DominoYesMaybe

Who can say where the road goes, where the day goes? Only time....

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:39:00 PST

Although I am not over in Orlando at Connect 13 this year the distance from my friends is all the more difficult with the news that one of the "Geek Bikers" , Kenneth Kjarbye from Denmark, had a fatal accident on the Annual Hog Ride.

Stuck in Ireland I have only my words to reach out to Kenneth's family and my friends who are at this time in a dark place they were not expecting to be not even in their worst nightmares .. <sigh> but there are no words I can think of that really do help, there are no words that wrap those in pain in the warmth of a hug, there are no words the equal of shared tears, there are no words that stop the birds of sorrow from flying over the heads of Kenneth's family and my friends.

It is sufficient to say that I and the 100's if not 1000's of community members near and far are thinking of all those affected directly and indirectly by Kenneth's tragic and untimely death. I like many others will raise a glass in the coming days and remember Kenneth fondly. For me he will be remembered as one of the "Vikings" from the LUGs and my toast will be - here is to Kenneth, fellow geek and fellow biker - good man yourself!

A sad day ... a sad day indeed.

Offical start of the Domino Charity Marathon Dander For Cash 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:25:00 PST

The Dander Route

A while back I mentioned that there would be a reprise of the Domino Dander for Cash this coming year.

It takes me great pleasure to announce that this year's Dander will be longer bigger and more challenging than the two that have preceeded it.

As of today it is offical, a spreadsheet has been created and accomodation is being looked at and foot care product sales have gone through the roof in certain places around the UK and USA

When I say "we" these are the brave souls that will attempt to walk the 80 miles of "The Great Glen" in Scotland in kilts in May.

Eileen Fitzgerald, Tony Holder, Bill Buchan, Carl Tyler (and Niece) are definites and Julian Woodward may possibly join us. Frank Doherty has offered to do some of the logistics if needed. We are starting on the west side of Scotland and walking to the East from Fortwilliam in the south west up along the Caladonial Canal, along the full length of Lough Ness and then down to the city of Inverness on the East Coast.

80 miles split in 4 days of approximately 20 miles each day.

Well it needs to be a challenge otherwise you folks out there won't give us lots of your hard earned cash for the charity we are doing this for. To be blunt 80miles in 4 days is MORE than enough of a challenge for myself! So the walkers now have 20 weeks to get into shape, trim the kilts and get "fettled" as they say in Norn Iron for the task ahead.

Since we are walking in Scotland we though a local Scottish charity would be a good idea and although the actual charity is not finialised we have sort of agreed that given that Bill Buchan's village charity raft race is on the week-end we finish we will probably support the larger of the charities they help - it looks likely that the very excellent and deserving Childrens Hospice Association Scotland will be the one we will be raising monies for - watch this space for details.

Two years ago when all the cash was tallied up we raised over £3000.00 that was for 26 miles in Kilts, this time it is a good deal further AND "Big Firm Tony" will be with us. THE WHOLE WAY!!!!!!!!! So when the time comes I will be expecting you to be generous ;-) and I would think that we should be able to manage £4000.00 this year if we try extra hard.

There will hopefully be a dedicated blog on the way shortly where you can follow the preparations for the Dander and the Dander itself. I am also designing a tee-shirt for the walkers. Both the blog and tee-shirt will have spaces for any ISVs or BPs out there that would like (for a small charitable donation) to have their logos emblasioned on blog and the manly and womanly chests of the participants.

So if you are a BP and would like to have your company associated with this kilted charitable community challenge, drop me an email and I will very gladly take any (or all) of your money :-D and do my best to plug the life out of your company name out there on the internet!

If any of the folks reading this want to join us for the walk but can't do the whole walk, feel free to come and join in for one or part of any of the days we are walking, the more the merrier again just drop me an email. and I will send you details of where we will be on what day.

There is also likely to be a big slap up meal in Inverness on the Friday to which any local Domino or indeed any geeky folks that might be about are more than welcome to come and buy us drink- again more details later.

So watch the new feeds for more details about blogs and how BPs and inviduals can help us reach our target for this year.

Spread the News ..

THE DOMINO DANDERS ARE BACK .... AND THIS TIME IT'S SCOTTISH!

03/Jan/2013 ** Update ** Chris Coates has just confirmed he has joined the Danders!!
03/Jan/2013 ** Updaye ** Julian Woodward has moved from "Possibly" to "Almost definitely"

Interesting thing coming in ECMAScript 6

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 03:40:00 PST

Javascript always has been the poor cousin to all that whizz-bangery that happens on a server and as a result anything new coming down the pipe line kinda gets lost in the news-stream of super-duper server improvements.

I try were possible to keep up to speed with what's about to come along and it was with this in mind I I was casting my eye over Juriy Zaytsev's EMCAScript 6 compatibility chart and I started to notice green's appear. Some of the current or beta versions of the browsers are starting to support the new V6 changes so it shouldn't be that long until we start to see them in the wild and can start to use them in anger.
(if you are interested in the EMCAScript 6 Draft Doc you can download it here)

Of the changes coming I am piqued by the idea of

1. Modules

While there are some JS libraries that do something very similar ES6 will provide support for modules, the rational behind this is to provide for:

Standardized mechanism for creating libraries.
In-language loading of external modules (non-blocking, direct style).
Portability between different host environments.
Future-proof mechanism for platforms to introduce experimental libraries without collision.
No installation/registration code within modules.

As Modules are static by default (but can be dynamically reflected) this makes them far more compatible with static scoping. Modules are loaded from the filesystem or network in direct style instead of by callbacks and this means the main thread of execution is not blocked by the load.

It is hoped that Modules will be used for scoping and their implementation preserves and promote static, lexical scoping, thus avoiding the many problems of dynamic scope: programming pitfalls, malicious scope injection, poor performance and lack of modularity. Static scoping is also necessary for checking for unbound variables at compile time.

A simple module would look like this


module orders {

export function ASP(qty,val) { return val/qty; }
export var dollar = "$";

export var pound = "£";

}

This module would then be accessed in your JS code like this :


import orders( ASP ,  pound) from orders;

alert( pound+" "+ASP(ThisOrder.Quantity,ThisOrder.Value) );

I can see instances where this will be very useful!

More details on Modules can be found here

2. Object.Observe
Object.Observe gives us the ability to watch Javascript objects and report back changes to the application, changes like properties being added, updated, removed or reconfigured. When I am building a UI frameworks I often want to provide an ability to data-bind objects in a data-model to UI elements. A key component of data-binding is to track changes to the object being bound. Today, JavaScript frameworks which provide data-binding typically create objects wrapping the real data, or require objects being data-bound to be modified to buy in to data-binding. The first case leads to increased working set and more complex user model, and the second leads to siloing of data-binding frameworks. ES6 will get around this by providing a run-time capability to observe changes to an object. Here is interesting discussion on this soon to be available new feature

3 Default Parameter Values

Default parameter values allow us to initialize parameters if they are not explicitly supplied, so you can do things like

function dspInputPanel(footer = "Steve McDonagh")
{
       ... build inputPanel Object..
       footer.innerHTML = footer;

}

So when I call dspInputPanel() with no parameters the footer object will contain Steve McDonagh
if I call dspInputPanel("Anne Other") then the footer object will contain Anne Other

4. Block Scoping
There will be 2 new declarations available for scoping data in a single block

let which is similar to the var declaration but allows you to redefine a var in the let's block scope without changing the orginal var in the scope of the function


function doInterestingStuff()
{
         var x = 5;
         var y = 6;
         let (x = x*2,y =y*3) { alert( x+y ); }     // pops up 28

         alert(x+y)                                            // pops up 11
}

const is the other declaration and is like let but is used for read-only constant declarations

5. Maps
Arrays of Name - Value pairs have been around a long time in JS and ES 6 will introduce the new Map() object with it's functions SET(), HAS(), GET() and DELETE() that makes using them even easier

var myDogs = new Map();
myDogs.set("Fido","Poodle")
myDogs.set("Rover","Collie")

myDogs.has("Fido")                                 // Returns true
myDogs.get("Fido")                                 // Returns "Poodle"

myDogs.delete("Fido")                             // Returns true when deleted
myDogs.has("Fido")                                //  Now returns false

6. Sets
SETs are basically arrays and there is a new object creator Set() with associated methods HAS(), ADD() and DELETE()


var myCustomers = new Set( ["IBM","DELL","APPLE"] )

myCustomers.has("IBM")                   // returns true

myCustomers.add("ASUS")               // adds "ASUS" to the set
myCustomer.delete("IBM")                // Removes IBM from the set
myCustomer.has("IBM")                   // now returns false

This will allow array filtering to be so much easier, consider the following where I have an Array of customer names that I want to ensure is unique this new method is much much much easier to read.


function unique( customers )
{

       var ucust = new Set();

       return customers.filter(item) {

                                     if(!ucust.has(item)) { ucust.add(item) }
                                     return true;

                                     }  

}

There are loads more changes and improvements in the spec and it seems that ES6 is targeting a 2013 full spec release but as always some browsers are already implementing individual features and it's only a matter of time before their availability is widespread.

JS it seems may be coming out of the closet in the next 6 months and may soon be considered a "proper" language :-)

The new CSS3 @supports() rule is really rather cool!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 04:35:00 PST

As all devs know , browsers can in varying degrees be a right royal pain in the arse when it comes to standards compliance and when you throw in companies like Never Upgrade a PC Till It Breaks Inc. who are still running XP with IE6, planning your super duper new web site to support them can be fraught with problems.

Most of us are used to the idea of designing a UI that degrades into a DBA-UX (Different But Acceptable User Experience) to do this we have to be able to work out exactly the support for each feature that use in our design and have some "alternate" view that we can switch to.

Up until now I have relied on the wonderful Modernizer.js which smooths out a lot of the inconsistencies between browsers particularly the older rust buckets that NUPCTIB Inc use.

However there is a new CSS rule that will also help you - ladies and gentlegeeks let me introduce @supports() which has the syntax

@supports <supports_condition> { /* specific rules */ }

@supports is supported in most of the current browsers but as you might expect IE has ignored it and Safari doesn't have it yet. If you do use it in your CSS and a browser loads it that does not know what @supports is.. it will ignore the enclosed block, so you can still use your normal methods.

Basically what @supports() does is , it queries the CSS engine for support of whatever it is you need and then invokes the enclosed CSS rules accordingly.

@supports (display: table-cell) { /* some table-cell css in here */ }

Will test the CSS capability for box-flex and apply the rule if it is supported
You can also use a negative test for a rule not being supported.

@supports not (display:table-cell) { /*cope with non support CSS here*/ }

... and you can string together logical NOTs and ORs!

@supports (display:table-cell) and (display:list-item) { /* CSS goes here }

I am sure you get the idea and can see the usefulness of this addition to the Designer's toolbox

Useful i5/OS tip - Displaying Locks on an IFS Object

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 05:58:00 PST

I was plagued this week by an odd problem on one of our i5 boxes. I was trying to use the CPYFRMIMPF & CPYTOIMPF to pull in data from a new Japanese division that uses nothing but Japanese characters in their data. This of course means UTF-8 / Unicode data, which can be a bit of a pain to set up in a DB2/i5 data table (particularly if someone forgets to make fields something other than CCSID 65535!)

Anyway.... I could get data off the system using the CPYTOIMPF into the IFS no problem at all, DBCS to UNICODE worked like a treat and everything was well with the world ... BUT ... try as I might I could not get CPYFRMIMPF to bring the data back into the DB2 file again.

There was a rather odd CPE3025 message that told me the input file or path did not exist (error code 3025) and yet there is was, I could open it, read it, edit and save it and everything seemed perfect .. but time after time I got the CPE3025 error and no data was transferred. I tried all day with no sucess and eventually went home hoping that a nights sleep would clear the mind and inspiration would come in the morning.

This morning came in an did a CPYTOIMPF which worked fine, did a CPYFRMIMF .. and .. it worked perfectly with no errors
After a bit of experimenting the culprit was discovered to be the fact that I had opened the file using Operations Navigator and even though the file had been closed normally Ops Navigator holds a lock on the file until Ops Nav is closed, the net effect of this is that the file is unavailable for the CPY* command.

Part of this analysis used a rather useful but lesser known API that you can use to track locks on objects in the IFS .. the api is this :

CALL QP0FPTOS PARM(*LSTOBJREF '/ifspath/ifsfile' *FORMAT2)

You need to have the *SERVICE special authority and the api dumps the locks to a spool file.

Easy when you know how but not an obvious tool for this particular problem

Domino Dander for Dosh 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:26:00 PST

Gentle readers some non-techie news!

The bold Eileen Fitzgerald and myself are planning a Dander For Dosh in May next year.

Eileen and were joined by the indefatigable Carl Tyler for 2012's walk along the coast between Bray and Wicklow in Ireland. We didn't pester the life out of you because we didn't get the giving organized in time for the actual walk. This year we will get our act in gear and start demanding money with menaces in January - You have been warned!

Conscious of the fact that the world is a tad short of cash we felt that we needed a real challenge one that would stretch us physically and encourage you to part with your hard earned cash. We are still discussing our options but top of the list is "The Great Glen Way" from Fort William on the West Coast of Scotland to Inverness on the east..80+ miles at around 20 miles a day for 4 days.

As plans form there will be more posts and many many requests for cash however if anyone would like to join us for 4 days of walking the length of the Great Glen under Ben Nevis along the edge of Lough Ness and down into the "granite" city, drop me a line and I will add you to the distribution list for our detailed plans.

Eileen and I cannot guarantee you good weather, but we can guarantee you four days of eclectic conversations, beautiful views, good food and good company (as you would expect from a group of Domino Geeks) I you want to join us for one day, two or all you will be very welcome (mainly as Eileen knows all my jokes and craves new material)

So Watch this space , marvel at our foolishness and when the time comes sponsor us as much as you can!

Alternates to the evil EVAL() in javascript

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 07:33:00 PST

I am interrupting the Design Series of post for a quick JavaScript post that comes out of a question asked on the JavaScript forum on LinkedIn about alternates to the eval() function in JavaScript.

The most pertinent reasons for not using eval() are:-

1. Security - it leaves your code open to a JS injection attack which is never a good thing
2. Debugging - no line numbers which is a PITA
3. Optimization - as until the code to be executed is unknown, it cannot be optimized.

Sadly EVAL is way to easy to use and as a result we see it all to often in places we shouldn't really see it and this can leave the door open to some nere-do-well making a mockery of the rest of your obviously wonderful code.

So what to do to avoid using eval()? Well alternates to the the 3 main areas I have used EVAL in the past are listed below.

1. When working out a bit of an object to change for example something like this

eval('document.'+IdName+'.style.display="none"');

Now I am not suggesting anyone WOULD do this given the tools available but I have come across code like this in older applications written by people just starting out in the wonderful world of JS.

document[IdName].style.display= 'none';

or

document.getElementById(IdName).style.display='none';

are both much safer and a lot faster.

2. Getting JSON that has been returned by AJAX calls to the server into the DOM, like this snippet of jQuery is doing.

$.ajax({ url: "getdata?openagent&key=SMCD-98LJM",

              success: function(data) { eval(data),
                                        doSomethingInteresting()
                                    }
        })
This will work but a more satisfactory way would be to use the JSON data type in the ajax call

$.ajax({
url: url,
dataType: 'json',
data: data,
success: *callback*
});
alternately use the $.getJSON() jQuery shorthand function.

If you don't use jQuery (or dojo which has an equivalent) you can use the powerful JavaScript JSON object.

var myJSONData = JSON.parse(data, reviver);

Where DATA is the the JSON data string and REVIVER is an optional function that will be called for every KEY and VALUE at every level of the final resulting object. Each value will be replaced by the result of the REVIVER function. For example this can be used to change strings in the JSON text into JS Date() objects.

3. The thorny and potentially very insecure loading and execution of Code Blocks, probably the most common use of eval() function in Javascript. Anywhere you allow code as text to be passed and run in the browser is prone to attack, it is much better where possible not to do this. When you absolutely have to do it then I would say using the Function constructor is less risky than a bold eval() call.

var myCode = "... your JS code ..."
var doSomething = new Function(myCode)
doSomething.call()

This will have the same effect as EVAL() but is less prone to being found as an avenue of attack for the forces of chaos on the internet. ** Note** you can also use the constructor format below to pass parms to the code block.

var doSomething = new Function("..var1name..","..var2name..", etc .. "..myCodeString..")

On a side note but related note, when you create a normal JS function construct, the definition does not have to appear at the start of the script (though it is usually best to do so for the sake of clarity). It can even be defined after the the code that calls it. In most cases, no matter where you choose to define your function, the JavaScript engine will create the function at the start of the current scope. BUT and it is an all caps BUT if you need to construct a code block conditioned on an IF, like this
if( someThingIsTrue )
{
function doSomeThingWonderful.call() { .... }
}

Mozilla based browsers will allow it, but most others do not as they will always evaluate the function, even if the condition evaluates to false. So do not try to declare functions in the way noted above. Declaring functions inside these statements is possible in all current browsers using assigned anonymous functions, so it is better to do it this way.

var doSomeThingWonderful;
if( someThingIsTrure ) {
doSomeThingWonderful = function () { --CodeBlock A--};
} else {
doSomeThingWonderful = function () { --CodeBlock B--};
}
doSomeThingWonderful.call()
There are other reasons you need to evaluate objects or code but generally there are ways around most of them that whilst potential slower to process are more secure and sensible.

Principles of Design #6 - Colour Theory, The basics

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:31:00 PDT

Right I could wax long an lyrical about colours and how to use them, which I have to say probably sounds odd coming from me given that I am nearly colour blind. However I have been colour blind all my life and to me the sky is blue and grass green because that is what we are taught from when we are small.

Colour is very hard to describe to someone else without using the word "like" in fact most colour names are based around a descriptor that carries with it the meaning of the colour being expressed..

For example "Cornflower Blue" should make you think of the colour of Cornflowers like the one on the left or of a room that was painted with cornflower blue paint. There is no such thing as normal colour vision, we all each and every one bring our own baggage to this quick wander down the garden path of colour theory.

Colour Theory is a BIG topic so I will only be looking at 3 specific areas in this post, areas that any web or app designer needs to have a firm grasp of if they are to produce finished code and colour schemes that are beautiful, pleasing and work within the context of the app you are developing. These topics are .

The Colour Wheel
Colour Harmony
Colour Context

The Colour Wheel

The colour wheel is one of those things I never see on a geek developers table or in their favourites and yet it is a tool that artists and graphic designers use daily!. Go to any art store and pick one up they will know exactly what you want is you ask for "A Colour Wheel". Alternately you can use one of the many online colour wheels .. this is one I use a lot and can recommend.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Color wheels are arranged so that the colours move from red at the top around the rainbow until you come again to the blues and violets at 11pm ish. You will notice that the wheel on http://colorschemedesigner.com has the words WARM and COLD at 1 and 7 o'clock. this does not mean that just the colors at these "times" are Warm or Cold but there is a transition going on from the reds,oranges and yellows which are the colours of fire, embers and the sun convey warmth where greens, turquoises and blues are the colours of grass and water traditionally cool things. But be careful it is transitional and you move from warmer to cooler in gradual steps in each colour.

A color circle, based on red, yellow and blue, is traditional in the field of artists however Sir Isaac Newton was the chap that developed the first circular diagram of colors we know of in 1666. Since then, scientists and artists have studied and designed numerous variations of this concept. Differences of opinion about the validity of one format over another continue to provoke debate. In reality, any color circle or color wheel which presents a logically arranged sequence of pure hues has merit.

Primary Colours: Red, yellow and blue
In traditional colour theory (used in paint and pigments), primary colour are the 3 pigment colours that can not be mixed or formed by any combination of other colours. All other colours are derived from these 3 hues. When you mix these 3 colours you get the Secondary Colours Green, orange and purple. If you start mixing primary and secondary you get the Tertiary Colours Yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green etc. and so on. gradually as you mix the colours you get the wheel you can see at http://colorschemedesigner.com.

OK I got that colours are colours and they are can be placed on a wheel so how does that help me and why should I use a wheel at all?

Good Question - this is where the next topic comes in

Colour Harmony

In visual experiences, harmony is something that is pleasing to the eye. It engages the viewer and it creates an inner sense of order or a balance in the visual experience. When something is not harmonious, it's either boring or chaotic. At one extreme is a visual experience that is so bland that the viewer is not engaged. The human brain will reject under-stimulating information. At the other extreme is a visual experience that is so overdone, so chaotic that the viewer can't stand to look at it. The human brain rejects what it can not organize because it cannot understand it.. Creating harmony is the task designers need to get right as it delivers visual interest and a sense of order.

The Schemes!
Look again at the colour wheel

The very slime outer ring comprise the primary colors, the inner rings the secondary, terteriary and so on so how do we combine these into a scheme? Well look at the top of the site you will see what at first glance look like odd shaped buttons.

these are the 6 types of standard colour schemes that for want of a better word "work". Look at the one I have highlighted called ANALOGIC, note the 3 dark segments at the top of the circle, these represent colours that are close together on the wheel. If a colour is beside another other colour it is called Analogous (or Analogic) you see this quite a lot in nature and the human brain really quite likes it and accepts it readily and this is perhaps the easiest colour scheme to get right.

If two colours are opposite one another on the wheel they are deemed to be Complimentary and this is another of the scheme names. If you select the Complimentary button on the http://colorschemedesigner.com site you will see this.

Note the appearance of two dots one at 12 o'clock the other at 6, these are the complimentary colours if you drag the dark 12 o'clock dot around the circle the corresponding opposite dot moves with it and the colour scheme displayed on the right of the screen displays a palate of colours that work well together. Note that as you move the dot the palate colours on the left never clash, are never discordant, they "work" - and there-in lies the beauty of the colour wheel!

There are 6 schemes in total and you can explore them at your leisure however I will mention one more the Triadic which combines 3 colours on the wheel in a triangle shape. This can be hard to get right if you do not use a colour wheel!

as you can see you get the dark dot at the top, which you can move around clock wise and anti-clockwise, the two white dots at the bottom form a triangle and these can be dragged as well.. however they broaden or narrow the base of the triangle.Once again the wheel can be used to get colour schemes that work, although some may be a tad garish.. so use with caution!

you will notice that the center of the circle is the colour under the dark dot, this colour will be the one you select as the main colour of your scheme, the others will be secondary to it. hence the larger area of that colour on the right hand palate pane.

Context

How colour behaves in relation to other colors and shapes is a complex area of color theory. Compare the contrast effects of different color backgrounds for the same red square

For most people with normal or nearly normal color vision red appears more brilliant against a black background and somewhat duller against the white background. In contrast with orange, the red appears lifeless; in contrast with blue-green, it exhibits brilliance. Also notice that the red square appears larger on black than on other background colors, this is context! Always try colour swatches of your colour scheme like this to see if they 'work' the way you expect them to and deliver the sort of balance and emphasis that you want to convey.

This is also where I have a problem and http://colorschemedesigner comes to the rescue again notice a the top right there is an option for..... Colour Blind

Have a look at your color scheme when you apply the different types of colour blindness filters and note how the tonal values change use these options in combination with the preview buttons at the bottom to see how others will see your colour scheme always remember that how you see the context of your scheme is not how others will if they have colour blindness of if there monitor is configured differently from yours. (I am Tritanopy Colour blind have a go and welcome to my world ;-) )

Next post we will go a bit deeper into the world of color and look at hue, luminance and tone

Coping with Windows update 2661254 SSL FIx on a self certed domino server

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 06:48:00 PDT

Well well well, that was an interesting couple of days!
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to release a fix that stops Internet Explorer (a pox on it) accessing any SSL site that has a <=512bit certificate.

Here is a link to the MS document

Now there are very good, sound and security related reasons for MS to do this but it did cause me some fretting and sleepless nights this week, i have no doubt once the fuss dies down you will see Firefox, Opera, Safari and the rest follow suit.

We protect a lot of our internally accessed data with self certed SSL certificates and these where created back in the days when 512 bytes was more than ample and secure for this purpose. These certs were renewed each year and over time have been forgotten about.

The symptoms of the problem post this fix being applied are:-

When IE <=8 tried to connect you get a "there is a problem with the web site" error and you can go no further, with IE >=9 you get the "There is a problem with the certificate" message but clicking on the "Proceed to the web site (not recommended)" does nothing.

Now on a i5 server (used to be the iSeries Server or AS400 and nicknamed iBoxes) renewing a self certed SSL server certificate is dead easy and you get the option to change the bit length so for our iBoxes it was dead easy. Admin Panel, renew certificate, change bit length, create, apply , restart server .. and the problem went away.

But Domino servers ... ahhhh ....

I went into the Certificate authority NSF created for the server, tried to create a new certificate, not a problem but no field to let me change the key length.. ARRRRRRGGHHHHHHH!!! Tried a whole lot of things to get a 1024 long key, with no great success. So my quickr users on the one server with the problem had to start using another browser whilst I sorted this problem out.

As it turns out Per Lausten Domino Guru and all around nice chap tweeted a link that lead me to the solution ...many thanks Per!!! Once again Social Networking helps the poor benighted admin out of a tight corner not really of his own making.

Basically what I did was the following which I was missing in the other ways I tried
The full details for what follows are on the link above, but in summary you just start from scratch.

01. I took a copy of the original Cert Authority NSF created for the server
02. I took a copy of the .key and .sth files currently in use on the server
03. I created a new nsf using the Domino Certificate Authority template CCA50.ntf
04. I created a new CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY KEY RING FILE with a 1024 bit key (option 1)
05. I ran the Configure Certificate Authority Profile (option 2) for the new key ring file
06. Set the expiry to 5 years
07. I ran option 3 - Create Server Key Ring & Certificate, filled in the guff required paying special attention to put CAKeyPair in as the CA Certificate Label and the fully qualified domain name of the server as the "Common Name" and 1024 as the key length.

Et Voila!!! I have a new Keyfile.kyr and KeyFile.sth with 1024bit keys!

All that was left was to copy these to the server and stop and start the HTTP task and IE started to work again, which was accompanied by a massive sigh of relief and a couple of memo's suggesting we might as well go the whole hog and get "real" certificates even thought they cost money.

Thanks again Per for the link that got this sorted you are a star!

Principles of Design #5 - Unity, Getting all to work together

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:23:00 PDT

Bit of a gap in the series, a 25 mile walk in the Mournes and a couple of projects at work got in the way.. Anyway on with the series - Unity, what is it?

Well that is a hard-ish concept as it sort of suggest that "What works ... works". However it is something that all devs should think about as most of aspire to create things that work and have an identity. Alternately we may work in a company that has a well defined corporate identity framework with in which we create our applications and whilst we work within this framework we may want to add to or improve the framework with our own ideas.

Other frameworks may be very well defined like IBMN's OneUI that we all know and some of us love. I have to add that I am not that keen on it but it does tick a lot of the "design" checkboxes it is just a bit ... mmmm.... soulless unless you breath some of yourself into it.

Consistency

So in broad terms unity is an umbrella principle for visual design, meaning all aspects of "The Language of Design" that I have talked about so far (and in those to come) contribute to the visual unity of an image. Consistency among parts that contribute to the whole is a hallmark of a unified design. Such parts include color schemes, typography, semantic hierarchy etc. When all of these parts are in sync, the end result is a unified design. However, if one of the parts is inconsistent or improperly applied, unity suffers and the image or site or app often appears disjointed. A common problem that makes a good web site look thrown together.

The site above whilst at first glance looks OK suffers from a lack of consistency, the images do not compliment each other and distract from the design The navigation is confusing and not centred, the colours do not complement each other and the page has no focus which leads nicely into ...

Relationships

Unity is the relationship among the elements of a visual that helps all the elements function together. Unity gives a sense of oneness to a page as a seen by the user as a single visual. In other words, the words and the images work together to create meaning. So basically don't use a picture of a dog when you are talking about cats or as in the example above have way way way to many unconnected images.

Colour Schemes

I will be talking in a separate post about colour however keeping colour consistent across all the pages or parts of your app.This is where frameworks like OneUI or Twitter Bootstrap come into their own and will help the designer from the get go.

By whatever method you should try to achieve a design that should consistently use a stable color scheme that appeals to viewers. For example, if a Web site consists of multiple pages and the font color for hyperlinks is blue on the first Web page, then hyperlinks should be blue on subsequent Web pages. Also, background colors should be used consistently and should enhance readability preferably by relying on a template or some type of CSS to ensure that page loads are cohesive.

Proximity

The simplest method of making objects or elements on a page appear to belong together is to group them closely together. We humans LOVE patterns and developing a pattern in your design or images will create unity in your design.

Similarity

Things that are the same shape, size, colour or orientation allows the viewer to associate them with each other and visually bind them together.

Repetition

Another method often used to promote unity is the use of repetition. Repetition of color, shape, texture or object can be used to tie a design together.

Continuity

A much more subtle method of unifying a design involves a trick borrowed from the art community. The continuation of a line, an edge or direction from one area to another. Continuation is often used in books and magazines to tie the elements of a page together with the use of ruled column dividers and by lining up edges of text headlines and graphics.

Take the picture above the artist has used the continuity of the road to unite the fore-ground with the back ground. The left to right stroked in fore-ground unite the left and right of the picture.

This continuity allows the viewer to start at the front of the picture and work to the back without interruption. The continuity of the stokes allows the view to recognise a pattern that consolidates the idea that we are looking at a "worked" field.

Closure
When you have a group of elements in a design it is important they they are "closed" . By that I mean that the group should be a recognised shape itself and the closure can be achieved with either a boundary line or by whitespace. Have a look at the example below at the 3 panels at the bottom each panel has an image with text below surrounded by white space. This is a "closed" group. Also looking at the 6 panels as a single group bounded by the grey side bars can also be considered as "Closed"

Conclusion

Consider the site above it shows all the elements of unity as a whole - the overall T pattern is easy for the user to identify with. The images work well together the fonts work well and the colour scheme works. This unity allows the elements of the site to be more than the sum of their parts and bind the site into a single pleasant visual experience.

This is what we as design-centric developers need to strive for design not only each element well but ensure that each element works well with every other element on the page.

That brings the principals bit of this series to an end. I hope you found it useful and in the next series of posts I will be talking about how we can leverage these fundamental ideas together with with your current skill sets in the development cycle to both develop and design apps and web sites.

First up is colour in the next post.

IT Sales Cold Calls - The bane of my life :(

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:42:00 PDT

Right - people who follow my tweets will already know that my patience with cold callers has worn perilously thin of late. Particularly with Oracle salespeople although SalesForce, HP and Macafee are not that far behind.

I am paid to do a job and I do that job reasonably well given the fact there there are only so many hours in the day that I can work in. What I am NOT paid to do is to engage with cold callers trying to engage me in a conversation that adds not a shred of productivity to my day, dozens of times a week. This week I have taken 14 of these deeply irritating calls and quite frankly enough is enough!

For the record :-

1. Were you even mildly interested in me as a person rather than as a revenue stream you would have asked someone how to pronounce my name, calling me Mr [long pause] Ma Dough Mag and when I correct it if you continue to get it wrong I WILL hang up.

2. Were I interested in your offering I will contact you until then LEAVE ME ALONE!

3. If I am on a list that says I am interested and you are from Oracle , Salesforce, HP or Macafee the list is wrong and I will have asked many times to be taken off the list. People like yourself haven' bothered so pardon me if I don't give a damn about professional courtesy if you or a colleague ring me the next fecking day with the same content.

4. I really really really do not care a monkey's chuff if Gartner thinks the sun shines out of your collective orifices. Neither do I care a scintilla that product X will save the universe from heat death or the effects of the antisocial cultural hegemony of Facebook. If you send me "White Papers" and I haven't explicitly asked for them then I will figuratively wipe my arse with them, flush them into the toilet of my contempt and have them safely de-odourised by the toilet duck of derision.

6. Offering to come and meet me in person because you will "be in the area" does not in any way suddenly make me interested in your product. The fact I have said "I am not interested" does not in any way allow you to infer than me being able to smell your aftershave and marvel at the sartorial elegance of your suit is going to change my mind.

7. Implying that whatever competitor's product I am using is crap, worthless or might cause impotence does not endear your product in any shape or form (Unless it is Internet Explorer which of course does cause Impotence and that is the reason I do not use it) If I ever want someone to insult the tools I use every day I will be sure to put you at the top of my list.

8. I know "times are hard" and you are "just doing your job" but you do have to remember you are interrupting me at work. You are directly responsible for a hiatus in whatever it is I am doing, that hiatus better be something I AM interested in or you WILL suffer the thin sharp edge of my wrath.

9. If you come across me on your call list for the day - consider me "hostile and dangerous" you have been warned!!!!

That is all.

Design Principles #4 - Use Emphasis to make your point

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:33:00 PDT

So in our wander through the skills and ideas useful for devs that do not have design team handy when they are designing apps and sites we arrive at emphasis.

"OK", I hear you cry, "I know all about the [em],[i] and [b] tags."

But emphasis is more so much more that typographical!

Emphasis is what gives you design a focal point and by that I mean that the element that is most important stands out in your design. For this reason emphasis is sometimes called dominance, but I don't want to get all "50 DIVs of Grey" here so I will stick with Emphasis for now.

In the web site above is a classical example of emphasis used to great effect. The rays of light slanting down from top left to the centre and the well lit center image and dark surround create the emphasis and drag the eye to the most important thing on the page. Rembrandt used exactly the same lighting technique all the time... the emphasis is on the lit characters and you find yourself looking at them first and paying more attention to them as a result.

Focal points are very important. In an earlier piece I mentioned the Web Page "Sweet Spot" which was roughly here.

However you do not have to place the focal point here, you can by using emphasis move the focal point to wherever you want on the page.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in design it when the dev tries to make everything in the design stand out or more commonly nothing has emphasis at all. The problem with that is the app will appear busy if too much emphasis is used, and boring and unappealing if not enough is used.

Instead I would recommend using a semantic flow to your HTML markup, a task now made all the easier with the HTML 5 which has changed and will continue to develop towards a semantic rather than presentational markup. Using this new semantic markup as a starting point the developer can arrange the elements of the app or page into a hierarchy.

So your Web page/app will have a hierarchy and all you need to do is put the emphasis on the correct elements so that your design leads the user on a journey you want them to take and hopefully that will be in IBMish an "exceptional experience" ;-) So how do I do it this emphasis thingie

White Space
Remember Emphasis is important but of equal importance is what you de-emphasise!
What I mean by that is the more an element is surrounded by white space or is isolated from other elements, the more weight and, thus, importance it takes on.

In the example above note the "Part of the story" unlike the rest of the page which is space-free this text is emphasised by the the fact it has white-space around it. It jumps from the page and screams "READ ME FIRST" to the viewer.

Contrast
Emphasis can also be leveraged using contrast.

Contrast is about differences: light against dark, small next to large, a portrait-oriented photo next to several landscape-oriented photos. See the contrasts and subsequent focal point on “Love that Summer Feeling” above. The focal point is a rectangle alongside many squares; it is the largest shape on the page; and it also is colorful against a black-and-white backdrop. This is Contrast pure and simple.

Establish and then break a pattern

In the last post I talked about Rhythm and patterns you can emphasise an element on your design by placing an element at odds with the established pattern on the site. the central item is rotated by 3 degrees clockwise (you can do this really easily with CSS3 *-transform:rotate(5deg); rule). Once again the eye is caught by the weight of the difference and drawn to the centre, the rotation be clockwise draws the eye down to the title "Tie-Dyed". Emphasis hard at work!

Continuance.

Continuance is a fancy way of saying once the eye starts moving it prefers to keep going in that direction until something with more emphasis comes along. Consider this

Even though the bottom splat is bigger and so tends to catch your eye first, your brain can’t help but go “FECK, look at the sexy arrow AND it is pointing right !” Soon enough, you’ll find yourself staring at the smaller object.This is the same effect as you get when someone stops on a crowded street and stares up at the sky, soon a bunch of people will be looking up trying to find what the person is looking at.. (Hint the person looking up is the arrow!!)

Typography
I started with a nod at typography I will do a complete post on fonts in the future so prepare yourself for an attack on the evil that is Comic Sans! But I will add here Fonts can play a bit part in emphasis but do NOT fall into the trap of having lots of different font-faces, sizes, colours and weights. This is NOT good! Use no more than 3 fonts on a page and make very very sure they look good together. Do not,for example mix serif and non serif fonts, on the same page it hurts the eyes! The experience of printers going back to the times of Caxton's printing press should be ignored at your peril!!!

So that was a quick dander through emphasis. It is a very very useful tool for a developer to use, but it is easily misused and can cause chaos , confusion and double-vision in your users! Like all things make it part of your thinking process when planning the site and experiment so you get the right emphasis on the right places.

Look at magazines at other web sites and applications, where is the emphasis? Does it help or hinder? You have your eyes open all day, use them to learn what makes "good" design!!

Next post will be UNITY!

Design Principles #3 - Getting down to the Rhythm

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:34:00 PDT

Rhythm is mentioned by one of my arty farty heros Henri Matisse

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.

Now Mr. Matisse was taking about paintings but it is equally true about music, poetry or indeed web and app design. We as devs create rhythm by simply repeating elements in predictable or surprising patterns. This repetition is a natural thing that occurs everywhere in our world. As people, we are driven everyday by predictable, timed events. The Olympics every 4 years, telegraph poles along a road, fence posts receeding off down a beach, breakfast coming after gettting out of bed.

Rhythm in design is just re-creating that, re-creating these predictable timed patterns, creating a pleasing sub-conscience relationship between the elements in the pattern.

Humans are designed to seek for and recognise patterns being able to recognise a sabre tooth tiger was a definite advantage to our hairy anchestors!. Patterns are familar and are reasuring to the user, unordered chaos (the opposite of rhythm) jars and unsettles the viewer and should be avoided - unless that IS what you were looking to achieve ;-)

In your app or web site rhythm creates a sense of movement for the user. A good website shouldn’t feel template based, it should tell a story. The fluctuation or repetition of key elements on a website express rhythm.

So rhythm - tell me more ... there are 3 types Regular, Progessive and Flowing.

Regular Rhythm

Dead easy ...it just repeats elements in timed or predictable intervals like this .. on Play.com

Button equal sized and horizontal, large main image in the area where the eye naturally gravitates, and "KNOCKOUT DEALS!" slap bang in the hot zone of eye movement. Then four small rectangle panels along the bottom. Even these 4 panels have text on the left similar sized image on the right.

All regular, safe , rhythm!

Beware regular rhythm! It can be ... boringly template looking ... if not done well and with some stylistic flair.

Progressive Rhythm

A progressive pattern used changes in size or colour or possesion but not in a regular way. Progessive patterns lead the eye progressively through the elements. In http://flairbuilder.com/ above the asymmetric circles and dotted thread are perfect examples of a Progressive Rhythm leading the naturally from Circle to Circle right to left.

This is particularly skillful blend of regular rhythm in the navigation and footer and progressive in the center panel. It works visually and that is always the acid test of a good design.

Flowing (or Fluid) Rhythm
A flowing rhythm gives a sense of movement, and is often more organic in nature. Think of the stripes on a Zebra, they are regular white and black stripes but arranged in a fluid almost random way. (The rhythm on a Zebra comes the repeating white and black not the size position or shape.)

Flowing is perhaps the most difficult of the rhythms to get right with elements on the page however you can use it to good advantage with your masthead or footer images, which can give the over all impression of a flowing movement on the page.

... and in this website , the sadly now defunct http://www.aw-digital.com

.. the dev has used a mixture of regular (the stripes top left) and progressive (the semi circular arc) and fluid with the different sized circles. The combination gives a very pleasing effect. Also note there in the top left quadrant the home button.. right where the eye will settle and there diagonally opposite are the "social" buttons balancing the home button nicely.... Lovely!

Adding unique interest and excitement to your web designs can be hard to accomplish, but adding some rhythm to the design is a quick and easy way to do this.Our own demon drummer Bruce Elgort will tell you that good drumming can be the back bone, anchor and driving force in music and as you can see it can be the same in web and app design! Every design has rhythm even if you didn’t plan for it, so a good dev will take control of it and use it to the best advantage.

.. and so on to how to do "Emphasis" to your app's best advantage in the next design post

Design Principles #2 - Proportion

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:42:00 PDT

Proprotion - OK why should I care about proportion?

Proportion is closely linked to Balance that I discussed in the previous "Design" post. Proportion is one of the attributes that can balance a page or on the other hand send it spinning off into the realm of things that make you go "EUCK!!!!!"

At it's most basic level, proportion is the relationship that an element has with one or more other elements on the page. This relationship can be any one of the elements attributes size, colour, weight (as described in the previous post) but generally it is the size that we humans look for instinctively.

Think of the human body. If you head was 200% wider but the same height it would odd or more correctly "out of proportion" to the rest of your body. The human eye is used to the "natural" proportions found in nature, so while we will instinctively like things that observe certain rules of proportionality we will also dislike and find upsetting those things that are "out of proportion".

Back in the Renaissance artists and mathematicians noticed that there was a natural proportion that when observed made their pictures, sculptures and buildings better, more pleasing and generally visually wonderful!

After much quill sucking and doodling on the back of Italian Bistro table clothes they came to the astounding discovery that the proportion of "nice looking things" was generally the same. They called this the "Divine Proportion" or "Golden Ratio" and it is 1:1.618033988749895 or if long numbers aren't your cup of tea 1:1.618

Eh?

Have a look at the above statues ... which one looks "in proportion"?

If you said the one in the middle .. well you would be right.. here you have the golden mean in action.. the ratio between each adjoining element is in the proportion 1:1.62 .... see?

Right that works for naked men (and women) but what about web pages or apps?

So if you have a page layout that is 906px wide and you want to divide it into two sections that conform to the golden proportion .. easy peasy!

Simple :-)

Still Not convinced... well lets look at twitter.

Look at the boxes.. and how they "fit" the design.. each box is in 1:1:62 with the next biggest element. BTW The spiral is one of the things in nature to look for when looking for the golden ratio.

Right I am going off on a tangent for a moment ..

The Golden Ratio is not quite as fixed a rule as you may think when you start to play around you will discover that you can break the golden ratio if you are careful. There is an optimal number of symbols or characters per line. Generally this is accepted as being 50-60 although up to 75 can be OK. More than this the readers eye wanders off and they loose their place and their interest. Too short and the eye will have to travel back too often, breaking the reader’s rhythm. Too short lines also tend to stress people, making them begin on the next line before finishing the current one (hence skipping potentially important words). SO depending on your typography in your page's elements you can break or at least bend the golden ratio and still provide a balanced design.

There is a very interesting book “Typographie” by E. Ruder that explains a lot about how we read and it seems that the subconscious mind is energized when jumping to the next line as long as it doesn’t happen too frequently. At the beginning of every new line the reader is focused, but this focus gradually wears off over the duration of the line

So with this in mind, sizing your textual elements should combine an optimal line length of between 50 and 60 symbols and nod at the proportions of the golden ratio.

OK Back on proportion

Sine 1:1.618 is pretty close to .33 : 0.66 a variant of the Golden ratio is "The Rule of Thirds" this generally can be used without need for your calculator. All you need to do is divide your design vertically and horizontally into thirds - like a tic-tac-toe board. take this site for example

Now if you remember back to part 1 of this series I pointed out that when people do decide to read a page, their eyes sweep horizontally from left to right, often focusing initially on a roughly triangular area in the upper-left corner. When the results are applied to a page that observes the rule of thirds then we see the following happening.

On the demandware site above you can see that the designer has used the rule of thirds but has nodded at the golden ratio

Also worthy of note in the site example :

1. The picture is placed so the site is in the golden ratio from top to bottom in a similar way to the statue.. the top section is in 1:1.62 to the picture underneath. There is also a golden spiral in there by "weight" in the top 2/3 of the page.

2. The edges of the person's body (not the arms) in the picture runs down the 2/3's line reading left to right or right to left, these are close to the golden ratio and are satisfying to the eye.

3. Whilst the weight of the left hand side is increased by the large ON DEMAND section the page remains in balance because the lower left hand segment is less populated than those on the right so the page remains in balance and is satisfying

4. The package the person is holding is sloped bottom left to top right. This leads the eye up to the navigation panel. Were it the other way around this would drag the eye down to the footer.

..and that is an short introduction to proportion ... another invaluable tool to the designer and will get mentioned again when I talk about "Grids" later in this series.

.. and next we move onto Rhythm ....

Today is a BOFH day .... :-)

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 06:27:00 PDT

Today I got a reply from a user who had received a standard warning message about a password change event that will be happening tomorrow.
The orginal email message reads

Dear xxx,

Please be aware that your password for the userprofile XXXXXXX on the BIGBOX server will expire tomorrow and you will be required to change it.
Regards

The Security Administration Team

We in IT send these messages on the two mornings before password change day so that the change does not come as a surprise and it gives our users 2 days to work out something exciting and memorable that does not break the password composition rules and yet fits on a post-it note attached to their screens.. Names of people and servers changed to protect the guilty.

The Reply

Steve
What is this about?
Regards
Norbert Normal

My Reply to the reply

Dear Mr Normal
This message is to warn you that your password will expire tomorrow and you will have to change it Here are some useful definitions

"BIGBOX" = A server that has the name BIGBOX you know you are attaching to the BIGBOX server when you click the icon on your desktop named BIGBOX. This opens a windows where in large 70pt friendly blue letters in the center of the screen it says BIGBOX

"Password" = this is a secret word that allows you and you alone to access the facilities on a Computer. In this case the BIGBOX server see 1 above. We use passwords because we like secrets in MIS. Encryption is our bread an butter and passwords our Marmite. We do it specifically to make it difficult for people to do things that they shouldn't do on the server. We have considered removing your keyboards but this was deemed to be too excessive by the User Committee.

"Tomorrow" = a difficult concept, usually considered to be the day after today. But when is today? I generally advise users that tomorrow is the next time you wake up and get out of bed. However if you had a large and perhaps liquid lunch this may lead to confusion. So I suggest you put on your television and tune to BBC1 .. stay awake until you see the next BBC Breakfast program starting and you will have arrived successfully at "tomorrow"

Regards
Steve

Quick Tip for IE Compatibility Modes

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 04:38:00 PDT

After much head scratching on how to get IE9 to behave properly with a web site design I discovered deep in a MS document that you can add this inside your [HEAD] and it will force any IE version to use the highest compatibility mode that is available to it
[meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /]

Damn useful as IE9 will by default start in QUIRKS mode and make a mockery of all your lovely newish CSS and JS.

The MS Article is here

PS I will be back later with Design Principals and Proportionality

Design Principles #1 - Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 08:00:00 PDT

So what is "Balance" and why do I give a monkey's chuff?

Well on a very basic level we humans like things to be balanced and something that is visually balanced is more pleasing to the eye than something that is not.

The easiest way is to think of an old fashion set of scales, when the two objects being weighed are the same weight the scales will be balanced. You can have several objects on one side and they still "balance" one big object on the other side.

You will hear design geeks like me say "That panel has too much weight" and basically I am saying the same thing. Visually the panel is heavier than the other elements and is causing the whole effect to be out of balance.

The "weight" of a visual object is made up of its size, color and lightness or darkness. If a visual object on the screen does not "balance" with the other objects on the screen then it drags the viewers eye down to the heaviest part of the screen and you may not be aiming for that effect and it may well detract from the information being presented on other parts of the screen. The weight of an element can be judged using these basic rules.

Bigger areas are heavier than smaller areas.
Darker areas are heaver than lighter areas.
Saturated colors are heavier than unsaturated colors.
A stronger border is heavier than no border or a thin one.
Texture is heavier than no texture. The denser the texture, the heavier.
Colors like red and orange are heavier than calm colors like blue or green.

The human eye is an odd thing it "likes" patterns it can understand easily. The eye understands balance and when faced with something that is out of kilter it will look at the heavy side first as we know that heavy things (in general) carry more importance than light things so in the absence of balance we look for heavy to try and make sense of the imbalance.

We achieve this by scanning a page, painting or website with our eyes looking for balance/imbalance and the thing with the most "Weight". Yahoo! have done some interesting research on tracking the eyes of visitors to various web sites and they have discovered that initially

People scan the main (heaviest) part of the page first, this should give us "Context"
They make decisions about the page in as little as three seconds based on that scan
If they decide to stay, they move their attention to the top half of the screen.

When people do decide to read a page, their eyes sweep horizontally from left to right, often focusing initially on a roughly triangular area in the upper-left corner of a webpage but are dragged towards the "Heavier" parts of the screen or page. Being a designer you can leverage this to your advantage by balancing your page in such a way that you allow your design to lead your users eyes through their visit, both encouraging them to stay and if they do stay making their visit pleasing to look at and use.

There are 3 types of Visual Balance

1. Symmetrical (sometimes called formal) Balance
Symmetrical balance is mirror image balance. If you draw a line down the center of the page, all the objects on one side of the screen are mirrored on the other side (they may not be identical objects, but they are similar in terms of numbers of objects, colors and other elements. Sometimes they are completely identical
Here is a web site that is very nearly completely symmetrical on a vertical access down the middle of the screen. Each side left and right has a similar "weight" and is "balanced".

It is also worthy of note that while the page is balanced Left to Right, it is in a state of imbalance top to bottom. the top is "lighter" and the bottom "heavier". This leads the eye from the top of the page down to the heavier bottom of the page, which is the direction that the designer wants you to take.

Also note the slightly larger tree in the bottom right below "Flexibility", this little bit of imbalance will underline the Flexibility link visually and we will unconsciously be more interested from a visual key in that part of the screen. the designer has done this deliberately to accent the importance they feel in "Flexibility"

2. Asymmetric (Sometimes called Informal) Balance
Asymmetrical balance occurs when several smaller items on one side are balanced by a large item on the other side, or smaller items are placed further away from the center of the screen than larger items. One darker item may need to be balanced by several lighter items.

This example shows an Asymmetric design that it is balanced. The darker right hand panel is smaller that the combined left hand text panels. It is also worthy of note that the eye again is taken from the lighter left most panel through the heavier middle panel and then finally to the left hand heavier panel.

Note in the middle panel the collection of 15 thumnails is at the top.. making the centre column slightly top heavy .. this along with the larger font in the the left hand panel keep the reader's eye in the top half and content rich part of the page.

Although asymmetrical balance may appear more casual and less planned, it is usually harder to to use because the designer must plan the layout very carefully to ensure that it is still balanced. An unbalanced page or screen creates a feeling of tension, as if the page or screen might tip, or things might slide off the side, just as the unbalanced scales would tip to one side.

3. Radial Symmetry
The third type of balance is radial balance, where all elements radiate out from a center point in a circular fashion. It is very easy to maintain a focal point in radial balance, since all the elements lead your eye toward the center.

In this example whilst the designer has nodded at symmetry they have not got it right at all, the columns are not symmetrical vertically or horizontally. The differences in width are un-balanced, The colours are un-balanced, the lightness/darkness is un-balanced. You will find your eye scanning up and down left and right in the vain hoping of finding both balance and a place that can be a focus and a place to start.

So Balance is VERY important in directing your users/visitors to the bits of your app/site you want them to focus on first and then lead them on into content and from their into the depths of your other content.

But BALANCE does not operate in isolation, careful use of proportion helps both balance and allows you to lead the user even more skillfully into your app, and Proportion is what I will look at tomorrow.

Good Design is NOT Expensive!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 08:52:00 PDT

Goodness Gracious!
I have switched to "Bus" mode - no posts on Dominoyesmaybe for months and then 3 in one day!
I blame UKLUG!
Of I go, have a whale of a time and I come back empowered and enthused by the new things I have come across and new challenges that have been set. This post however comes from the other source of UKLUG benefits, the chats and conversations in the bar after the official bits have finished.

I was chatting with some other devs and the topic of design came up now not the back end application architecture functional design, the front end UI / UX design. It was mooted that this gets ignored a lot for fear of adding time to the schedule or adding $$'s to the cost of a project and this may be true given the structures we develop in, however I would posit that there is a way were there is minimal additional cost and not that much extra time either.

The answer - simple - teach the devs the principals of design and then we will include those skills naturally as part of the life of a project. Until this happens the phrases ...

"I can't do the arty-farty stuff"
or
"I am not paid to design I am paid to program"
or
"If you want design you need to hire Gok Wan"

... will get trotted out when a project ends up looking the back end of a cow with rampant dysentery.

One of the big positives of a well designed application is that it helps that often fraught problem of "user acceptance". It is no brainer that something that is well designed will appeal to the majority of users whilst something that is badly designed will put them off it from the get go and that is very very important.

We all have a designed thing that makes us go "Wooooo! that is NICE" now look at an application that you have created .. does it make you go "Wooooo! I want to use that" ?.

Design is a big big topic however the thing is that the principals of design boil down to just five elements and they are :

Balance
Proportion
Rhythm
Emphasis
Unity

Now over the next couple posts I am going to explore each one and try to explain what each means and how we are application developers can leverage them to create the same wonderfully useful applications but with that extra bit of "polish" on the front end.

Spark Sessions are GREAT!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 08:20:00 PDT

I hear those of you not conference goers mutter "Spark Sessions - what are they?"

Well one of the the wonderful ladies that comprise the "Nerd Girls" - Gab Davis persauded me to do one at BLUG and then again more recently at UKLUG. I am not sure who introduced them or their provenance before I got involved but the every lovely Gab is the one poking grumpy gits like me to get off their arses and do something that is different and most importantly inspiring.

For such is the reason Spark Session exist - to inspire.

Think of them as little 5-6 minute TED sessions but done by ordinary folk like me and the hard part is you have a maximum of 1 slide and that generally has your name on it. So there is no hiding infront of your projected content. There is just you and your audience which even for a seasoned presenter can be - well - daunting!

My first attempt was at BLUG and i have to say that although I started well I came up a bit short on both time and inspiration so I changed my topic for UKLUG and on this occasion managed to get some inspiration in and brought the duration up a bit too, so there is hope that Gab will ask me to do it again at the next conference I am at.

I have to say that the numbers in attendance at Spark Sessions is going up too, so we must be doing something right ;-) and if you are attending a LUG or Connect and you see "Spark Sessions" come along or even better put your name forward. I can recommend it :)

My topic on this occasion was "Volunteering", now there is an old army axiom that reads something like "Never Volunteer for anything" and to be fair in some circumstances this can be true but importantly not all the time.

When you voluteneering YOU as a person can make a difference, it may appear to be a small insignificant difference at the time but it IS a difference and all those wee differences will stack up to make a whole hell of a lot of difference!

Volunteering is not a one way street where you help someone or something and get nothing in return, in my experience the volunteer gets as much back and in some cases more than they put in.

Much has been said about the Olympic volunteers, indeed our own Tim Clark and Sue Smith were one of the many folk that gave of their time freely in the hope they would add to the success of the games. I can say without fear of contradiction that did just that in spades!! I would also warrant if asked both Sue and Tim would say they got as much back from the experience as they put in .. if not more.

For my UK readers I have a challenge it is only a little itzy bitzy challenge that will require you to give a couple of hours a week and a couple of hours is nothing ... a trip to the pub perhaps ... an evening of really bad TV. Nip over to the DO IT web site and type in your post code and have a look at what is available in your area.. they also provide a tab for "Volunteering from my computer" !

Go on .. have a go ..and HAVE FUN!

** Edit ** Thanks to Chris [IdoNotes] Millar you can see lots of Spark Sessions on YouTube .. here
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL95028A08F0E8B934&feature=plcp

HTC One X Battery Life Improvement

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 07:38:00 PDT

Gentle Readers - I love my HTC One X, have done since the day I got it. Fast, good screen, I can read it without glasses and zero app failure since I got it in April.

The only slightly down thing was battery life but this is true of many of the full function smartphones when used in anger. In it's defense I would said that it is a BIG lump of a thing and I do use GPS when dandering and a 3 hour dander with GPS on sucks the life out of a battery faster than a thirsty Ulsterman drinks his Guinness.

Now I recently pulled down the combined 4.0.4 version of Android, the 4.1 version of HTC Sense and the 4.23 of the HTC SDK API and updated the phone. BOY was I surprised!!!

Normally my trusting Powerbee accompanies me when out dandering and I expect to be walking for more than 10 miles as it would normally run out of power at or arroun 3.5 hours. I normally trim the phone down to only have the GPS & CARDIOTRAINER running ensuring that WiFi and Mobile Data are turned off and the phone is not looking around to do stuff that I do not need it to do and even with all that I would still be pushing it to get a 3 hour dander and still have more that 10% battery left.

So I was very pleasantly surprised with the first dander after the upgrade, I did all my usualy stuff and set off from Bray to Wicklow with the Lotus Luminaries Carl Tyler and Eileen Fitzgerald. After 4 hours of dandering I looked at the phone to see if it needed the powerbee and low and behold the battery indicator was STILL showing 70%!!

Ye Godz and small piscean beings!

What would have been usually >10% left was now 70% so I dandered on and checked every so often to see what the battery power was like. I took a couple of photos and checked my mail when sitting for a coffee so the battery was hit with a higher than normal dandering usage. It was only after 6.5 hours of continuous GPS enabled dandering that I got the BEEP for >14% left and the powerbee was attached.

That is a 100% improvement on dandering battery improvement!

I kinda wrote that off as a one off, but I have done 2 long danders since and got similar results

That for me is a job well done by someone in Android and/or HTC world, I suspect it may be HTC

Thank you HTC!

Now about the mail client .. can you give me back a SELECT ALL option cos that was really useful and you took it away ?

UKLUG 2012 - If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 10:57:00 PDT

There is a Pizza in the oven, there is beer in the fridge and I am collating and bubble sorting my thoughts while making those odd noises of deep satisfaction only known to aliens from Alpha Centauri and *LUG attendees...Yes another UKLUG is done, dusted and put away for another year.

First a super-duper-ginormous-fudge-flavoured-exceptional-experience-with-extra-cheese-THANK-YOU to the Elsmores, Warren and Kitty, without whom UKLUG would not happen and if by some fluke of chance it did then it would it be only a fraction of the fun. I can speak with some authority here as I am one of the "helpers" and I see the event from both sides.
(*note "helper" is used in the Norn Iron sense of "getting in the way and making rude jokes")

LUGs are primarily about the attendees, the organizers and sponsors make it happen and facilitate it being a good experience but at the end of the day it is the attendees that make the event a success. So from this small cog in the organization I say a loud (and if you were at speed sponsoring you know how loud) THANK YOU to all that attended, without you well it would be really really boring!
NOW MOVE TO THE NEXT BOOTH ON THE RIGHT!!!

I will leave it to others to wax lyrical on their favorite sessions and seminal moments and there were many, too many to mention here. While all UKLUGs and ILUGs are brilliant this one seemed somehow better and I cannot put my finger on quite why. My more regular readers will of course recognise that when I can't put a finger on something a theory will not be long in the coming. :) So here goes.

Like all things the yellow-bubble is in a constant state of change and change like sunshine can be both a dawn or a dusk. The last few years have been replete with changes the most recent being the renaming of "Lotusphere" to "Connect" and some are announcing this as the dusk of the Yellowverse. This negativity may come from the pain that comes when separating the little bit of the professional "us" that was defined over the years by everything under the Lotus brands, but I would add that it is also the dawn of "something different".

Whilst this separation is painful it is seldom fatal and as the dawn of a new day replaces the old one what is lost will be soon be replaced by something new. I did two sessions this year, the first one with 4 other Lotus luminaries on how the Lotus products still provide superb, value for money platforms for enterprise applications and that they will continue to do so! In contrast my other session was with Sharon Bellamy on "Taking the fear out of websphere"... to be honest given the subject and the 9am start on day two I was not expecting the 39 people that chose to attend, but this is an indication that some of the changes that are happening are being recognized and are being prepared for. This was echoed in the number and content of other broader scoped sessions on offer in the agenda.

So I think part of the difference I alluded to earlier may have been the start of a community acceptance of the fact that we are not able to control the changes that are happening no matter how much we whinge or how adroitly we wring our hands. Since we have got that out of the way we are left with the challenge of changing ourselves and I for one am now looking forward to it :-)

BLUG 2012 Antwerp thanks and mildly antisocial thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:37:00 PDT

I am returned from Antwerp and the 2 days of tech, sessions, chocolate, smiles, laughter and a beer called "Bollocka" ... yes I attended BLUG 2012

I got home yesterday and have had 24 hours to review in my own mind the event and the one word that resonates in my memory is "community".

I can say without fear of contradiction that there were no negatives to report. Theo and the team of willing helpers put on a fantastic 2 days of super speakers with lots of cutting edge tip, tricks and whizzbang demos to share. Sponsors who where happy to chat and while there to "pimp" their products to the masses did so in a way that integrated seamlessly with the flow of the conference.

As I wandered around joining in some conversations, listening to others and generally getting in the way I noticed many smiles and quite a bit of laughter ... and that always does the soul good :-)

I got to meet up with old friends, share a beer and a meal or two with some chums I have only virtually ever been in contact with and I made a fair few new chums, there were even some who hadn't heard about the "Grapefruit Pip" in my medical past.

I even managed to bring down the tone of the conference by being rude about IE in my session about Design, I am still surprised that Theo felt I would be good enough to put up against the likes of Paul Mooney, Gab Turtle, Rob Novak, Femke Goedhart and the rest of the stellar cast of IBM Champions and the great and the good. Having said that my audience stayed awake and seemed to enjoy themselves. I have promised I will get the slide deck to Theo as soon as possible once I add some depth to the bits I had to skip over at the end. I may try and convince Warren Elsmore that I should reprise it at UKLUG in September .... ah problem there ... he was in the audience ... I may have to resort to bribery.

Theo ... a MASSIVE Thank you from this one attendee and speaker - you and your team ROCK!

Now the vaguely anti-social bit...

Needless to say there were many side bar chats about things of great import and one of the recurring themes was this whole "Social" concept. Now it may be that I am too old to be impressed by the hyperbole of marketing departments or it may be the fact that I trundle through the world slightly out of phase with everyone else ... whatever the reason the social "prefix" elicits a shudder in my soul ... so it was very interesting to hear what was said by the great, the good and the opinionated (that would by definition include me) and I found that I am actually closer to the idea they are trying to sell than I thought I was.

I have always maintained (and did at 4am in the lobby bar) that we humans are by nature "social" we do not need to be taught how to be social set us down in a room with coffee, cookies and decent wifi and we will get social pretty damn quick!

The problem I have always had is we are not only social we are tribal. 50,000 years of being tribal is hard to get past. While we are happy to share within the confines of our tribe, sharing with the other tribes particularly those we dislike comes hard.

25 years of being a handmaiden of the corporate Mammon has taught me that the tribal warfare of the cubicle is at times more cold blooded and viscous than anything Nicolo Maciavelli could have dreamed up even after a late night veal parmigiana and two bottles of Soave!

It will take more than a corporate mind set change, it will take a fundamental shift in the mind set of the people within the organization. To use the playground as a metaphor, that nice chap from Marketing might let the sales team play with his ball at dinner break, but when the bell rings for home time he will take his ball and go home.

In various conversations I learned nothing to disabuse me of this point of view. Don't get me wrong I think the idea of Social Business is a great idea and tools like Connections will facilitate companies great and small to do business in a new exciting way ... but ... engagement means breaking the barriers between tribes both internal and external to the organization, transparency means that your own very personal f**k ups get a much broader airing a scarey thought for most plebs in cubicles the world over particularly if being nimble means that things change too quickly for the human part of the process to keep up.

In my experience to date talking to my users about Collaboration these are the stumbling blocks to adoption of "social" and these barriers have been there since the advent of Teamroons and Quickplaces.

Whether we swim in the relatively placid private lake of our inbox or we are kayaking in the torrents of activity streams we are still human, we still live in tribes ... that being said post BLUG and chatting with the likes of Chris Crummey , Femke Goedhart and John Beck I have moved from a Cynic-in-Chief-anti-social-mutterer to being almost-convinced that it might actually work as sold. I still have my "what-abouts" listed above but I now think that those of us at the sharp end of collaboration can make the difference that will at the end of the day make it work.

That being said I may still be on a good beer, chocolate and good craic high :-)

As always LUGs are like that, they take you places you don't think you can go and make you challenge your point of view. If you haven't been to one, I encourage you to seek out your nearest one and go! I would of course love you to come to UKLUG in September and let Warren Elsmore and the team challenge you ;-)

IBM Should Support IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and Lotus Notes Traveler on IBM i

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 06:47:00 PST

This is by way of Steve Pitcher who is bribing us with free beer. Having said that as an iBoxer of old all the way from the S34/S36/S38 precursors I have a feeling I will be buying Steve the beers and not the other way around!

Why Should these IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) products run on IBM i?

IBM i on Power Systems and it's predecessors have literally hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide.
IBM i customers want to leverage existing investments in hardware, software, personnel and training.
Running ICS servers on other platforms complicates IBM i customer environments. Many customers have a single IBM i server running their entire business.
Better performance - All server to server communications is via the Power Systems high speed bus.
Better security - IBM i is impervious to viruses. Period.
Better uptime - IBM i has a higher uptime % than any other operating system
IBM i is IBM's most widely deployed operating system, over AIX, Power Linux and zOS.
Fewer points of failure - One system to manage, administer, maintain, backup and recover.

200 IBM i customers and IBM Business Partners representing 520,000 potential licenses have already expressed interest in these products only if they were supported on IBM i

Go to this website and tell IBM that you want support for IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and Lotus Notes Traveler on IBM i.

I have ... so should you!

A classic example of Sharp Practice on the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:39:00 PST

Now readers you will know that I am
(a) getting on in years
(b) prone to grumpiness
(c) do not like folk that treat the Internet as their exclusive Honey Pot to pillage as they see fit.

On to the meat of this post I came across via two fellow yellow geeks this site http://www.medhelpline.co.uk

**UPDATE** One of the geeks is Jake Howlett who has also been tweeting and taking action as well after one of his family fell foul of this site's adverts on Google

Now a word or two of explanation. NHS Direct is a UK government run web site and hot line that you can ring cheaply from anywhere in the UK if you have a medical problem that you want to research or get advince on. As an ex-nurse I thing this is an excellent idea as a designer I have issues with the implimentation, however that aside this is a valuable resource for anyone in the UK that needs immeadiate advice on medical issues, if you ring their 0845 4647 you will pay £0.03 per minute.

The http://www.medhelpline.co.uk site tells the user to ring an 0906 which is a UK premium number costing £1.02 per minute - 34 times more than the call would cost if you ring the 0845 4647 number. If you ring the 0906 number all that happens is after some burps squeaks and whistles you get "connected" to the 0845 number but you are still paying 34 times more for the call.. if the call takes say 10 minutes you would spend £10.20 using this so called "service" were it would have cost £0.30 to ring the 0845 4647 number directly.

That was ALL this site does.. nothing else .. it provides 1 premium rate telephone number that will redirect you to a much much cheaper 0845 number.

At 16:00 although the costs are mentioned on the site and that fact that this is a "connection service" the actual NHS Direct phone service is not mentioned anywhere on the front page netiher does it link to the freely available NHS Direct Website.
** UPDATE @22:00 ** They now do mention the real web site but do not link to it .. however the 0906 number is in 66px large font and the real website is mentioned (and not linked to) in 11px font in the "small print" so they are still pushing their premium number 6 times bigger than the mention of the real unlinked to web site.

The site has only 3 pages - the longest of which is their TERMS page which carries a lot of legalese for the provision of 1 phone number. What is clear is that the terms make no mention what so ever of the nature of the service being proovided or the costs you may incur.

If you go to google and search for NHS DIRECT you will find that the company running this service has paid Google for a "Top of Page" advert. This will appear at the top of the returned results ABOVE the link to the actual web site. ** UPDATE @22:00 ** this may now have changed as the advert appears sometimes and at other times not.
I am told that this sort of thing may well be legal however I think that this fits the legal description of "Sharp Practise" To illustrate this I will give a "for example" I discover a lump in my testes one night at 3:00am I am concerned it might be serious. I need advice and I really cannot wait until the morning. I go searching for the NHS Direct number and find this page and because I am distracted by the fear I may have cancer and might soon be dead I ring the first number I find and stay on the line for 30 minutes talking to a nurse, the call has cost me £30.60 where it should have cost me £0.90.

The person providing that severice may be acting with in the law but are they acting ethically making money out of a person who is very probably ill and consumed with worry for themselves or a loved one?

I would posit that this is both unethical and a monumentally foul dispicable thing to try and do.

If you would like to know who this person is I have looked in publicly available data sources and retrieved the following information about the company

JUNO APPS LTD
RIVERSIDE HOUSE
RIVER LAWN ROAD
TONBRIDGE
KENT
ENGLAND
TN9 1EP

Companies House Registration Number: 07664745
Phone Number: 0844 284 1844
Company Director: Mr Ben David Carter

The web site was registered 13/Feb/2012

As soon as I was directed to the site , I did some research and then reported it to the UK ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) as this was a paid for advert on Google. I then tweeted it and several followers have also reported it to the ASA. If you feel like I do this is beyond acceptable you can report this site here at the ASA web site remember to stress that the web site is/was advertised on Google as an "advert"

I also contacted the BBC News team by phone and walked them through the Google Search and pointed out the ease with which a call that could cost a few pence becomes many pounds.

I have also reported the site to Google (which may be why it is not appearing at the top of the search results anymore)

I have also reported the site to Fasthosts as I feel the site is in breach of section 3.3.6 of their AUP which states the registrant must not publish anything "Likely to decieve any person" which I feel the format of and design of this site does exactly that. The contact email for Fasthosts is enquiries@fasthosts.co.uk

** UPDATE @22:00 the web site went to a "404 Page Not Found" between 6pm and 9pm but is available again now

Since this business of making money out of the sick, the worried and the ill is probably legal and this site will probably remain in business so I can only advise you the reader in the following way:

The NHS Direct Phone line is 0845 4647
It costs around 3p a minute
DO NOT USE MEDHELPLINE.CO.UK
which cost £1.02p per minute

And I invite the site owner Mr Carter to explain why this is not a low sneaky money grubbing scheme designed to fleece the unwary, ill and distressed.

*** UPDATE 25th Feb ***
Google - have done nothing not even acknowledge my message regarding my complaint of a potential T&C violation within AD-Sense

Fasthosts - acknowledged the receipt of my complaint and their Twitter person did too - but todate nothing has happened.

BBC News - Not interested

It seems that lethargy and a bad dose of "So What!" are the order of the day

I have created an e-petition here http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/30258 sign it if you can

I have also updated the Wikipedia page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Direct with details of the above phone line

At last!!! the Standard IP.AC QOS Standard PHEW

noreply@blogger.com (Steve McDonagh) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:34:00 PST

Network Working Group                                    D. Waitzman
Request for Comments: 2549                       IronBridge Networks
Updates: 1149                                           1 April 1999
Category: Experimental


             IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

Status of this Memo

   This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
   community.  It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
   Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This memo amends RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP
   Datagrams on Avian Carriers", with Quality of Service information.
   This is an experimental, not recommended standard.

Overview and Rational

   The following quality of service levels are available: Concorde,
   First, Business, and Coach.  Concorde class offers expedited data
   delivery.  One major benefit to using Avian Carriers is that this is
   the only networking technology that earns frequent flyer miles, plus
   the Concorde and First classes of service earn 50% bonus miles per
   packet.  Ostriches are an alternate carrier that have much greater
   bulk transfer capability but provide slower delivery, and require the
   use of bridges between domains.

   The service level is indicated on a per-carrier basis by bar-code
   markings on the wing.  One implementation strategy is for a bar-code
   reader to scan each carrier as it enters the router and then enqueue
   it in the proper queue, gated to prevent exit until the proper time.
   The carriers may sleep while enqueued.

   For secure networks, carriers may have classes Prime or Choice.
   Prime carriers are self-keying when using public key encryption.
   Some distributors have been known to falsely classify Choice carriers
   as Prime.

   Packets MAY be marked for deletion using RED paint while enqueued.



Waitzman                      Experimental                      [Page 1]
 
RFC 2549            IP over Avian Carriers with QoS         1 April 1999


   Weighted fair queueing (WFQ) MAY be implemented using scales, as
   shown:

                                                  __
                                  _____/-----\   / o\
                                 <____   _____\_/    >--
                 +-----+              \ /    /______/
                 | 10g |               /|:||/
                 +-----+              /____/|
                 | 10g |                    |
                 +-----+          ..        X
               ===============================
                              ^
                              |
                          =========

   Carriers in the queue too long may leave log entries, as shown on the
   scale.

   The following is a plot of traffic shaping, from coop-erative host
   sites.


        Alt |       Plot of Traffic Shaping showing carriers in flight
            |
         2k |           ....................
            |          .                    .
            |         .                      .
         1k |        .                        .
            |   +---+                          +---+
            |   | A |                          | B |
            |   +---+                          +---+
            |_____________________________________________


   Avian carriers normally bypass bridges and tunnels but will seek out
   worm hole tunnels.  When carrying web traffic, the carriers may
   digest the spiders, leaving behind a more compact representation.
   The carriers may be confused by mirrors.

   Round-robin queueing is not recommended.  Robins make for well-tuned
   networks but do not support the necessary auto-homing feature.

   A BOF was held at the last IETF but only Avian Carriers were allowed
   entry, so we don't know the results other than we're sure they think
   MPLS is great.  Our attempts at attaching labels to the carriers have
   been met with resistance.




Waitzman                      Experimental                      [Page 2]
 
RFC 2549            IP over Avian Carriers with QoS         1 April 1999


   NATs are not recommended either -- as with many protocols, modifying
   the brain-embedded IP addresses is difficult, plus Avian Carriers MAY
   eat the NATs.

   Encapsulation may be done with saran wrappers.  Unintentional
   encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation
   being messy and the packets mangled.

   Loose source routes are a viable evolutionary alternative enhanced
   standards-based MSWindows-compliant technology, but strict source
   routes MUST NOT be used, as they are a choke-point.

   The ITU has offered the IETF formal alignment with its corresponding
   technology, Penguins, but that won't fly.

   Multicasting is supported, but requires the implementation of a clone
   device.  Carriers may be lost if they are based on a tree as it is
   being pruned.  The carriers propagate via an inheritance tree.  The
   carriers have an average TTL of 15 years, so their use in expanding
   ring searches is limited.

   Additional quality of service discussion can be found in a Michelin's
   guide.

MIB and Management issues

   AvCarrier2 OBJECT-TYPE
     SYNTAX     SEQUENCE OF DNA
     MAX-ACCESS can't-read
     STATUS     living
     DESCRIPTION "Definition of an avian carrier"
     ::= { life eukaryotes mitochondrial_eukaryotes crown_eukaryotes
           metazoa chordata craniata vertebrata gnathostomata
           sarcopterygii terrestrial_vertebrates amniota diapsida
           archosauromorpha archosauria dinosauria aves neornithes
           columbiformes columbidae columba livia }

   AvCarrier OBJECT-TYPE
     SYNTAX     SET OF Cells
     MAX-ACCESS not-accessible
     STATUS     obsolete
     DESCRIPTION "Definition of an avian carrier"
     ::= { life animalia chordata vertebrata aves
           columbiformes columbidae columba livia }

   PulseRate OBJECT-TYPE
     SYNTAX     Gauge(0..300)
     MAX-ACCESS read-only



Waitzman                      Experimental                      [Page 3]
 
RFC 2549            IP over Avian Carriers with QoS         1 April 1999


     STATUS     current
     DESCRIPTION "Pulse rate of carrier, as measured in neck.
                  Frequent sampling is disruptive to operations."
     ::= { AvCarrier 1}

   The carriers will not line up in lexigraphic order but will
   naturally order in a large V shape.  Bulk retrieval is possible
   using the Powerful Get-Net operator.

Specification of Requirements

   In this document, several words are used to signify the requirements
   of the specification.  These words are often capitalized.

   MUST      Usually.

   MUST NOT  Usually not.

   SHOULD    Only when Marketing insists.

   MAY       Only if it doesn't cost extra.

Security Considerations

   There are privacy issues with stool pigeons.

   Agoraphobic carriers are very insecure in operation.

Patent Considerations

   There is ongoing litigation about which is the prior art: carrier or
   egg.

References

   Waitzman, D., "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on
   Avian Carriers", RFC 1149, 1 April 1990.

ACKnowledgments

   Jim.Carlson.Ibnets.com > Jon.Saperia . ack 32 win 123 (DF)
   Ross Callon, Scott Bradner, Charlie Lynn ...









Waitzman                      Experimental                      [Page 4]
 
RFC 2549            IP over Avian Carriers with QoS         1 April 1999


Author's Address

   David Waitzman
   IronBridge Networks
   55 Hayden Ave
   Lexington, MA 02421
   Phone: (781) 372-8161

   EMail: djw@vineyard.net