05 May 2011

President Obama campaigned on a platform of Government transparency.  To his credit, he has taken steps in that direction, such as lifting the ban on photographing flagged draped coffins returning from the wars.  Again, to his credit, he made it clear that Americans should not be shielded from the horrors of war.  Paradoxically, yesterday, he banned the release of photos of the body of Osama bin Laden. 

The White House has today issued these new INFOSEC guidelines, effective Monday, 09 May 2001.

UNCLASSIFIED
New INFOSEC Guidelines from GoTUNSA
(Government of The United States of America)

GoTUNSA has issued a new classification schedule.  All documents used by GoTUNSA (see appendix and definitions) are to use this classification system beginning 09 May 2011.

The new classifications are as follows.  Please see appendix and definitions for more details on each level of classification.

UNCLASSIFIED                                    

INCONVENIENT    
EMBARRASSING     
TOP EMBARRASSING    

SCARY
VERY SCARY
TOP VERY SCARY

TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY
TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY, COMPARTMENTALIZED,
TOP EMBARRASSING SCARY, COMPARTMENTALIZED, CODE WORD

UNPC
UNPC EMBARRASSING
UNPC EMBARRASSING SCARY

SPECIAL ACCESS
YOU ARE VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY VERY VERY SPECIAL
YOU ARE VERY EXTREMELY SPECIAL
YOU ARE EXTREMELY EXTREMLY SPECIAL
YOU ARE MORE SPECIAL THAN ANYONE WITH LOWER CLEARANCE

WEB ADMINISTRATOR
TOP WEB ADMINISTRATOR 

YOU ARE GOD
YOU ARE BHO
YOU ARE JULIAN ASSANGE

Shhh…you are Chinese Government Hacker
Top shhhh…Chinese Government Hacker Web Administrator

All documents created or used by GoTUNSA shall be stamped top and bottom in RED INK, underscored, and using the FONT shown.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
UNCLASSIFIED

http://www.facebook.com/MichaelYonFanPage

Michael Yon

By Amanda Morrall

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have undoubtedly heard of New Zealand's trumped up securities law having been rolled out.

Although the full force of the Financial Services Act won't come into effect until July 1, components of the new regulatory regime are already in place.

A key feature that applies to industry players across a broad spectrum of services is the requirement that they be registered on the Companies Office Financial Services Provider Register. 

With few exception (namely practitioners from the Christchurch region) all individual and or businesses engaged in the practice of selling products or advice of a financial nature are now obliged to have registered themselves.

As well as being an accounting method for Government to keep tabs on practitioners (previously there was none), the register is a security of sorts for paying members of the public who want to check up on the individual advising them.

Anyone who has ever used or is planning to use a financial adviser, an insurance broker, a mortgage broker, a syndicated property dealer or anyone else for that matter who is selling you a product or a service would do well to do some internet intelligence starting with this register.

A note of caution

Just because a simple search turns up the name of an individual or a business doesn't mean you should put down your detective hat. Registration in itself is no guarantee of experience, qualification or competence.  

A better guide to whether someone is well placed to sell or counsel you can be found on the new Authorised Financial Advisers website. Here you'll find a more detailed explanation of the difference between a Registered Adviser (RA) and an Authorised Financial Adviser (AFA) and a Qualified Financial Entity (QFE).

In a nutshell, the law defines RAs as individuals selling simple "Category 1" products and AFAs as providing or selling personalised financial advice and or giving investment advice. QFEs are banks and the like, which are certified on the basis they can ensure the competence and qualifications or their own staff to advise on and sell appropriate product.

Here's the rub, a cursory search on the registry won't immediately flag you to the difference. Unless you drill down and purposefully look for a declaration that an individual is an AFA, you might assume that by the very presence of a name on the registry, that they are.

It's a point that grates with Institute of Financial Adviser president Nigel Tate.

"There's no clear definition there on the differences between a registered adviser and an authorised financial adviser," Tate warns.

What's more concerning he argues is that the legally defined differences (even if they were better communicated or advertised) don't necessarily afford the public better protection, in his opinion.

A major criticism of the new regulatory regime is that it is so heavily focused on the investment side of the industry that others selling equally financial potent product are immune from similar scrutiny.

Tate uses mortgage brokers as an example. Because the nature of their advice is classed as Category 1 (which is construed to be 'simple') they aren't held to the same standard as authorised financial advisers who are having to sit exams, demonstrate their competency and knowledge and generally be held to a higher level of accountability.

Tate challenges the idea that mortgage structuring is simple advice based on the financial nightmares he's been presented with  from clients ill-served by supposed specialists who failed to take into account global circumstances of borrowers or consider potential risk scenarios that could break them.

The glorification of the mortgage holiday is prime example of this.

While sold as a way to alleviate financial stress, the true costs of prolonging the inevitable is not often well explained. (For more see Amanda Morrall's article in "Holiday's hidden Sting.)

Ill-sold insurance packages and products carry similar hazards.

Double standard 

In the absence of the same regulatory rigours facing authorised financial advisers, Tate counsels the public to treat mortgages, insurance and syndicated property investments deals with the same level of caution they would an investment, never taking advice lightly.

As insurance and mortgage specialist and brokers fall into a different classification, they are not obliged to make the same level of disclosure with their clients with respect to their qualifications, potential conflict of interests or commissions.

Gary Young, chief executive of the Insurance Brokers Association of New Zealand,  said while it was true brokers weren't held to the same standard, the professional had adopted a code of conduct that more or less mirrored what was asked of AFAs.

Young argued that commissions received by brokers were minor relative to what investment advisers made and were therefore less significant.

"The margins that they get are not that big and as its the insurers who pay them, they all tend to pay the same. So there's no great incentive to place on risk because of the commission rates because they follow all the others.''

As for qualifications, Young admitted there was no requirement as such (or any universal standard) for that matter but he said those who took the profession seriously were properly skilled as per legislative guidelines. Further, he said professional development was something that IBANZ encouraged for its members.

The professional body represents about 90% of brokers in New Zealand, with 170 "corporate members" (companies) and 2,000 registered members.

The New Zealand Mortgage Brokers Association  could not immediately be  reached for comment.

Contents of the financial services provider register

The register contains the following information about each registered Financial Service Provider (FSP):

• http://www.business.govt.nz/normal-black.png); list-style-type: square; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; ">
• The FSP's name and any trading names
• Business address
• The name and address of the approved dispute resolution scheme the FSP belongs to
• The financial services they are registered to provide, including any licensed service (for example, AFAs or QFEs)
• The name and address of any relevant licensing authority (for example, Securities Commission for AFAs and QFEs)

How to search

1. Quick search

Click on the Search the register tab in the top right hand corner of the screen.

To view instant results on screen just begin entering your search criteria into the 'Search' field.  To search for an FSP that is an entity you might enter the first word or two of the company's name.  For an individual you should begin entering their surname.

A list of possible matches will be displayed on screen and you can click on any one of these results to view the details of that registration.

Click on the SEARCH >> button to display the complete search results for your search criteria.

Example of a quick search result displaying one possible match

 

2. Advanced Search

From the Online Services - Do It Now menu choose Advanced search.

You can search for an FSP using either their name or their registration number.

• http://www.business.govt.nz/normal-black.png); list-style-type: square; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; ">
• FSP type
  • http://www.business.govt.nz/normal-blue.png); list-style-type: square; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; ">
  • All types (default) or
  • choose specific types of interest - for example, only Individuals, New Zealand registered entities, or Other entities.
• Search options
  • http://www.business.govt.nz/normal-blue.png); list-style-type: square; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; ">
  • All names including current, previous and aliases (default) or
  • choose to search only for the name as a current name, a previous name or an alias.
• Financial services
  • http://www.business.govt.nz/normal-blue.png); list-style-type: square; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; ">
  • All financial services (default) or
  • choose specific financial services (for example, a deposit taker, a registered bank, etc).

    Note  | To search for a provider within a specific financial service you must also include search criteria for an FSP's name or part of an address.
     

• Address keywords - To refine your search to include only specific address keywords (such as a street name, city, postal code, or country)

 

This blog post (yes, the one you are reading) is number 2,000 in this blog. The blog turned 10 years old on December 31, 2010, but other than a quick mention of it on Twitter, I more or less let that pass.

The vanderwal.net domain name started was initially purchased in 1997 and was used for a general personal website, of which my links page is a early remnant of that (it is a continuation of links page I had on my personal website initially hosted in Compuserve in 1995) and it has moved to all versions of my personal site since then. The blog was started in late 2000 as it was on my to do and try list and I started in with Blogger while waiting for the New Year�s ball to drop on tv. The first post, is now gone (it was likely the very profound �hello world� sort of thing or �FuBar is testing�. I, like many others who were using Blogger, then a product of Pyra, went through the growing pains of Blogger with its outages (all pages from Blogger were sent via FTP to my site) that meant no new updates could be made using that service. Pyra imploded one fine day and was left with just one employee, Ev Williams to run it with bits and pieces of help until it was later bought by Google. But, I only lasted on Blogger for nine months or so as I had been pulling together a travel blogging tool that would allow me to post to my blog and not have to use FTP.

October 2001 I moved to my own hand build blogging tool that also included a redesign. This has all pretty much stayed since then. In October 2004 the commenting was turned off after I woke to 1400 porn SPAM comments and I deleted the SPAM comments and removed the code for commenting. I had intended to bring comments back at some point in the my own tool, but then comment SPAM got worse my thought was to move to add an external commenting service (none have been satisfactory enough to move forward with). I then have been planning to move all of these posts into another blogging tool that had an easier to manage workflow for editing and also had a good commenting system. That has yet to happen and increasingly I am fine without there being any comments here. I miss the days of old when there were great conversations in a blog�s comments, but those days rarely happen any more outside of four or five blogs I can think of. One of the reasons I went with building my own blogging tool was the ability to have multiple categories assigned to each post to make aggregation of like posts much easier. The volume of content here has made that ease of use, much more difficult to pull off and it is one of the things I am back playing with in a dev version of the tool.

When I look back to my first blog posts that were created in Blogger, I see a huge change in the writing style and content from where posts have ended up today. The blog is named �Off the Top� as it was posting of things that were coming off the top of my head and were just a random collection of things (hence the URL naming for where the blog sits). The rough gathering and sharing of ideas shifted in after the first few months to a longer and a little more serious style. My style shifted a little bit when I moved to my own blogging platform, but the biggest shift was when I added headers to posts in March 2002. The style of the posts went from many short (paragraph or so) posts highlighting of things found and shared for others, but also shared for a future me to comeback to. By 2003 the posts were getting longer and there were fewer posts per day.

The changes on blog writing style were paired with other services and blogs easing content out of the blogs pages here. The catchall blog I started with included posts of a sentence or two and occasionally a paragraph or so, changed quite a bit over time.

Delicious was the first to really move content out of the blog here. The small snippets pointing to web pages and putting them in context all fell into Delicious (for a short time I built a my own bookmarking tool, but it lacked the social benefit of seeing others interactions around the same pages).

Twitter altered the site by the quick bon mots going straight there. The short snippets not only disappeared, but the frequency of blogging really slowed down. The posts that still showed up here were longer and more detailed.

This shift was somewhat good as it allowed me to really focus on subjects I was working through. One of the longer early pieces was in 2002 and was not posted in the blog as it was very out of character. When I moved to my own blogging platform I not only set it up to have multiple categories / keywords, but to classify posts as blog posts, journal, or essay. This last classification was statements and short pieces, longer more personal pieces, and essays were longer. Over the time, most everything has been classified as a blog post, but fits my initial framing that these would be called essays.

The longer pieces were also trending to a more central theme that I was working around. The mixing of work and much more fun content was getting a lot of feedback from people reading that it should be separated. That more professional writing also seemed likely to benefit from comments, which were not coming back anytime soon here. At this point I used my TypePad account and pointed www.personalinfocloud.com to it. For quite a while I was cross posting, but that slowed down in 2008 or so.

This blog is continuing on. I have a lot of pent up content that fits well here. I really want to get back to posting things about what I am reading and have a means to capture and share other ideas out. The demarkation of what goes here and what goes over to the Personal InfoCloud blog is a little fuzzy. But, I am fairly sure I am not going to add comments back here on this blog. Watching other blogs the number and quality of blog comments have dwindled, drastically. There are few blogs that have great comment threads anymore, but far fewer than benefit from tools like Disqus that aggregate poor comments (most are not comments and not really relevant to the posts) from elsewhere around the web / internet.

Here is to another 2,000 posts! Perhaps (I didn�t plan 2,000 posts when this started and would have called anybody crazy should they have suggested such a little over 10 years ago).

Just a quick heads up on a new WSUS/Windows Update Knowledge Base article we published this morning. This one talks about an issue where after a Windows Update client connects to an internal server that has custom content published to it, the client encounters error code 0x80240fff. After encountering this error, the client can no longer install updates:

=====

Symptoms

When a Windows Update client connects to an internal server that has custom content published to it, the client may encounter error code 0x80240fff. After encountering this error, the client can no longer install updates.

Cause

This error can occur if custom content uses a Product name that matches an existing Category name. For example, this can occur if you create a product within SCUP named "Tools". This leads to an issue when evaluating the categories since there is now a product named "Tools" and an update classification called "Tools".

Resolution

In order to resolve this issue, you must find the custom content that uses a Product name matching an existing Category name, and decline or modify that custom content. The problem will be corrected when there are no longer any custom updates with a Product name that matches an existing Category name.

In environments using multiple WSUS servers, you must make sure that the problematic custom content has been declined or modified on all servers in the hierarchy.

=====

The information above was published today in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

KB2521187 - Windows Update may encounter error 0x80240fff when updates published on an internal server have the same Product Name and Category Name

J.C. Hornbeck | System Center Knowledge Engineer

The App-V Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/appv/
The WSUS Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/sus/
The SCMDM Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/mdm/
The ConfigMgr Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
The SCOM 2007 Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/operationsmgr/
The SCVMM Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/
The MED-V Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/medv/
The DPM Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
The OOB Support Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/oob/
The Opalis Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/opalis
The Service Manager Team blog: http: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager
The AVIcode Team blog: http: http://blogs.technet.com/b/avicode
The System Center Essentials Team blog: http: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenteressentials

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

Version 2.13.0:

SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:

• replicate() (by default) and vapply() (always) now return a higher-dimensional array instead of a matrix in the case where the inner function value is an array of dimension >= 2.
• Printing and formatting of floating point numbers is now using the correct number of digits, where it previously rarely differed by a few digits. This affects _many_ *.Rout.save checks in packages.

• Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
• X11 system manager (optional).
• Gnu g77 compiler and tcltk libraries included with the installer.

Location: Rocklin or Los Gatos, California
URL: www.purple.us

To apply: Please send resume and website link to http://www.purple.us/jobs/search.php under the Senior UI Engineer position

• Compensation: $6,894-$8,465/month
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

• Location: Downtown Portland
• Compensation: Approx $11.50 to start, 10%-15% per year raises for well performing staff
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

The extension lecturers at the UW Educational Outreach’s English Language Program (ELP) have created the first instructors union at the university.

Because the group consists of extension lecturers, which are instructors from the UW Educational Outreach program, they were not previously represented as UW employees.

Rozanna Carosella, an extension lecturer in the ELP was the first to start the process after recognizing that a union would be beneficial for the program to have the ability to hold meetings where faculty of the ELP could openly discuss working issues in an organized fashion with the university. In addition, she felt that members of the ELP were not represented at the UW, so concerns or issues they had went unnoticed.

“We want to be able to sit down in negotiations, as equal partners with our colleagues, administration and other university personnel,” Carosella said.

As a union, the lecturers now have a process of negotiations between them and their employers to reach agreements regarding working conditions.

On March 17, the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) said that 56 of the 67 ELP lecturers wanted to unionize under a collective bargaining law. This law allows staff in higher education the right to unionize if they are not part of the Washington State Department of Personnel civil services, which classifies the rights of state employees.

Lecturers of the ELP are employed with contracts that expire after one quarter or year, however many have been at the university for longer periods of time.

Richard Moore, an extension lecturer in the ELP, has been at the UW for 17 years. He hopes the unionization will allow him and his colleagues to have secure positions within the university’s employment structure.

“Not having an official place within the university equates us with casual employees and part-time employees,” he said. “There was no formal channel to address any issues that may have come up because we didn’t have any representation at all.”

Dave Szatmary, vice provost of UW Educational Outreach, explained that there are about 1,000 extension lecturers total and most of them primarily teach in short, noncredit, professional-development programs because they have other full-time careers. However, he said the ELP is different from other programs because the extended lecturers are full-time teachers.

Starting in late 2006, Carosella and the ELP began working with the American Federation of Teachers Washington (AFT), which helps professional groups in education gain recognition and organize into unions.

Sandra Schroeder, president of AFT Washington, has been working with the ELP from the beginning. Although AFT usually works with groups in community and technical colleges, Schroeder decided to help the ELP.

“I was so impressed, and still am, by their ability to organize themselves and to set a goal —— that they wanted representation —— and stick to it,” she said. “I think it’s been inspiring to see their commitment.”

At first, AFT recommended that the ELP first reach-out to the UW’s Faculty Senate (FS) to be included in discussions and decisions about working conditions at the UW.

However, in February 2008, Carosella said the FS resolved that the complex struggle to include the ELP under the Faculty Code would be too time-consuming and it would be more efficient for the lecturers to seek unionization.

“The determination was made that it would be an uphill struggle and that we would be better off putting all the time and energy into working directly with the union,” she said.

In May 2008, with assistance of the AFT, 81 percent of the ELP filed signature cards with the PERC, attempting to gain recognition under the collective bargaining law.

In response, Schroeder said that the PERC communicated with the UW and were told that there was no existing legislation that gave the ELP lecturers collective bargaining rights.

With this information, the PERC ruled that the legal status of the ELP being faculty or exempt from civil service was unclear, so they could not be included under the collective bargaining law.

After other approaches at gaining recognition failed, the AFT reached out to the Washington State Department of Personnel for their classification of the ELP lecturers’ job.

In January, the ELP collected signature cards, which indicated that they wanted the AFT to represent them as a union.

In a joint statement released in February, the AFT and the UW said the university used its statutory authority to exempt the extension lecturers from civil services, which granted them their right to organize under a union.

“Obviously every group has the right to unionize, and we look forward to working with AFT,” Szatmary said.

Now the next step for the program is to build the organization by writing a constitution and electing an executive board.

“We’re feeling pretty proud of ourselves and thankful for the AFT for their support,” Carosella said.

Moore hopes that their triumph sets a pathway for other groups on campus that are not represented.

“I think being one of the first groups of teachers to unionize is kind of a trailblazing role,” he said.

Reach reporter Daron Anderson at news@dailyuw.com.

• Compensation: $11.03/hour – non-benefited position
• This is at a non-profit organization.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

• Compensation: $12/hour + Full Benefits Package
• This is at a non-profit organization.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

I recently stumbled across screenshots of old websites of mine and was hurled into a state of reminiscent shock. I knew they were bad, but wow they were outstandingly horrible (redeemed only by their microformats support! I kid, I kid). Several years and a few Georgia Tech design and HCI courses have passed since those atrocities graced the web but I archived them in a sort of reverse portfolio as a personal reminder of how much my design sensibilities have matured. Only in the last year have I begun feeling slightly more confident about my design quality and process.

I have yet to consider myself a real designer and there are quite a few things I would do differently with my most recent work on Notifo and Pic A Fight. But I've learned why my work nowadays is better than from years past. I am aiming to somehow share some of these thoughts brewing in my head with this post today.

I have been brainstorming for the past few days about how to scope this article. Unfortunately I don't think I can distill everything about design into this or any number of posts. For one, design can be very subjective (or just plain wrong at times). Second, there's a sharp distinction between graphic design and user experience that deserves its own article. Third, there's a whole world of typography, color theory, gestalt laws, fitts' law, hick's law, visual hierarchy, UI patterns, layout mastery and copywriting that needs to be explored first hand. But most importantly, I'm still learning too. This is not a definitive guide, just a friendly pointer for startup folks getting into design.

What I can do is share what has worked for me. I won't get into how to do the technical side of things, because let's face it that's just a Google search away and you'll probably find a great article on Smashing Magazine showing you Sass, writing mixins, learning to put CSS3 vendor prefixes ahead of real properties and so on.

Subtle is key! Except when it's not.

When I was a wee pixel pusher I would overuse whatever graphic effect I had just learned. Text-shadow? Awesome, let's put 5px 5px 5px #444. Border-radius? Knock that up to 15px. Gradients? How about from red to black?

You can imagine how horrible everything looked. Now my rule of thumb in most cases is applying just enough to make it perceivable, no more. This usually means no blur on text-shadow and just a 1px offset, or only dealing with gradients moving between a very narrow color range.

Then what do I mean about "except when it's not"? Take for example visual hierarchy — where to draw someone's eyes first with color, contrast and proportion. If you are going to increase the font size of a particular element, don't increase it by 1 or 2 points. Increase it by 10. Here's a nice test: take a screenshot of your website or layout and make it 3 times smaller. Can you still see the main headline or call to action well? No? Make it bigger!

Get Inspired and Stay Thirsty My Friends Organized

This is not a new concept by any means, but it bears repeating: keep the right side of your brain engaged by regularly seeking great website designs, reading about design, sketching site layouts (or anything really) and more. Whenever I see a website I like, or even just a particular element of a site, I take a screenshot and archive it. I have been doing this for at least a year with the help of LittleSnapper. Be warned, the app is a little slow. I wish someone would make a better competing product. I would pay $100 for it.

Easy to use with their browser bookmarklet. LittleSnapper stays out of sight and saves the screenshots.

I have amassed over 700 screenshots so far. Not a day goes by that I don't archive something nice I see online. There is an app in the Mac App Store called Galleried which is the desktop app equivalent of browsing many CSS galleries and helps too.

Process

My typical site redesign process usually goes like this:

• Get in the mindset of the target audience. Since this is your startup this probably won't involve much research as you are likely already the domain expert and ideal customer of your product. If not, checkout the Five W's of UX: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Keep a clear cut use case in mind throughout the redesign.
• Spend a few hours trying to formulate my thoughts about how the first step affects layout. Should it have one big call to action for a primary use case? Are there multiple needs and products that need to addressed? What will the hierarchy be like? What gets the most attention? Flip through the aforementioned screenshots I take everyday and find 5 or 6 layouts I admire most. It might not be overall layouts, but particular elements I like.
  
  For example, these were some sites I had in mind when in the early stages of planning Notifo's layout. The key feature I liked from all these sites was strong header navigation. I always start with navigation, determine the primary call to action and accompanying graphic/illustration/video/et cetera. The rest seems to follow naturally.

• The next step is either a few quick layout sketches with whatever I have on me — either my trusty Cambridge notepad and uniball Super Ink pen or UI Stencils pad — or straight to HTML/CSS. More often than not I start directly in HTML/CSS. This is a big point of contention for designers. There's a large camp of folks that start with mockups or wireframes with Photoshop, Mockingbird/Balsamiq, OmniGraffle and so on, and those that begin in markup. The points for starting with the former are that it's easier to change things on the fly and you're more open to trying radical changes that would usually require substantial markup changes. Kyle Neath of GitHub prefers a mixture of both methods: screenshot stuff, cut it up and tweak in Photoshop, then implement.

Little known fact: the Ballmer peak phenomenon doesn't only apply to coding, it works with design too. That explains the two buck chuck.

• I sketch 2 or 3 simple layout variants on a notepad, no more than 20 minutes, then go straight to markup. I setup Sass, import my mixins, a reset and get to work. Once a basic semblance of a website is up I actually do a lot of design tinkering in Chrome Dev Tools. I used to staunchly prefer Firebug but webkit and Chrome Dev Tools have come a very long way.
• And then I take more screenshots of the Chrome Dev Tools-edited variations I like. I probably had 10 variations before I went with the one I liked for Notifo.
• I tend to start with grayscale then tinker with color after I have the visual hierarchy down. I use xScope to help align anything and everything. It's perfect for quickly measuring space between elements (the red lines and measurements in the first image in this post is xScope).

One such work in progress/tinkering with chrome dev tools screenshot. I had just started to add color and texture to the header. Up until then it was all gray. Not really worrying about copy just yet.

• Color adjustments and typography tweaks usually continue through to the very last minute. I'm always experimenting to see what it would look like with other tones, hues and font stacks.
• Most work up until now has been for the homepage. Mentally prepare a sort of style guide — modules or patterns that will be used throughout the site. Classes to use for various sidebar elements, secondary navigation and so on. Update layout to work for content pages and style one-off pages like login, signup and a tour or benefits page.
• Ask around for feedback and incorporate changes.

For smaller sites like Pic A Fight I skip all this and just wing it in HTML/CSS. On the other hand sites like Skribit have several layouts — i.e. the homepage structure was completely different to the structure used on logged-in user pages, so there's some extra work there.

Required Reading

While I could easily recommend many great design books, such as "Universal Principles of Design" and Norman's classic "The Design of Everyday Things", I'll start with some of what I consider to be the essentials for web and graphic design.

Coders that get stumped usually do something non-code related for a while and come back to see that the code gremlins have fixed their problem or going for a walk helped them think outside the box. Something similar applies for design. Keep your brain active by constantly seeking new sources of inspiration and creativity. I got a Wacom tablet to doodle in Illustrator and found that helps with idea generation a bunch. Yes, this is a long caption.

Read the Non-Designer's Design Book and learn about basic color theory and C.R.A.P. — Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. Cool colors like blue recede while warm colors like orange seem to move toward the viewer.

For example on Notifo I used a tint of orange and analogous colors for the foreground and call to action, respectively, with complementary blue as the background. Learn about color complements and analogous colors; they are used most often and absolutely come in handy when doing the most daunting task for new designers, picking colors.

Mark Boulton's A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web is fantastic. I purchased the PDF to help support Mark, but a free online version is available as well. There are some sections in the book about how to get started freelancing, business plan stuff, dealing with client briefs and so on, but you can skip that. You're already well on your way with your startup.

If you were going to only go with one design book, this would be it. Mark covers it all: type classification, typesetting, everything about color (with site examples), color as emotion, designing without color, using and not using grids, composition basics including lead room and movement¹. It makes for a fairly quick read. Knock it out on a lazy analog Sunday and achieve design enlightenment.

An old design class homework assignment of mine in Adobe InDesign. Reminds me of my PageMaker 6.0 days on high school yearbook staff.

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is widely considered to be one of the great works discussing typography but it is mainly concerned with print. Fortunately Richard Rutter and Steve Marshall have adapted Bringhurt's work vis-a-vis the web. The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web is a great foundation in typography for the web, including various CSS snippets throughout. For example, never use line-height with absolute units as that can actually result in negative leading on browser font-size increases. Use a unit-less value² greater than 1.4 to keep leading proportional to text size.

More Homework

Get a Typekit account and rigorously browse through fonts. Take note of their organization structure. Learn about font stacks. Try out some fonts on a site of yours. Make sure you set fallback fonts. Experiment. Learn about lettering.js. Aim for contrast while avoiding conflict. Play with font size, weight, structure, form, direction and color. Typography is easily one of the most overlooked aspects of design for new web designers. It makes a huge difference and is worth exploring. Great designers treat text as UI has always been Cameron Moll's mantra.

A design is in conflict when you set two or more typefaces on the same page that are similar — not really different and not really the same. [...] When you put two faces together that look too much alike without really being so, most of the time it looks like a mistake. The problem is in the similarities because the similarities conflict.
Robin Williams, The Non-Designer's Design Book

Briefly read up on the Gestalt Principles as they refer to user interface design: proximity, similarity, good continuation, closure, common fate, past experience, figure & ground. And Fitts' Law too. Then find out what UX really means.

But Stammy, we launch in one week!!?!111

Yikes. In that case, here are a few pointers:

• Nothing in this list matters if you have shitty marketing copy. Run your copy through a fine-tooth comb. Then do it again. Sell people on benefits, not features. How long has your site/service/app been around? Will you be around in a year? Tell me about your team (I want an about page with mugshots! ³). Who are your current customers and how do they use it? How can I trust you with my info? Can you share any interesting usage/et cetera numbers?
• Buy a nice set of icons and use sparingly. If I see yet another site using Silk icon's I'm going to go crazy. Try Picons, Pictos or Helveticons.
• Everything that can be clicked needs to have a hover state and preferably an action state as well. Feedback is important in good interface design. LoVe HAte: link, visited, hover, active

A button I added two states to for Skribit's (my first startup) Twitter integration.. feedback galore!

• If it can be aligned, it should be aligned.
• When selecting colors for gradients in Photoshop, keep in mind that adding black (shade) or white (tint) to a hue (pure color) desaturates it. Not always a bad thing per se but it often makes for some muddled colors. Spice it up by trying different blend modes.
• Use complementary or analogous colors to start and don't have more than 2 dominant colors. There are many exceptions to this when you get better. For now, find some palettes on ColourLovers or pick tints/shades from 0to255.
• Textures! Download tileables or make your own grain, fabric or other such texture and use as a transparent, repeating background for large elements that would otherwise just be solid colors. But keep it subtle! The texture should only be perceivable when looking closely, not when 3 feet away from the computer. Also make sure that your texture goes with the theme of your design. A rust texture doesn't play too well with your futuristic iPhone app landing page. That can conjure up some cognitive dissonance. Your app is telling me it's the new hotness while your rust background texture is telling me it's old and busted⁴. Similar issues can arise with picking fonts that don't go with the mood of your site.
• "Always adjust opacity. Nothing is totally black or white, dark or bright. A semi-transparent black or white line, glow, shadow or shape goes a long way." -Mike Rundle
• Put non-essential links (anything that doesn't help new user signup conversion) in the footer. That's the first place users go when they know what they're looking for. Regulars in the footer include a link to a contact page, about, blog, and sometimes sitemap. Available yet out of the way.
• Plain edges are boring. Add a subtle 1px inner line slightly lighter than the background if dark. Use rgba(255,255,255, [value from 0-1]).
• Not quite sure how to style a particular element? Browse through UI-Patterns.
• More white space. A good rule of thumb is that your padding and margin should be roughly equivalent to the font size used near that element.
• Do you have a definitive call to action on your homepage?
• Aid gestalt proximity and closure by grouping related items together with light bounding boxes or borders.
• Have a long list of elements? Zebra-ify them and use alternating and subtle background colors.
• Putting padding on your form inputs! Tooltips or extra description for non-standard fields. Style :focus too.
• Avoid having more than three levels of boxes inside of boxes — especially if they all have drop shadow and borders, they tend to make a bad effect on the bottom when you see 3 chunks of lines.
• Is the largest element or headline on your homepage the most important thing? Make sure that's what you want them to see first.
• Finally, you don't have to fill up all of your available space!

And if you have an extra minute to spare before launch, setup Optimizely⁵. Start playing with some simple A/B testing on your homepage. Yeah I know A/B testing sounds scary at first. Optimizely makes it easy, just give it a shot.

Try New Things

While it's not quite the best strategy for my inbox, whenever I see a new site or service launching I readily toss in my email so I can be sure to tinker with it first thing when it comes out. I get to experience new layouts, designs and good UX almost every week by doing this. My co-founder, Chad, is the same way when a new API comes out and must tinker with it.

Most of what I described in this post is about design, not user experience or usability. Your site can be sexy and pixel perfect but if the flow for a user to complete a specified task is unintuitive and requires too many steps, it makes for a poor experience. Likewise well-researched information architecture (layman's: the organization and labeling of your site's sections and pages) is crucial. UX is a field I'm just diving into. Check back in 10 years for my definitive UX how to guide. Probably best if you subscribe. :)

In the meantime, checkout 52 Weeks of UX.

More books..

For those that want a massive list of good design reading, indulge below. I've only read or skimmed through about half and heard good things about the rest. You'll probably want to start with Steve Krug's work. Much of the rest is not quite geared for the web but helps paint a bigger picture about design as whole.

Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell
The Nature & Aesthetics of Design by David Pye
Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services by Kim Goodwin
The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
The Smashing Book by Smashing Magazine
The Web Designer's Idea Book #2 by Patrick McNeil (great for inspiration)
Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
The Information Design Handbook by Jenn Visocky O'Grady
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown
The Art of Innovation Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm by Tom Kelley
Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design by Jane Fulton Suri and Ideo

Thoughts?

Drop me a comment below. This post was very much a raw brain dump. There are many facets to design, especially ones I admittedly have no clue about and am learning, that I couldn't get much deeper than this without making it a 10 part series. Chad says I should. Maybe I will after my secret redesign and UX challenge starting this month. Thanks for reading.

Footnotes

¹ I can't stress enough how important this is! I very much dislike when sites have screenshots facing or angled the wrong direction. The subject of any photo or image can draw the reader where to look next.
² Aside from z-index, line-height is the only CSS property that can go unit-less
³ I want to know you and your company's story. This is a chance to make an emotional connection with the prospective customer. Lure them in so you don't have to waste your time with I N C E P T I O N later! Win.
⁴ MIB reference for $1000 Trebek. Did you know they're filming MIB 3? Crazy.
⁵ Full disclosure: Pete, who you can read about from the Optimizely about page (see footnote ³), once bought me a grande iced tea at a Starbucks on Van Ness.

Disclosure: some book links use my Amazon associates code because I'm broke as a joke.

In reply to Jax: a new type classification:

@quadibloc : you've got it! :-)

Bodoni and Albertus belong to B3 category, because they are often used for publishing.

The C-class (code) is specific to programmers (context of use: text editor, emacs, vi, etc. --- in that specific context, type conveys information, nothing more ; to a certain extent, writing as a novelist is a kind of coding, and many writers appreciate typefaces like courier, especially if you use distraction-free text editors)

In reply to Jax: a new type classification:

Seeing the distinction between "message", "contact", and "public", I would have put Courier in the "Message" category - I'm still vague on what "Code" should mean. If it means simply a way to express the symbols of the alphabet without much subtext, that can apply to Caslon or Helvetica in the right context.

So what I'm seeing here is:

Expression: Script and display typefaces - where the style of printing is intended to convey some type of "feeling". Comic Sans and Papyrus would go here too, along with Hobo, with the fonts that look like candy or balloons - but also much more respectable ones, Zapf Chancery being an example.

Message: This also seems to be a "display" category to a limited extent. Franklin Gothic seems to be what goes here - typefaces that are bold, but otherwise relatively plain.

Contact: If Times New Roman, then Century Expanded and Caledonia. I think Helvetica will sometimes be used in this mode, even if Helvetica Medium, normally used for signage, goes under "Message". These are utilitarian typefaces, used for ordinary communication - often, without much thought being put into the choice, by people who are not typographers. Courier can go here some of the time too.

Public: If Caslon and Garamond - then this is where traditional classic typefaces are used for things like the "visual identity" of a prestigious college. This is where a typeface is formal and elegant - without verging into script or display.

While the use of a typeface more clearly corresponds to one of these categories, one can also classify typefaces - although this classification is fluid - by their dominant use. Caslon was once firmly in the "contact" category in its heyday.

I'm not quite sure where to fit Bodoni or Albertus here, though...

In reply to Jax: a new type classification:

Hi,

I'm glad you love the word "globomunication" ;-)

Some examples, sure :
- expression : zapf chancery, zapfino, bickham script, and so on any typeface expressing a feeling in first place
- message : gotham when used for obama campaign, helvetica, din
- contact : arial widely used in e-mail applications, times new roman widely used in everyday life
- public : garamond widely used in publishing, baskerville and caslon as well
- code : courier is the best example, as a core system fonts in most of OSes

I apply the classification to the fonts themselves, because, somehow, form is related to use. For instance, courier could hardly be a typeface for expression. Helvetica and Arial are very close, but do not belong to the same category, because the context and the people who are using them are different.

M. a. a. n., I didn't know the abbreviation, so thanks you for giving me an opportunity to improve my english ;-)
Jax is possibly "maan" for type designers, but it could be useful for "the rest of us" in order to make understand what typefaces & typography actually is nowadays in the real life. Out there, most people use typefaces but do not see them ; they cannot distinguish every subtle forms but context of use is meaningful for them.

• Location: Manhattan
• Compensation: Commission
• This is a part-time job.
• This is a contract job.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

• Compensation: $4314-$8831
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

In reply to Jax: a new type classification:

The Five W method is helpful to give a structured explaination :

¶ Who is it about?
It's about communication & typography

¶ What happened (what's the story)?
There is a lot of type classifications (Thibaudeau, Vox-ATyPi, Alessandrini) but they most focus on the look of the typefaces rather than on the use of the typefaces. Erik Spiekermann in “Stop Stealing Sheeps” raises the question of a classification of type according to their purpose (cf. Jean-François Porchez, “On type classifications”, Gazette, Typofonderie, March 10th 2011)
In the same time, I had an opportunity to re-read the Jakobson scheme. Roman Jokobson is a American linguist, he studied the language according to six functions :
§ The Referential Function
corresponds to the factor of Context and describes a situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the referential function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words, e.g. "The autumn leaves have all fallen now."
§ The Expressive (alternatively called "emotive" or "affective") Function
relates to the Addresser and is best exemplified by interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance but do add information about the Addresser's (speaker's) internal state, e.g. "Wow, what a view!"
§ The Conative Function
engages the Addressee directly and is best illustrated by vocatives and imperatives, e.g. "Tom! Come inside and eat!"
§ The Poetic Function
focuses on "the message for its own sake"[3] and is the operative function in poetry as well as slogans.
§ The Phatic Function
is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore associated with the Contact factor. The Phatic Function can be observed in greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers.
§ The Metalingual (alternatively called "metalinguistic" or "reflexive") Function
is the use of language (what Jakobson calls "Code") to discuss or describe itself.
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobson%27s_functions_of_language)
So I decided to mix Jakobson with "Erix" (Erik S.) hence "Jax"

¶ Where did it take place?
It took place in France, because, in there, we love speculative/abstracts studies.

¶ When did it take place?
It took place in 2011, because, from time to time, a type classification appears.

¶ Why did it happen?
It happened because I wasn't satisfied with my reflexions about type licencing. So I wanted to go further : what's a typeface is for and in which case, people have to use it willingly or unwillingly.

¶¶ So what?
Nothing, such a type classification is pointless from a "graphic design"/"visual" point of view.
But it could be useful to explain what typography means as a communication tool.

¶¶ Some examples, just to be more concrete?
Yeah of course :
- as a piece of art (A), a typeface is sometime expressive as such: e.g. a calligraphic typeface, a decorative titling typeface --- Zapfino, History, PF Champion
- as a branding tool (B1), a typeface carries the message
- as a default typeface (B2), a typeface is used in a word processor, in Gmail or in instant messaging application --- any preinstalled typeface, like Times New Roman or Arial for instance
- as a full-featured workhorse design (B3), a typeface could be used for a book, a magazine, a website, etc. --- most commercial typefaces
- for core applications, terminal, display, programming (C), a typeface is a interface --- courier, fixedsys, ms sans serif

¶¶ Is there, however, a connection between function & aesthetics/licencing aspects

Yeah, possibly:
A | calligraphics | copyright/copyleft | on-demand, self-made
B1 | all classes | copyright | on-demand
B2 | transitionnal, modern | copyright/copyleft | pre-paid
B3 | all classes | copyright/copyleft | on-demand, pre-paid
C | mechanistics | copyright/copyleft | pre-paid

• This is at a non-profit organization.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

• Location: Vacaville Ca.
• Compensation: DOE
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

BBFC rating suggests Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition coming in June originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Hi,

I am facing issue in taking backup. Please find the output of bpbackup and bperror.

#bpbackup

JobID         Type State Status             Policy           Schedule Client Dest Media Svr Active PID FATPipe
   33       Backup  Done     23 unix_passwd_change               full bkpsvr      HPtestsvr       2547      No

#bperror -S 23 -r
socket read failed
A read operation from a socket failed.

Try the following:

1  Check the NetBackup Problems report for clues on where and why the failure occurred. If you cannot determine the cause from the Problems report, create debug log directories for the processes that could have returned this status code. Then, retry the operation and check the resulting debug logs.
2  Corrupt binaries are one possible cause for this error.
   Load a fresh bptm from the install media to try to resolve the problem.
3  On Sun Solaris, verify that all operating system patches are installed.
   See the Operating Notes section of the NetBackup Release Notes.
4  On Windows, verify that the recommended service packs are installed.
5  This error may occur during a restore to a Novell client. Note the following possible actions:
   *  By default, the value for Novell "Maximum Concurrent Disk Cache Writes" may be too low (for example, 50); Novell recommends setting it to 100. A value of 100 increases the speed and efficiency of the disk cache writes. It increases the number of write requests to be run at one time.
   *  Change to or add the following settings in the Novell sys:system\autoexec.ncf file:
   SET Maximum Packet Receive Buffers = 4000
   SET Maximum Directory Cache Buffers = 4000
   SET Maximum Concurrent Disk Cache Writes = 2000
   SET Maximum Concurrent Directory Cache Writes = 2000
   SET Maximum Physical Receive Packet Size = 1514
   *  On Windows master servers, check the LIST_FILES_TIMEOUT value and ensure that this value is at least 1800.
6  Run the NetBackup Configuration Validation Utility (NCVU) on the master server and clients. Note the name resolution checks in section seven and NCVU summary.

I am not able to understand the issue. Please help me with the same.

Here is the details of the backup policy.

#bppllist unix_passwd_change -U
------------------------------------------------------------

Policy Name:       unix_passwd_change

  Policy Type:         Standard
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      03/29/2011 11:12:46
  Client Compress:     no
  Follow NFS Mounts:   no
  Cross Mount Points:  no
  Collect TIR info:    no
  Block Incremental:   no
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     0
  Max Jobs/Policy:     Unlimited
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           passwd_stu1
  Volume Pool:         NetBackup
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       -
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no

Granular Restore Info:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  ia64          HP-UX         bkpsvr

  Include:  /tcb/files/auth/d/dr344917

  Schedule:          full
    Type:            Full Backup
    Frequency:       every 28 days
    Maximum MPX:     1
    Synthetic:       0
    PFI Recovery:    0
    Retention Level: 5 (3 months)
    Number Copies:   1
    Fail on Error:   0
    Residence:       passwd_stu1
    Volume Pool:     (same as policy volume pool)
    Server Group:    (same as specified for policy)
    Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:     0
    Daily Windows:
          Sunday     20:00:00  -->  Monday     06:00:00
          Monday     20:00:00  -->  Tuesday    06:00:00
          Tuesday    20:00:00  -->  Wednesday  06:00:00
          Wednesday  20:00:00  -->  Thursday   06:00:00
          Thursday   20:00:00  -->  Friday     06:00:00
          Friday     20:00:00  -->  Saturday   06:00:00
          Saturday   20:00:00  -->  Sunday     06:00:00

telnet <client> bpcd and telnet <server> bpcd is working. I have tried them also.

Thanks In Advance!!!

Hi,

I am facing issue in taking backup. Please find the output of bpbackup and bperror.

#bpbackup

JobID         Type State Status             Policy           Schedule Client Dest Media Svr Active PID FATPipe
   33       Backup  Done     23 unix_passwd_change               full bkpsvr      HPtestsvr       2547      No

#bperror -S 23 -r
socket read failed
A read operation from a socket failed.

Try the following:

1  Check the NetBackup Problems report for clues on where and why the failure occurred. If you cannot determine the cause from the Problems report, create debug log directories for the processes that could have returned this status code. Then, retry the operation and check the resulting debug logs.
2  Corrupt binaries are one possible cause for this error.
   Load a fresh bptm from the install media to try to resolve the problem.
3  On Sun Solaris, verify that all operating system patches are installed.
   See the Operating Notes section of the NetBackup Release Notes.
4  On Windows, verify that the recommended service packs are installed.
5  This error may occur during a restore to a Novell client. Note the following possible actions:
   *  By default, the value for Novell "Maximum Concurrent Disk Cache Writes" may be too low (for example, 50); Novell recommends setting it to 100. A value of 100 increases the speed and efficiency of the disk cache writes. It increases the number of write requests to be run at one time.
   *  Change to or add the following settings in the Novell sys:system\autoexec.ncf file:
   SET Maximum Packet Receive Buffers = 4000
   SET Maximum Directory Cache Buffers = 4000
   SET Maximum Concurrent Disk Cache Writes = 2000
   SET Maximum Concurrent Directory Cache Writes = 2000
   SET Maximum Physical Receive Packet Size = 1514
   *  On Windows master servers, check the LIST_FILES_TIMEOUT value and ensure that this value is at least 1800.
6  Run the NetBackup Configuration Validation Utility (NCVU) on the master server and clients. Note the name resolution checks in section seven and NCVU summary.

I am not able to understand the issue. Please help me with the same.

Here is the details of the backup policy.

#bppllist unix_passwd_change -U
------------------------------------------------------------

Policy Name:       unix_passwd_change

  Policy Type:         Standard
  Active:              yes
  Effective date:      03/29/2011 11:12:46
  Client Compress:     no
  Follow NFS Mounts:   no
  Cross Mount Points:  no
  Collect TIR info:    no
  Block Incremental:   no
  Mult. Data Streams:  no
  Client Encrypt:      no
  Checkpoint:          no
  Policy Priority:     0
  Max Jobs/Policy:     Unlimited
  Disaster Recovery:   0
  Collect BMR info:    no
  Residence:           passwd_stu1
  Volume Pool:         NetBackup
  Server Group:        *ANY*
  Keyword:             (none specified)
  Data Classification:       -
  Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:    no

Granular Restore Info:  no
  HW/OS/Client:  ia64          HP-UX         bkpsvr

  Include:  /tcb/files/auth/d/dr344917

  Schedule:          full
    Type:            Full Backup
    Frequency:       every 28 days
    Maximum MPX:     1
    Synthetic:       0
    PFI Recovery:    0
    Retention Level: 5 (3 months)
    Number Copies:   1
    Fail on Error:   0
    Residence:       passwd_stu1
    Volume Pool:     (same as policy volume pool)
    Server Group:    (same as specified for policy)
    Residence is Storage Lifecycle Policy:     0
    Daily Windows:
          Sunday     20:00:00  -->  Monday     06:00:00
          Monday     20:00:00  -->  Tuesday    06:00:00
          Tuesday    20:00:00  -->  Wednesday  06:00:00
          Wednesday  20:00:00  -->  Thursday   06:00:00
          Thursday   20:00:00  -->  Friday     06:00:00
          Friday     20:00:00  -->  Saturday   06:00:00
          Saturday   20:00:00  -->  Sunday     06:00:00

telnet <client> bpcd and telnet <server> bpcd is working. I have tried them also.

Thanks In Advance!!!

• Fully functional pedals for human propulsion.
• An internal combustion engine producing less than two gross brake horsepower with automatic transmission.
• An electric motor with or without pedals.

Last week, we released a new, tested, binary release of the integration platform (the source has been on CodePlex for a while).  This release primarily contains a bunch of bug fixes.  The bugs came from our internal use of server to server synchronization tools, customer reports and internal testing.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f854dd59-8eeb-4673-8d9a-ae012989bfa2

The list of bugs fixes is:

• VC adapter: code review should use cloaked path for pending change comparison
• VC adapter: Branch, Merge, Edit code review failure
• 2 way sync conflict not handled correctly
• Created Date greater than Resolved Date for some WIs ported by TFS Migration tool service
• VC adapter: Branch, Merge, Edit code review failure
• Icons branding shell evoke tools and toolkit
• Dev10 Work Item Tests are hard-coded to use ReflectedWorkItemId field
• Integration service (SqlChangeGroup) threw OOM exceptions
• A directory , which contains an sub directory which is not visible over the Config Spec causes tool to exit with error.
• VC adapter: content conflict resolution (take right) is not working when conflict was raised while pipeline flows from right to left
• Shell: help link in edit view is not working
• TFS 2010 WIT adapter: custom network-topology link gets deleted in bi-directional sync
• VC migration does not correctly handle the case of multiple filter paths when one path is a child of another
• TFS merges with identical content should appear as changes in CC
• Labels added to ClearCase when "LabelAllVersions" is true should be logged at Info level
• Bi-directional WIT tests: right side filter string generated does not included the work items migrated from the left to right
• WIT: Migration / sync of work item to work item links does not occur until a field change is made to one of the work items
• nightly WIT tests are failing with nullref
• WIT migration/sync: Conflicts of type WITUnmappedWITConflictType and WorkItemTypeNotExistConflictType should not cause the current trip to stop
• Some changesets are migrated from TFS to CC more than once
• ClearCase (forum post): User unable to configure ClearCase to TFS migration in Shell
• ClearCase (forum post): User unable to run ClearCase to TFS migration due to exception parsing date in CC history row
• Null Ref exception in Subversion Adapter
• Null Ref exception in SubversionShellAdapter
• Undelete tests are timing out due to unresolved code review conflicts
• FilterPairs with AreaPath values block on ValidationException: TF51011: The node specified is not found in the classification hierarchy
• Docs should say that TestCases migration is not supported
• Null reference exception occurs in ClearCase adapter when CC ls command output is empty
• ClearQuest - TFS sync: Duplicate bugs are created in TFS
• ClearQuest - TFS sync: Editing a bug in TFS that originated as a CQ Defect causes Runtime Error with COMException on call to ClearQuest API
• ClearQuest - TFS sync: editing State field of a TFS Bug causes ArgumentNullException and stops sync if change would result in invalid CQ state transition
• ClearQuest - TFS sync: adding an attachment to either a CQ Defect or a TFS Bug does not work
• ClearQuest adapter fails to detect changes in ClearQuest when timezone is greater than UTC because it uses local time for the HighWaterMark
• ClearQuest - TFS sync: changing the only the State of a ClearQuest Defect does not cause it to be sync'd until another field is changed
• Dogfood: HWM data stored in SYNC_POINT table is wrong causing ServerDiff WIT to ignore many differences (and other problems)
• Pioneer Upgrade: Hierarchy links don’t sync properly
• WIT sync fails for fields of type double with "decimal point is comma" setting
• ClearQuest - Migration is blocked by error on query for ClearQuest items to migrate if the CQ database server uses a Date format that is not the ISO standard format
• ClearQuest - ServerDiff Wit command does not work at all when the CQ filter string specifies a CQ stored query (very common)
• Key constraint violation occurs on the TFS_IntegrationPlatform DB when resolving a Namespace Conflict

Together, these represent a significant improvement in stability, correctness and manageability.

Brian

With the hallucinogenically-named Employee Free Choice Act “basically dead” for now, union bosses are still finding ways to try to fill their coffers with new members any way they can. At the state level, since agricultural workers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, the United Farm Workers is using the farm worker exemption to its advantage—and counting on newly-elected Democrat Governor Jerry Brown to help it.

On Sunday, while small marches took place around California commemorating Cesar Chavez Day, the United Farm Workers (the union that the late Cesar Chavez co-founded and led) issued a press release announcing their ongoing push for California SB 104, the “Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act.”

The four-mile march through the streets of Greenfield, led by UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, commemorates the life and legacy of Chavez. Keeping with the farm labor leader’s vision and lifetime-dedication to farm worker rights, the event is also a push for SB 104, the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act. The bill, written by state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) would help field laborers better protect themselves by making it easier for them to join unions.

California’s farm workers already have the right to join unions. However, today, they have the right to vote by secret ballot. SB 104 would effectively eliminate secret ballot elections by introducing card check for the first time:

SB 104, as introduced, Steinberg. Labor representatives: elections.

Existing law prohibits employers from engaging in unfair labor practices, including interfering in the election by agricultural employees of labor representatives to engage in collective bargaining for the designated bargaining units. Existing law also provides criminal and civil penalties for any employer or person who engages in unfair labor practices as determined by the Agricultural Labor Relations Board within the Labor and Workforce Development Agency and the courts.

Existing law provides for a secret ballot election for employees in agricultural bargaining units, as defined, to select labor organizations to represent them for collective bargaining purposes.

This bill would, instead, refer to the above-described secret ballot elections as elections occurring at polling sites. This bill would also permit agricultural employees, as an alternative procedure, to select their labor representatives by submitting a petition to the board accompanied by representation cards signed by a majority of the bargaining unit. The board would be required to conduct an immediate investigation to determine whether to certify the labor organization as the exclusive bargaining representative for the particular agricultural employees. [Emphasis added.]

Since card check is the union bosses’ preferred method (over secret-ballot elections) of getting new members, assuming this passes the California legislature and is signed into law by Jerry Brown, it is doubtful that many of the farm workers will be given the chance to vote using secret ballots ever again.

In addition to the card check provisions of SB 104, the bill also provides extraordinarily high fines for employers.

For example, upon being served with a petition for majority sign up, the employer must immediately turn over employee information to both the union and California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board or be fined $10,000 for each day the employer does not respond.

Within 48 hours after the petition is served, the employer shall file with the board, and personally serve upon the labor organization that filed the petition, its response to the petition. As part of the response, the employer shall provide a complete and accurate list of the full names, current street addresses, job classifications, and crew or department of all currently employed employees in the bargaining unit. The employer shall organize the employees’ names and addresses and other information by crew or department and shall provide the list to the board and petitioning labor organization in hard copy and electronic format. The employees’ first name, middle name or initial, last name, address, city, state, ZIP Code, classification, and crew or department shall be organized into separate columns. Immediately upon receiving the employer response and employee list, the board shall provide the response and employee list by hard copy and electronic copy to the labor organization that filed the majority signup election petition. For each day an employer fails to provide a complete and timely response, the board shall assess a fine of up to ten thousand dollars ($10,000). [Emphasis added.]

Much like the failed EFCA, California’s SB 104 provides for civil penalties of up to $20,000 per unfair labor practice. In this area though, much like EFCA, the language is vague as to whether or not a $20,000 penalty is for a single event, or whether it could be multiplied by the number of persons affected by that single event.

In the end, should SB 104 pass the legislature and Jerry Brown sign it into law, it will turn out to be a huge boon to the United Farm Workers and further evidence on how much Democrats will do anything for their union bosses.

_________________

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

X-posted.

Executive summary: HTML Copy is an extension for Visual Studio 2010 (part of Productivity Power Tools) that automatically copies source code from the Visual Studio editor to clipboard in HTML format (in addition to the existing TEXT and RTF formats), preserving font and color information. It does so automatically every time you press Ctrl+C or otherwise invoke the Edit.Copy command, so there is no explicit way to invoke the feature (it has no UI of its own).

In the latest release: all font and background color information is now correctly written to HTML, dark schemes such as those from http://studiostyl.es are now correctly supported. Format of the output markup is now customizable via a Tools Options page.

Hint: if you don’t want to read all the long details below, but still interested or have a question, there’s an FAQ at the end of this post. Don’t miss it!

Also see my previous posts about HTML Copy:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kirillosenkov/archive/2010/06/07/copy-code-in-html-format-with-visual-studio-2010.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kirillosenkov/archive/2010/08/11/html-copy-extension-from-pro-power-tools-not-working-with-live-writer.aspx

Configuring the output via the Tools Options page

I guess the biggest improvement in this version is that I finally added a Tools Options page that lets you customize the HTML markup that ends up on the clipboard:

You can select how the snippet is prefixed (arbitrary markup, could be anything, e.g. custom JavaScript etc.) By default, I use <pre style=”...”>, because after looking at various blogs this is the most common way to format code. Moreover, you can insert the actual values for the font, foreground color and background color in curly braces. If you don’t want to have the values embedded, just remove the macro in curlies and hardcode your own value.

Format for the colorized spans – use CSS or embed styles directly

Colorized spans in code are encoded using the <span> tag – you can’t change that.

However, you can choose whether to use CSS for classes (EmitSpanClass). If you select this one, highlighted spans from the editor will add the actual classification type of the span into the resulting HTML markup:

<span class="keyword">public</span>

The classification type is what the language service actually classifies the token as, so the full fidelity information from the compiler is preserved in your output HTML. For instance, DayOfWeek.Friday will be output as:

<span class="User Types(Enums)">DayOfWeek</span><span class="operator">.</span><span class="identifier">Friday</span>

Then you just have to define your own CSS for the various classification types that the compiler uses, and your code will be correctly colorized in the browser.

If you don’t want to use separate CSS styles however, you have the option to embed the font and color information directly in your HTML. Set EmitSpanStyle to true (and EmitSpanClass to false), and you will produce stand-alone, independent HTML that doesn’t need any CSS:

<span style="color:blue;">public</span>

<span style="color:#2b91af;">DayOfWeek</span>.Friday

Preserving full language fidelity from the Visual Studio editor

HTML Copy has an advantage over other code formatting tools that colorize code for the web using their own, simple rules (often RegEx based). HTML Copy colorizes code exactly how Visual Studio editor displays it. Also, this works just as well for other code formats, such as HTML, VB, F# etc. As long as the VS editor has classified the text, we just grab that information and output it to clipboard while preserving the exact classification types and classification format definitions.

The controversy around the <br> tag

You have an option to replace line breaks with the <br> tag. Why? I had done some research to see how different RSS readers present formatted code and it turns out, if you use Outlook RSS Feed Reader, it has a bug where it just ignores line break characters inside <pre> tags and lumps all the code onto one long line which is word-wrapped. I’ve let the Office team know about the bug, but in the meanwhile, I decided to provide the option to use the <br> tag instead of line break in HTML. Downside of it is that in HTML source, your code looks like one long line, but the good news is that RSS Reader in Outlook then correctly displays the text. Other readers also correctly display <BR> tags inside <PRE> tags, so we should be good here, no?

No.

Internet Explorer doesn’t copy the <br> as a line break when selecting the code in the page and copying it to clipboard. Suppose you’re reading a blog and you would like to copy the code from the webpage. You select it, paste into notepad and you get one long line! That’s why, if you want your readers to be able to copy your code correctly from a webpage in IE, don’t use the <BR> tag, use the line break in HTML. I’ve let the IE team know about the bug (preserve line breaks when copying <BR> inside <PRE> to clipboard), but they didn’t fix it in time before IE9 shipped.

The controversy around the space and &nbsp;

A similar “surprise” was awaiting me when I installed Windows Live Writer 2011 to test HTML Copy with their latest version. Live Writer used to be the tool that I LOVED, because it was simple, did the right thing and was a pleasure to use.

Enter Windows Live Writer 2011.

When pasting HTML from clipboard using Ctrl+Alt+V, DOWN, ENTER, it apparently thinks that you pasted code from Word, and their special algorithm kicks in that is supposed to “fix” the tangled Word formatting. In reality however, they take the clean and well-formed HTML that I put to clipboard and mess it up beyond any recognition. In particular, if you were using spaces for indentation in your code, it will at random insert inexplicable &nbsp; all over the place. I’ve found that if I replace all my spaces with &nbsp; myself, then Live Writer at least has some mercy for the HTML markup and while still mangled, it displays more or less correctly in the browser, so I included the option. Naturally, I’ve done due diligence and informed the Live Writer team about this unfortunate behavior regression. Let’s see if they fix it as promptly as the Internet Explorer team did (ha-ha, my bitter sarcasm!).

Bug fixes

This release has a few bug fixes that I’ve accumulated from customer reports (thanks everyone for your feedback!). One good news is that I now correctly preserve the background color and font information, so the tool should now correctly work for folks with a dark scheme (sorry for the white on white stupidity – I should have known better!).

Copy from Remote Desktop and other Windows Clipboard oddities

One major thing that Ameen from the editor team helped me fix is that sometimes Copy just didn’t work inside Remote Desktop sessions. If you have HTML Copy installed, and press Ctrl+C inside remote desktop, and the code doesn’t get copied to clipboard – please just try copying it again a few times.

The story (Raymond Chen style). Windows clipboard obviously needs to be available to all the processes, which, naturally, run concurrently. I would have thought that they have some sort of a reader-writer lock, a monitor, semaphore – anything. Well, no. If a process tries to access clipboard while the clipboard is already open, it just fails with CLIPBRD_E_CANT_OPEN. A good description of this can be found here or here for example.

In brief, if you copy stuff to clipboard in remote desktop, shortly after you’re done, it will open the clipboard again to synchronize it back to the host machine. About the same time however, I come in and try to open the clipboard too (because I want to augment the TEXT and RTF formats already there with the new HTML format). Obviously, we both fail, and what do we both do? We both go sleep 100ms. Yes, that’s how the WinForms team and the WPF team worked around the lack of proper synchronization in Windows Clipboard. They retry 10 times and sleep for 100 milliseconds in between. The problem now is: they all wake up and try again at the same time. Better solution here would be at least to sleep a random number of milliseconds (module timer granularity), but alas this is not the case here.

The way I wrote HTML Copy originally is that it was listening to the Edit.Cut and Edit.Copy VS commands, and after VS has put TEXT and RTF to clipboard, I happened to additionally put HTML on clipboard in a second transaction. Now I just completely suppress Visual Studio’s handling of the Cut and Copy commands, and copy all the formats, TEXT, RTF and HTML in one fell swoop. This should hopefully alleviate the problems connected with copying over remote desktop.

The next most requested feature (not there yet)

The request I’ve been hearing the most is to add some sort of a command, that wouldn’t put HTML to clipboard in a separate clipboard format parallel to text and RTF, but instead put the HTML tags to clipboard directly in text format, so that you can paste source yourself to a simple text box such as the one in Wordpress or other web-based tools.

Obviously I can’t copy HTML markup to plain text clipboard during normal operation, because this would break copying code around in VS during programming (on second thought – hmm, maybe not such a bad idea after all??!)

So I guess I need to mentally prepare myself for adding an actual Visual Studio menu item to explicitly copy HTML markup to clipboard in plaintext format. Let’s hope I get around to it before the next update of the Productivity Power Tools.

FAQ

How do I use HTML Copy?

Provided you have installed Visual Studio 2010 and Productivity Power Tools, there are only two simple sides to it – Produce HTML and Consume HTML. You Produce HTML (or simply put it on clipboard) by copying code in the editor as you normally would (most people prefer Ctrl+C). You Consume HTML by pasting it in a program which has a “Paste Special” feature, such as Word, Outlook, OneNote or Windows Live Writer, and selecting HTML format instead of plain text format.

How do I paste code in Windows Live Writer?

Ctrl+Alt+V (or Ctrl+Shift+V on older versions) will pop up the Paste Special dialog. Then, select Keep Formatting (DOWN ARROW) and ENTER (if you don’t see Keep formatting there, it means HTML Copy didn’t work). Then you can switch to the Source view and actually examine the HTML. Caveat: Windows Live Writer 2011 mangles the HTML the moment you paste it, so please don’t blame me – I produce clean well-formed HTML without redundant tags. I also don’t use <font> tags, so if you see a <font> tag, it’s not me!

How do I get the source for the HTML markup?

You need a tool that lets you examine the clipboard, such as Clipview by Peter Büttner:

Don’t forget to push the View button in the top-left corner – the tool doesn’t refresh automatically! If you know a better way, please let me know!

How does this compare to other tools?

There are plenty existing tools out there to let you format code on your blog. Here are some links:

• http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BestCodeSyntaxHighlighterForSnippetsInYourBlog.aspx
• http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/
• http://copysourceashtml.codeplex.com/
• http://www.11011.net/software/vspaste

SyntaxHighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev is very nice and seems to be popular. One minor thing with it is that it requires JavaScript (not all readers support it). Code will still display decently though, so it’s not a big issue. Another downside of tools like this – they do their own colorization, and don’t preserve the exact classification of the compiler. Thus, they’re less precise. But again, this is very minor – it works reasonably well in the general case.

CopySourceAsHtml seems to be very nice (and HTML Copy is essentially the same thing, but Colin was first!) He did a fantastic job with the APIs we exposed at the time. We both colorize code correctly (like VS does), but we don’t output as neat functionality as SyntaxHighlighter (ability to copy/print code for example, which requires JavaScript). I also don’t support line numbers in HTML Copy.

Paste from VisualStudio by Douglas Stockwell is a Windows Live Writer plug-in that takes RTF from clipboard and converts it to HTML. An advantage is that it preserves correct coloring from the editor, downside is that it’s only for Live Writer.

Why did you decide to write yet another tool like this, with plenty of good tools already out there?

Architecture. With the brand new editor in Visual Studio 2010, it’s design is so nice and pluggable, it allows extensions to easily add whatever formats to clipboard. However text and RTF were implemented in the box, but HTML wasn’t. I really wanted a tool like this to be in the box, so I looked around. Unfortunately, the implementation of CopySourceAsHtml (the best tool I’ve found) didn’t take advantage of the new editor APIs so I decided to write my own. Since Productivity Power Tools seemed like a good ship vehicle to give my implementation proper testing, I decided to do just that. Maybe if the tool is good enough one day, we’ll put this in the box.

What are the known bugs and feature requests?

1. Again, the biggest is showing raw HTML markup to the user.
2. Then I have a request from Tomáš Skála to normalize indentation (should be something along the lines (no pun intended!) of while(lines.All(line => line.StartsWithSpace())) lines = lines.Select(line => line.TrimFirstSpace())
3. Then I have a bug report from csrowell where Ctrl+L on two non-fully selected lines doesn’t fully delete both lines

As always, please let me know your questions and comments if any. Thanks!

This blog post (yes, the one you are reading) is number 2,000 in this blog. The blog turned 10 years old on December 31, 2010, but other than a quick mention of it on Twitter, I more or less let that pass.

The vanderwal.net domain name started was initially purchased in 1997 and was used for a general personal website, of which my links page is a early remnant of that (it is a continuation of links page I had on my personal website initially hosted in Compuserve in 1995) and it has moved to all versions of my personal site since then. The blog was started in late 2000 as it was on my to do and try list and I started in with Blogger while waiting for the New Year�s ball to drop on tv. The first post, is now gone (it was likely the very profound �hello world� sort of thing or �FuBar is testing�. I, like many others who were using Blogger, then a product of Pyra, went through the growing pains of Blogger with its outages (all pages from Blogger were sent via FTP to my site) that meant no new updates could be made using that service. Pyra imploded one fine day and was left with just one employee, Ev Williams to run it with bits and pieces of help until it was later bought by Google. But, I only lasted on Blogger for nine months or so as I had been pulling together a travel blogging tool that would allow me to post to my blog and not have to use FTP.

October 2001 I moved to my own hand build blogging tool that also included a redesign. This has all pretty much stayed since then. In October 2004 the commenting was turned off after I woke to 1400 porn SPAM comments and I deleted the SPAM comments and removed the code for commenting. I had intended to bring comments back at some point in the my own tool, but then comment SPAM got worse my thought was to move to add an external commenting service (none have been satisfactory enough to move forward with). I then have been planning to move all of these posts into another blogging tool that had an easier to manage workflow for editing and also had a good commenting system. That has yet to happen and increasingly I am fine without there being any comments here. I miss the days of old when there were great conversations in a blog�s comments, but those days rarely happen any more outside of four or five blogs I can think of. One of the reasons I went with building my own blogging tool was the ability to have multiple categories assigned to each post to make aggregation of like posts much easier. The volume of content here has made that ease of use, much more difficult to pull off and it is one of the things I am back playing with in a dev version of the tool.

When I look back to my first blog posts that were created in Blogger, I see a huge change in the writing style and content from where posts have ended up today. The blog is named �Off the Top� as it was posting of things that were coming off the top of my head and were just a random collection of things (hence the URL naming for where the blog sits). The rough gathering and sharing of ideas shifted in after the first few months to a longer and a little more serious style. My style shifted a little bit when I moved to my own blogging platform, but the biggest shift was when I added headers to posts in March 2002. The style of the posts went from many short (paragraph or so) posts highlighting of things found and shared for others, but also shared for a future me to comeback to. By 2003 the posts were getting longer and there were fewer posts per day.

The changes on blog writing style were paired with other services and blogs easing content out of the blogs pages here. The catchall blog I started with included posts of a sentence or two and occasionally a paragraph or so, changed quite a bit over time.

Delicious was the first to really move content out of the blog here. The small snippets pointing to web pages and putting them in context all fell into Delicious (for a short time I built a my own bookmarking tool, but it lacked the social benefit of seeing others interactions around the same pages).

Twitter altered the site by the quick bon mots going straight there. The short snippets not only disappeared, but the frequency of blogging really slowed down. The posts that still showed up here were longer and more detailed.

This shift was somewhat good as it allowed me to really focus on subjects I was working through. One of the longer early pieces was in 2002 and was not posted in the blog as it was very out of character. When I moved to my own blogging platform I not only set it up to have multiple categories / keywords, but to classify posts as blog posts, journal, or essay. This last classification was statements and short pieces, longer more personal pieces, and essays were longer. Over the time, most everything has been classified as a blog post, but fits my initial framing that these would be called essays.

The longer pieces were also trending to a more central theme that I was working around. The mixing of work and much more fun content was getting a lot of feedback from people reading that it should be separated. That more professional writing also seemed likely to benefit from comments, which were not coming back anytime soon here. At this point I used my TypePad account and pointed www.personalinfocloud.com to it. For quite a while I was cross posting, but that slowed down in 2008 or so.

This blog is continuing on. I have a lot of pent up content that fits well here. I really want to get back to posting things about what I am reading and have a means to capture and share other ideas out. The demarkation of what goes here and what goes over to the Personal InfoCloud blog is a little fuzzy. But, I am fairly sure I am not going to add comments back here on this blog. Watching other blogs the number and quality of blog comments have dwindled, drastically. There are few blogs that have great comment threads anymore, but far fewer than benefit from tools like Disqus that aggregate poor comments (most are not comments and not really relevant to the posts) from elsewhere around the web / internet.

Here is to another 2,000 posts! Perhaps (I didn�t plan 2,000 posts when this started and would have called anybody crazy should they have suggested such a little over 10 years ago).

Full speed ahead -- but will he get his submission in by the 1 March cut-off date?

#12/2010: Doing R&D or not, that is the question (in a crisis)

#11/2010: Corporate R&D and firm efficiency: Evidence from Europe’s top R&D investors

#10/2010: The determinants of R&D Investment: the role of Cash flow and Capabilities

#9/2010: What is small? Small and medium enterprises facing patenting activities

#8/2010: Innovation and Employment: A firm level analysis with European R&D Scoreboard data

#7/2010: Young Leading Innovators and EU’s R&D intensity gap

Sporting their attractive new uniforms, Mongolian trade mark examiners train for the onset of the Singapore rules

It's not widely known, but the idea for loose-leaf binders was inspired by the man-trap

The first waffle iron: great for food but terrible for shirts

The National Association of State CIO’s (NASCIO) & Deloitte released findings from “The 2010 Deloitte-NASCIO Cybersecurity Study” which found that State governments are NOT doing enough to secure citizen data and maintain public trust. In fact looking at the details of this study it’s evident that state governments have more personally identifiable information (PII) of citizens than any other organizations.

State governments fund security less than other entities and often CISO’s lack enforcement authority for broad security enforcement throughout the government. The funding problem results in shortage of IT security personnel. The study shows that only 2% of state governments have more than 50 information security FTEs compared to 48.5% for similar sized organizations.

While many state CISO’s at the state have adopted NIST standards for risk assessment, most state governments still do not adhere to enforcement mandates or audit compliance like FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) which is enforced at the federal government level. The irony is that adopting better security standards can actually save SLG money on IT procurement and daily management and operations.

According to Gartner's, 2008 "Case Study: Air Force Commodity Councils Take Aim at Mission Effectiveness": The U.S. Air Force adopted new security standards included the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) & utilization of a Microsoft support agreement which helped

• Speed up implementation of critical enterprise wide security standards
• Save approximately $156 million in hardware costs
• Enforce enterprise-level cybersecurity policies
• Timely distribution of software updates & configuration management
• Save $100+ million in software licenses & other life cycle costs

In all the USAF achieved better security and saved more than $256 million in 4 years by simply implementing stricter security standards and reining in spending for procurements and excessive IT staff by reducing the number of required systems administrators required to manage systems.

SLG needs to first improve security by implementing the Twenty Critical Controls for Effective Cyber Defense. Few SLG agencies have adopted ALL of these safeguards and as a result we are losing the “Cyber War” in state and local government and subject to threats and data loss potential that could dwarf by magnitudes that which was released by Wikileaks.org.

Automation and software can be mapped to the controls as well in order to combat back and gain the tactical advantage in cyberspace while implementing these controls. In an effort to simplify adoption, SANS has mapped a list of generically user-vetted tools here, however there are a number of Microsoft Cloud & On-Premise technologies that map to each of these 20 Critical Controls:

1. Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Devices

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)- Hardware Inventory
• System Center Online Asset Inventory Service (AIS)
• Windows Intune (In the Cloud)
• Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit

Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Software

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)- Software Inventory
• Windows 7 AppLocker
• Software Restriction Policies (Active Directory GPO)
• Microsoft Software Inventory Analyzer (MSIA) – Free Tool

2. Secure Configurations for Hardware and Software on Laptops, Workstations, and Servers

• Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) Image
• Microsoft Active Directory GPOs & Security Guidance
• Microsoft Security Compliance Manager(Central Security Baseline Management)
• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)| Desired Configuration Manager

3. Secure Configurations for Network Devices such as Firewalls, Routers, and Switches

• 802.1X Wired Authentication
• 802.1X Wireless Authentication
• Network Access Protection (NAP) | Cisco Network Access Control (NAC)

4. Boundary Defense

• Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG)
• Microsoft Unified Access Gateway (UAG)

5. Maintenance, Monitoring, and Analysis of Security Audit Logs

• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• Audit Collection Services

6. Application Software Security

• Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
• SDL Threat Modeling Tool
• Banned.h (Header file to sanitize code listing banned APIs)
• FxCop (Static code analysis of .NET)
• Code Analysis for C/C++
• Anti-XSS Library (Mitigates Cross Site Scripting)
• BinScope Binary Analyzer (Free Tool)
• MiniFuzz (Free Tool)
• SDL Regex Fuzzer (Free Too)
• AppVerifier (Free Tool)
• Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG)
• Microsoft Unified Access Gateway (UAG)

7. Controlled Use of Administrative Privileges

• Microsoft Active Directory
• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

8. Controlled Access Based on Need to Know

• Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure (FCI)
• AD Rights Management Services (RMS)
• Microsoft Active Directory

9. Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation

• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) – Software Update Management
• Microsoft Software Update Services (WSUS)
• Shavlik (SCUPdates) – System Center (SCCM) deployment of updates for both Microsoft & 3^rd party applications
• Eminentware – Simplify 3^rd party patch management via WSUS and SCCM
• Secunia (Corporate Software Inspector - CSI) integrates with WSUS and SCCM for 3^rd party patch management
• Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP)

10. Account Monitoring and Control

• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• Audit Collection Services
• Microsoft Windows Event Log

11. Malware Defenses

• Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP)
• Microsoft Forefront Protection for Exchange
• Microsoft Forefront Protection for SharePoint
• Microsoft Forefront Security for OCS
• Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG)
• Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE)

12. Limitation and Control of Network Ports, Protocols, and Services

• Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP)
• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) – Desired Configuration Management
• Windows Firewall
• Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG)
• Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG)

13. Wireless Device Control

• 802.1X Wireless Authentication
• Microsoft Internet Authentication Service

14. Data Loss Prevention

• AD Rights Management Services (RMS)
• RSA Data Loss Prevention (integrates with RMS)
• Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG)- HTTP redaction & Attachment Wiper
• BitLocker Drive Encryption

15. Secure Network Engineering

• Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS)

16. Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises

• Microsoft IT Attack & Penetration Testing Case Study

17. Incident Response Capability

• Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
• Microsoft Services Premier Support

18. Data Recovery Capability

• Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM)
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSCS)
• Windows System Restore

19. Security Skills Assessment and Appropriate Training to Fill Gaps

• Microsoft Security Guidance on TechNet
• Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
• Microsoft E-Learning

Microsoft  has solutions, products and technologies that map into each of these weak control  areas identified by the NSA & NIST, and many of them are already licensed by SLG agencies or free  downloads but  many controls still have yet to be deployed.  State and local governments agencies may drastically improve security while saving money by implementing these security controls holistically rather than piecemeal as historically has been the case.

After several steps backward with the delisting of health care coverage for gender reassignment surgery, a parental rights bill that enables parents to remove their kids without penalty from classes not consistent with their beliefs, an outright refusal to include trans people in revisions made to the Alberta Human Rights Act, and an Alberta Health Act that still leaves many glaring questions, the province may finally take a baby step forward.

Thirty-seven years after homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, Alberta says (again) that it will finally remove homosexuality from its diagnostic code. According to information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by human rights activist Rob Wells, between 1995 and 2004, the diagnosis was used 1,782 times.

The province has known about the classification for more than a decade and the Conservative government first promised to change it in 1998. On Tuesday, Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky repeated that promise.

Continue reading "Alberta Delists Homosexuality as a Mental Disorder"...