{"id":1518,"date":"2011-04-01T16:16:08","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T06:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2011-04-01T16:16:08","modified_gmt":"2011-04-01T06:16:08","slug":"soip-qos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2011\/04\/01\/soip-qos\/","title":{"rendered":"SoIP QoS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today being April 1st, I thought I would share a story of an April Fool’s Joke. It was about 5-7 years ago, I think, so I am hoping the statute of limitations has expired, even though some of my regular readers may still remember this story when it happened.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h3>\n

Back in those days, I was working for an American multinational in Research and Development. We were strongly encouraged to submit patent applications to protect the intellectual property we were creating. However, patents are expensive to obtain and to defend, so there were some process hurdles to get through before an idea would hit the patent office.<\/p>\n

When a local employee, or group of employees, had an idea, they would fill in a form describing the idea, and it would be submitted to a peer group here in Australia to be reviewed. If it passed that level, it would be forwarded to a corporate attorney specialising in Intellectual Property, in the US, where it would go before another higher-powered committee before being sent off to be drafted for submission to the appropriate Patent Offices.<\/p>\n

Many of us had battled with this patent idea form which asked questions which sounded clumsy to the engineers, but elicited the answers needed for the attorneys to assess ideas that were outside their area of expertise. One example related to the search for “prior art” – to see if some competitor had already had the idea. There were some arcane rules about where we should – and where we mustn’t – search for prior art, and one of the sections required us to fill in details about where we looked, including details of web searches, if any.<\/p>\n

The Preparation<\/h3>\n

Anyway, one day I was thinking about the tradition of April Fools’ Day RFC Submissions<\/a> and thought it would be fun to do a similar parody, but based on the Patent Submission form – sure the audience would be much smaller, but why not? It isn’t a nasty prank. It isn’t trying to embarrass anyone. It is just a little-hearted parody.<\/p>\n

On Good Friday, shortly before April 1st, I sat down and put together a parody submission form. I bounced the idea off a couple of friendly colleagues, got their buy-in and quite a few suggestions and review comments, and updated it again that night. It was all ready for April 1st.<\/p>\n

The Implementation<\/h3>\n

Voice over IP and Video over IP were common areas of patents, so I decided Smell over IP would be a good gag. After a bit of searching, it turned out that idea had been done (both jokingly and semi-seriously) before, so I decided to fold in the idea of Quality of Service – another area where patent submissions were common.<\/p>\n

In the appropriate sections of the form, I described a problem. We were all familiar (I explained, tongue-in-cheek,) with the Smell over IP protocols, but in practice, packet loss lead to serious degradation of the smells being transmitted. With the innovative QoS invention, we could guarantee that smells were correctly received.<\/p>\n

The document was chockful of bad puns (with the N.O.S.E. subsystem being responsible for testing the integrity of the smell) and inside jokes. I can remember barely any of them.<\/p>\n

I do recall in the prior art section, I had written a number of Google search terms, such as:<\/p>\n