SNIA certifies IBM Security Key Lifecycle Manager (SKLM) for KMIP implementation

The Storage Networking Industry Association Secure Storage Industry Form (SNIA-SSIF) announced  recently that IBM Security Key Lifecycle  Manager (SKLM) has recently passed its rigid Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) conformance test program.

This distinction places IBM in an exclusive club of companies who have been able to implement KMIP and satisfy the rigid testing requirements set forth by SNIA-SSIF.

Besides IBM, only Hewlett Packard and Cryptsoft are listed on the SNIA-SSIF KMIP testing results website of companies who have passed the SNIA-SSIF KMIP conformance test program.  And sellers familiar with SKLM know that it has significant competitive advantages over HP and Cryptsoft.  See the SKLM Competitive Snapshot PPT for those insights and more.

KMIP is a standard managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).  IBM has been an advocate of the KMIP standard since its inception, in an effort to standardize key management communications so that customers do not have to be subject to proprietary, embedded, and often insecure key management solutions.

Different Meeting in Agile (Scrum)

There are set of meetings which are conducted if you are practicing Scrum.  Each meeting have specific agenda, purpose and frequency and Scrum Master should ensure that each meeting sticks to its plan and achieves its intended purpose.

Here are the meetings which comes with practicing Scrum. 

Sprint Planning Meeting
Frequency: Once at the beginning of every Sprint cycle.
Duration: 4 to 8 hours depending on Sprint length.  As a rule of thumb, it is 2 hours per week of sprint.  So if you are having 2 weeks sprint then 4 hours for planning and so on.
Purpose: Determine what work to be done in the sprint, preparing backlog and communicate to everyone what will be completed in the sprint. Development Team commits to the plan and Sprint backlog. Also, In first half of the meeting entire team involving dev team, scrum master, product owner meets and they prioritize the Product Backlog.  In first half product manager identifies the user stories that team feels it can commit to completing in the sprint based on prior experience.  In Second half of the meeting development team and scrum master breaks the story down into tasks and they determines how they plan to develop and test agreed user stories. At the end of this meeting team creates the plan for the sprint and agrees on Sprint backlog.

Daily Stand-up Scrum Meetings
Frequency: Daily
Duration: 15 min
Purpose: Main purpose of this meeting is to collaborate with other team members and communicate Risks. In these meetings, each team member answers 3 questions:
- What I did since last call
- What am I going to do till next call
- Is there anything which is blocking me (impediments) from achieving my sprint goals. If there are any impediments than Scrum Master records that. Team doesn't try to resolve issues in this meeting and Scrum Master work outside this meeting to bring impediments to resolution.

Sprint-end Review Meetings
Frequency: Once at the end of the end of the sprint
Duration: 2 to 4 hours
Purpose: Show the work (demo) to the stakeholders and customers that team accomplished in the sprint and receive feedback.  Also, review the work that is planned but not completed.

Sprint-end Retrospective Meetings
Frequency: Once in the sprint. Usually on the last day of the sprint after Sprint Review Meetings
Duration: max 3 hours
Purpose: This meeting is facilitated by Scrum Master. Two main questions are answered in this meeting i.e., What went well during the sprint? and What could be improved in the next sprint?

Overall purpose of this meeting is to implement continuous improvement in processes.  Based on the brainstorming and analysis team decides to implement new processes, update existing processes and/or continue to follow good processes.

 Optionally some teams do have few other meetings like

Backlog Refining Meetings
Frequency: None
Duration: None
Purpose: This is not Standard Scrum practice but many team follows it to manage the quality of product backlog items better. This is an ongoing process where team and product owner reviews the product backlog and re-prioritized (if required).  If required large Product backlog items are broken into smaller items and more details about the items are added.  This helps team during the Sprint planning meeting to pick and complete the user stories in effective manner.

Scrum of Scrums Meetings
Frequency: Daily
Duration: None
Purpose: This is a technique which is very useful when there is large team working towards same goal.  This large team is divided into multiple scrum teams to focus on one particular area.  These individual scrum teams designates one member in their team to represent their work to other teams.  All teams discuss their work in Scrum of Scrums daily meeting with the agenda of focusing on areas of overlap and integration.This designated team member could be technical contributor in the team or Scrum master of the team.  As Jeff Sutherland commented, Scrum of Scrums is not meta scrum but its responsible for delivering the working software of all the teams to the Definition of Done at the end of the sprint.

The Agenda of Scrum of Scrums Daily meeting are to get answer to four questions:
- What has your team done since last call
- What will your team going to do till next call
- Is there any impediments for your team
- Is there any impediments your team going to put to other teams

Creativity by Rinku - Family/Apple tree

Creativity by Rinku - Best out of waste (Toy Train)

Toy train made up of match box

• Bogies are made up of Match box 
• Tyres are buttons
• Tracks are made up of sticks and matches

Creativity by Rinku - Best out of waste (House)

• Roof is made up of Pista shells
• Clouds are made up of Cotton
• Sun is Button
• Chimney borders are made up of sticks
• House black border is made of woolen threads
• Window's are made up of Aluminium foil
• Window's red border is made up of Red woolen threads
• Garden is made up of small chopped hand made paper
• Door handle and railings are made up of glitters

After Rinku's magical touch

Creativity by Rinku - Mural Name plate

Reading last few lines from a log file using perl

Hi,

Today I will explain you the program which will help you read whole log file or last given number of lines in a file.

use strict;

my $argc = scalar(@ARGV);

# validate command line arguments
if ($argc eq 0)
{
    print "Error :: Log file not provided\n";
    print "\nUsage\n\n";
    print "$0 \n";
    print "where,\n";
    print "log file name = Fully qualified name of the log file\n";
    print "number of last records = Optional parameter.  Specify the number of last  records you want to read\n";
    exit;
}
my $log_file = $ARGV[0];
my $number_of_records = $ARGV[1];

if (not defined $number_of_records)
{
    $number_of_records = "";
}

unless (-e $log_file)
{
    die "Error :: $log_file doesn't exist\n";
}

# Define variables.

my $current_line = 0; # determine current position in file
my $seek_line = 0; # determines line number where we want to jump and start reading


# Get total number of lines from the file
open (FI, $log_file) or die $!;
while ()
{}
my $lines = $.;
close(FI);

print "\nTotal number of lines in file = $lines\n";

if ($number_of_records ne "")
{
    $seek_line = $lines - $number_of_records;
}

print "Seeking line number $seek_line\n";

open (LOG, $log_file) or die $!;
while ()
{
    my $str = $_;

    $current_line++;
    next if ($current_line <= $seek_line);

    chomp ($str);
    print "line number $current_line: $str\n";
}
close(LOG);