It's good to put a face to a name

Conceptual artist Alex Dragulescu has created 3D images of the main computer virus threats including:

viruses, spam, phishing attacks, spyware, malicious links and trojans.

He was given the programming code by MessageLabs for the most common internet viruses and decided to make a set of pictures that he calls Infected Art.

Picture above is a Netsky email worm. Now you know what to watch out for!

ref: bbc

By Fiona Dorman
Published: 5 March 2008
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Snow + Car = Disaster

Although it snowed almost all day on Monday for some reason the snow didn't take to the streets of Glasgow. I think it's got something to do with the almost seamless covering of used chewing gum that covers the pavements in the city centre. However, in the not so leafy suburbs the snow started to lie and by the early afternoon mayhem had broken out as parents started rescuing children from schools. These pictures (taken just round the corner from my house) illustrate the extent of the mayhem perfectly.

By Paul Mowat
Published: 5 March 2008
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Scotland on Rails

tictoc will be presenting at Scotland's first Ruby on Rails conference taking place on 4-5 April in Edinburgh.

I'll be presenting a talk called 'Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret!'. Deploying Rails applications is still a sore point for developers, especially when you start hosting multiple sites. I'll be spreading the good word about Litespeed and how it has made our lives easier at tictoc.

There's a decent line up of speakers with some big names from the Rails community, full details over at Scotland on Rails.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 February 2008
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Online winners and losers

It's been a season of weird online trading stories with some of the big players taking substantial hits on the high street and others doing phenomenally well. The one thing that can't be denied is the undoubted success of the web in this story! Below are some snippits of winners and losers in the etail environment.

Sainsbury's has announced 'exceptional' online sales growth over the Christmas period. The company said the improved etail results helped it achieve its overall £2.5bn sales target three months ahead of schedule.

Amazon was the most popular retail site over Christmas accounting for 9% of visits to all retail sites.

Shares in HMV have jumped 15% after the music and books retailer said it had a "highly successful" Christmas period. Like-for-like sales at its HMV stores in the UK and Ireland rose 14.1%, while sales at its Waterstone's bookstore chain rose 4%.

Marks and Spencers was hit by poor Christmas sales with UK like-for-like sales falling 2.2% in the last three months of 2007, however website sales were particularly healthy, up 78%.

Tesco said its online businesses had a "very successful" Christmas, with total sales up 24%, helped by strong demand for MP3 players, digital cameras and laptops.

Webs the future!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 17 January 2008
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Christmas Spending

It's now that time of year when we all look at our bank accounts and wonder how much we actually spend over the festive period. If your anything like me the answer is too much!

The British Retail Consortium reported that UK retailers recorded their worst December figures since 2004. However, online retailers have had a more successful Christmas as reported by e-consultancy.com.

Figures from the UK show that 4.4 million people spent a total of £84 million on Christmas Day, 269% more than last year with an average of £19.09 per person. While in the US £14.9 billion was spent in December up 19% on last year.

By Alan Masterson
Published: 10 January 2008
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Merry Xmas from all at tictoc

It's been a very busy (and fun!) year here at the tictoc family house and we'd like to wish all our Clients, Suppliers, Mums, Dads, Grannies, Aunties, Uncles and any other people who've put up with us throughout the year, a very Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

The tictoc Family Xmas Card

By Melanie Russell
Published: 20 December 2007
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'Mega-Minute'

Lots of press coverage today about online shoppers spending £767,500 in a single minute at 1.09pm yesterday.

Office workers taking advantage of their lunch hour to purchase gifts online are believed to be behind this record high, and the company reporting these figures, Retail Decisions, expected online sales for the full day to total around £370m, a 106% increase on the same Monday last year.

By Kerry Reid
Published: 11 December 2007
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tictoc DevELFopers go mad

Here's a little insight into the mindset of some of our web developers!

tictoc DevELFopers

By Melanie Russell
Published: 10 December 2007
6 Comments

You gotta love Dolly!

We were listening to the radio here in the tictoc Admin office and the enigma that is Dolly Parton was being interviewed and singing her little heart out. Classics such as 9 to 5 and Love is like a butterfly!! She also came out with a few classic Dollyisms that I just had to share to lighten an otherwise dark and miserable Friday afternoon!

(Please remember to read using a texan draaawll)

"I don't lose my temper, I USE my temper"

"I don't trouble trouble, till trouble troubles me"

When asked how long does it take to do here hair, she answered

"I don't know, I'm never there"

"It takes an awful lot of money to look as cheap as I do"

www.dollyparton.com

If you're looking for some inspiration for cooking Christmas goodies check this out:

Dolly's Dixie Fixin's cook book

By Melanie Russell
Published: 7 December 2007
6 Comments

Happy, stress-free Christmas Shopping

In an article published in The Sunday Herald recently, it was stated that more than 27 million people are expected to shop online over the festive season turning Britain into the biggest online retail market in Europe.

Total online sales are set to reach £40 billion this year and are predicted to quadruple to £162bn by 2020 when they will account for 40% of all UK Retail sales.

According to uSwitch, UK Consumers could save more than £13bn a year by shopping online! Some of the most popular products bought online are music, films and concert tickets. More than half of online shoppers (53%) by music and films online; 35% buy tickets for events over the internet and about a third purchase books, clothes and sporting goods. Grocery shopping online is also becoming more popular.

Here are links to some of our eCommerce websites:

Guitar
Scotch Whisky Shop
Just Dogs
Royal Mile Residence
Woods of Windsor

Source : The Sunday Herald, Naomi Caine

By Melanie Russell
Published: 30 November 2007
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Balloons and top hats

We regularly hold Friday afternoon "Show and Tell" sessions whereby we all share and discuss interesting projects we've been working on, designing, developing or just generally sharing stories of the daily goings on in the tictoc Family.

Following last Fridays session, we thought it was time we shared a few social drinkies to welcome new members to the team and generally practice the incredibly complex and somewhat frustrating art of balloon character creating!

Tom kindly brought top hats along (which are marshmallows dipped in chocolate with a blob on the top then topped with a smartie for those who didn't know!) and party bags were provided by Alan. It was a close call as to who won the"bounce the balls highest" competition but Mr Beddard was the clear winner in the "whizzing balloons reaching the top of the stairwell" race!

I'm thinking about the art of Japanese Bonsai as a theme for the next night - thoughts anyone???

By Melanie Russell
Published: 7 November 2007
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Text-only version of your site?

In the past, sites had no real structure and multimedia elements were used heavily without any thought of alternate content.

When these sites had to be made accessible the knee-jerk reaction was often to create a text-only version of the site. This allowed those unable to access the main site a means of reading the content, but at a cost.

Adding a text-only site in those days effectively doubled the web team's workload as it was a whole other site to maintain. Text-only sites contained content that was incomplete or of lower quality and over time gradually became more and more out of sync with the main site. An often used analogy, is the idea of having a restaurant where quality food is served upstairs and passable food is served on the ground floor in the kitchen. Diners unable to tackle the stairs are forced to have a lower quality experience. The dual-site approach ticked all the boxes for accessibility in theory, but in practice rarely offered value.

To counter these problems, text-only sites became dynamic and shared the databases that powered the live site. The main site would then link off to a 'text only' site (the same site, but using different HTML templates that removed all styling). This was an improvement, but it missed an important point.

Most screen-readers and assistive technologies work by screen scraping; reading all the visible text on the page. This happens regardless of whether the site is text-only or not. Although text-only sites can help users who have visual difficulties, a better approach would be to provide alternative colour schemes or advise and educate the user on how to create and apply user stylesheets.

To make sure that assitive technologies can make sense of your website, it is more important to structure your pages well. The templates supplied with your website will give you a good base structure to work from, but it's important that the copy you add through the CMS maintains the standard.

Good structuring tips include using heading elements rather than simply making text bold (and bigger!) to both clarify what the following section is about and to create a heirarchy (e.g. h3 is considered a sub-section of h2). Additionally, when creating links to other pages it's good practice to ensure that the linking text makes sense when read out of context - try to resist typing 'click here'!

By taking accessibility into account at the start of a project and making it a part of the project instead of a bolt-on as in the past, your site will be more accessible with less effort. With a little care, keeping your site maintained and accessible to all can be a piece of cake. Stop trying to be accessible and start being accessible!

By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 7 November 2007
2 Comments

Weird & wonderful world of art

I was fascinated by this art installation outside the Royal Academy of Arts in London, theThree Legged Buddha by the Chinese artist, Zhang Huan.

The piece depicts the bottom half of a three-legged Buddha. Two of the legs are supported by posts and the third rests on a Buddha's head. The arch-like structure stands at 8.6m, allowing visitors to walk underneath it. The sculpture is made of copper panels welded together and is supported by a steel inner frame. It is the most significant of his recent over-sized sculptures depicting parts of the Buddha, and is a reference to the past desecration of centuries-old artefacts.

By David McGilvray
Published: 7 November 2007
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Scottish Retail Awards

It's been a busy week of networking and awards! Following Claridge's, the next event was the Scottish Retail Excellence awards in the Hilton in Glasgow.

This event couldn't have been more different to the Claridge's event! With entertainment provided by a bizarre troup of dancers (see above!) throughout the evening and hosted by the wonderful Lorraine Kelly it was an amazing show of recognition and support for all sizes of retailers from the big boys (i.e. John Lewis and Asda) to the slightly less well known (David Stein butchers).

Created by the Scottish Daily Record and Scottish Business Insider, the event honours the retail sector's top achievers and recognises excellence in all areas of retail throughout Scotland.

Go go those Globe Girls!!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 1 November 2007
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tictoc and Patonz at Claridge's

Having been a Patonz partner for nearly two years now, I was delighted to be invited to attend one of their most exclusive black tie events in Gordon Ramsays restaurant at Claridge's in London.

The event was attended by a stunning list of incredibly high ranking business people from the top end of the retail sector around the world and was a fantastic opportunity to explore new opportunities for tictoc and the retail sector.

As always, thanks to Brendan for an amazing evening!

By Melanie Russell
Published: 1 November 2007
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Plagiarism on the web

The world wide web is open for us all to see. So it's amazing in this day and age that people believe they can plagiarise another website and get away with it.

We were amazed to find this website today www.sbforum.org, mainly because it has an uncanny resemblance to a site we created nearly 2 years earlier www.sfeu.ac.uk

Plagiarism or just coincidence. You decide.

By Melanie Russell
Published: 24 October 2007
3 Comments

RailsConf: Day 2

Day two of the European Rails Conference kicked-off with the main man himself, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). The creator of Rails talked on how the framework and community has changed over the last three years from the position of the young upstart, who was at first laughed at and ignored but is now taken seriously as a real alternative for big business.

This reiterated a theme for the whole conference about how Rails is now being considered and used in more and more Global 1000 companies. I was talking to a guy from IBM who was saying how he has been successful in pushing the Rails platform for internal projects within the company. Both IBM and Sun were main sponsors of the conference, which tells us how these big companies are sitting up and paying attention.

DHH then proceeded to demonstrate some of the new features and refinements in the soon to be released version 2.0 of Rails. A nice overview of this can be found over here.

Making Rails More Artificially Intelligent

The first session of the day started with an interesting talk from the guys at http://bee.com.es on how to use algorithms to solve 'intelligent' problems and make your applications smarter. The talk focussed on two key areas bayesian networks and genetic algorithms. It's a fascinating field and is growing ever more important as it provides methods that help make sense of the ever increasing volume of information on the web, such as improving search results, filtering spam and creating personalised suggestions (such as products or music of interest).

Full Text Search with Ferret

Programmers seem to love giving their creations odd and sometimes silly names, such as Ferret. Ferret is actually the search engine we use to provide the onsite search capability of our websites, so there could be a vaguely tangible link with searching and 'ferreting' through a site... Anyway, this talk was on some of the more unknown/advanced features of the search engine. There were some useful tips that will be working their way into our implementation soon.

Rubinius - Improving the Ruby Ecosystem

Rubinius is a brand new code-base for the Ruby language. Most of the core functionality is actually written in Ruby, so it will be possible to easily go in and directly modify the core functionality. New features like modern memory management and garbage collection mechanisms should provide significant performance improvements. Applications can also be compiled into packages in a similar way to Java to enable easier distribution and productisation.

One concern is that the Ruby platform will become splintered with two different versions of Ruby, however the Rubinius project assures us it will keep full compatibility with the original Ruby. An interesting note is that Rubinius has a complete RSpec test suite based upon the original Ruby functionality. The same test suite is also used by JRuby thus following the same standard specification.

Scaling a Rails Application

The final session of the day was by one of the developers behind the hugely popular Twitter. Whilst not something directly affecting us at the moment, it was interesting to gain some insight into their system. Unfortunately the presentation wasn't as prepared as it should had been and contained a few mistakes.

One interesting point was the announcement that Twitter will be open-sourcing a daemon component called Starling that they use to offload long-running processes to maintain browser responsiveness for the client.

Keynote Speeches

There were two keynote speeches worth mentioning, the first by Dr Roy Fielding called “The Rest of REST” which dealt with using REST as an architecture of developing modern web applications. Roy was one of the original authors of the HTTP protocal - something the entire internet is now reliant upon. Although rather academically orientated it was interesting to hear some of the history behind such a core component of the internet.

The last keynote was a talk by Craig McClanahan from Sun. Craig is the creator of the original mega Java framework, Struts. Being a popular speaker within Java circles he gave a very energetic talk on how he has enjoyed the power and productivity gains from using Rails, even so far as admitting that it feels painful having to go back into Java - quite an admission from a hard-core Java guru! 

Photo credits Duncan Davidson and Patrick Lenz.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 September 2007
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More restaurants, less hunger!

By Super Administrator
Published: 26 September 2007
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