the child theme stylesheet. I also dabbled in widgets and created a custom RSS subscription widget. There are tons of these plugins available for download, but they didn’t have quite the desired formatting (or maybe I just wanted to make life difficult for myself). I learned a lot in the process and plan to make some improvements in the near future.
For now, I’m going to learn as I blog. I figure that will be the best way to become a true WordPress guru and hopefully learn how to make some dough off this whole blogging thing.
Colonel Hacker 