Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

• You may note that Alert Tweets from @ipawsopenstate have been interrupted. My UAT work and NWS posts exceed the allowed daily Tweet limit. #
• Brain MRI today. Do you think they will actually find one? 🙂 #

• A new version of the IPAWS-OPEN Interface Design Guidance (July 2) is now available for MOA holders. Minor edits only. #
• Personal note: Best thing about my sons: they turned out to be GREAT fathers. Praise God. #
• Washington Nationals game with grandson on hottest day of the year (102) – dumb? #

• Very similar in clarity and complexity to the Java Calendar class. http://t.co/VhdruJWf #

• If you actually want to see a NIEM success: national maritime information exchange model. #
• Ordered a "tall blonde with room" at Starbucks this morning. Petite black barista laughed out loud. #

• Living in 3D (hex) #

Why you should attach security at the message level, not just use SSL.

I found the following today as a good explanation. It goes all the way back to 2005, but the metaphor still works. See: Naked Motorcycle Riding

I wrote the following Comment on a LinkedIn NIEM Thread and thought it might be worth sharing:

In my opinion (perhaps not so humble :-)) NIEM is very good if you use it right. But, if you think of NIEM as a standard by itself, it is NOT GOOD. Too much stuff. Hard to keep organized. It is actually incredible how well organized it is given its volume, but as a standard by itself, it is just too BIG to be anything but unwieldy.

Now, as a model for building standard exchanges, it has TREMENDOUS value. It is like a mine. You have to refine the ore through an appropriate standards development process. (The IEPD process works for this.) But the ore is super high quality when compared with building standards from scratch, because the NEIM model has been preprocessed in the sense that most definition and relationships are well defined and understood. Even so, you still have to refine NIEM input using the IEPD process to actually create a usable exchange or a useable standard exchange.

Bottom line, if you expect NIEM to be “auto-reusable,” you will be disappointed. But, If you use NIEM appropriately, it has a lot to offer in the way of documented data structure and definition.

• @Gumshoe working on a connection through Canada' MASAS. #
• This is for people following @ipawsopenstate: The number of tweets allowed in a short period of time was exceeded today. #
• NWS has been sending all its weather alerts to #IPAWS in test. Exceeded Twitter allowance of day through @ipawsopenstate. #

Giving a talk on the ways to use CAP using the new IPAWS CAP 1.2 interface at noon tomorrow (15 Feb 2012). Details:

Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) Joint Developer/Practitioner Webinar
Using the Open Platform for Emergency Networks (OPEN) for Public and Private Alerting
Wednesday February 15, 2012 12:00 Noon Eastern

In addition to its role as message aggregator for public alerting, IPAWS-OPEN enables the interoperable sharing of emergency alerts and incident-related data between incident management systems that comply with non-proprietary information standards.

During our next Webinar, System Architect Gary Ham will describe how IPAWS-OPEN provides support for exchanging alerts within a single response organization, between one or more response organizations, with all response organizations, and/or with the public. He will also explain how the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) scope element is implemented by IPAWS-OPEN for public and private alerting.

This program is intended primarily for IPAWS-OPEN developers and testers; however, emergency management practitioners who are interested in learning more about IPAWS incident management-related capabilities are also encouraged to participate. Please make plans to join us via Live Meeting. As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

IMPORTANT: The audio portion of the program will be delivered via your computer speakers. The Live Meeting client must be used in order to receive the audio. Please review the instructions available from: http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/ipaws/livemtginstruct.pdf prior to the program.

Login to MS Live Meeting for visuals: The following login link can only be used 30 minutes prior to the scheduled meeting time: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/eiip/join?id=DMprogram&role=attend

• Operation System Security Patching today in the IPAWS-OPEN test environment. No IPAWS activity until complete. No @ipawsopensate tweets. #