March 7, 2004
@ 06:26 PM

There's currently a semi-interesting discussion about software patents on the XML-DEV mailing list sparked by a post by Dennis Sonoski entitled W3C Suckered by Microsoft where he rants angrily about why Microsoft is evil for not instantly paying $521 million dollars to Eolas and thereby starting a patent reform revolution. There are some interesting viewpoints voiced in the ensuing thread including Tim Bray's suggestion that Microsoft pay Tim Berners-Lee $5 million for arguing against the Eolas patent.

The thread made me think about what my position on filing software patents was given the vocal opposition to them on some online fora. I recently have gotten involved in patent discussions at work and I jotted down my thought processes as I was deciding whether filing for patents was a good idea or not. Belows are the pros and cons of filing for patents from my perspective in the trenches (so to speak).

PRO

  1. Having a patent or two on your resume is a nice ego and career boost.
  2. As a shareholder at Microsoft it is in my best interests to file patents which allow the company defend itself from patent suits and reap revenue from patent licencing.
  3. The modest financial incentive we get for filing patents would make for buying a few rounds of drinks with friends.

CON

  1. Filing patents involve having meetings with lawyers.
  2. Patents are very political because you don't want to snub anyone who worked on the idea but also don't want to cheapen them by claiming that people who were peripherally involved were co-inventers. For example, is a tester who points out a design flaw in an idea now one of the co-inventers if it was a fundamental flaw? 
  3. There's a very slight chance that Slashdot runs an article about a particular patent claiming that it is another evil plot by Microsoft. The fact that it is a slight chance is that the ratio of Slashdot articles about patents to those actually filed is quite small.

That was my thought process as I sat in on some patent meetings. Basically there is a lot of incentive to file patents for software innovations if you work for a company that can afford to do so. However the measure of degree of innovation is in the eye of the beholder [and up to prior art searches].

I've seen a number of calls for patent reform for software but not any that have any feasible or concrete proposals behind them. Most of the proponents of patent reform I've seen usually argue something akin to “Some patent that doesn't seem innovative to me got granted so the system needs to be changed“. How the system should be changed and whether the new system will not have problems of its own are left as excercises for the reader.

There have been a number of provocative writings about patent reform, the most prominent in my memory being the FSF's Patent Reform Is Not Enough and An Open Letter From Jeff Bezos On The Subject Of Patents. I suspect that the changes suggested by Jeff Bezos in his open letter do a good job of straddling the line between those who want do away with software and business method patents and those that want to protect their investment.

Disclaimer: The above statements are my personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. 


 

As pointed out in a recent Slashdot article some researchers at HP Labs have come up with what they have termed a Blog Epidemic Analyzer which aims to “track how information propagates through networks. Specifically...how web based memes get passed on from one user to another in blog networks“. It sounds like an interesting idea, it would be cool to know who the first person to send out links about All Your Base Are Belong To Us or I Kiss You. I can also think of more serious uses of being able to track down the propagation of particular links across the World Wide Web.

Unfortunately, it seems the researchers behind this are either being myopic or have to justify the cost of their research to their corporate masters by trying to compare what they've done to Google. From the  Blog Epidemic Analyzer FAQ

2. What's the point?

There has been a lot of discussion over the fairness of blogs, powerlaws, and A-list bloggers (You can look at the discussion on Many2Many for some of the highlights). The reality is that some blogs get all the attention. This means that with ranking algorithms like Technorati's and Google's Page Rank highly linked blogs end up at the top of search pages. Sometimes (maybe frequently) this is what you want. However, it is also possible that you don't want the most connected blog. Rather you would like to find the blog that discovers new information first.

The above answer makes it sound like these guys have no idea what they are talking about. Google and Technorati do vastly different things. The fact that Google's search engine lists highly linked blogs at the top of search results that they are tangentially related to is a bug. For example, the fact that a random post by Russell Beattie about a company now makes him the fifth result that comes up for a search for that comapny in Google isn't a feature, it's a bug. The goal of Google (and all search engines) is to provide the most relevant results  for a particular search term. In the past, tying relevance to popularity was a good idea but with the advent of weblogs and the noise they've added to the World Wide Web this is becoming less and less of a good idea. Technorati on the other hand has one express purpose, measuring weblog popularity based on incoming links.

The HP iRank algorithm would be a nice companion piece to things like Technorati and BlogPulse but comparing it to Google seems like a stretch.


 

Categories: Technology

Torsten just finished creating a German version of RSS Bandit. This should make it into the next release which should please our various German users. As Torsten mentioned we are looking for volunteers to do other languages. We will need at least two volunteers per language so that there can be some degree of error checking and the like.

To get started with translating RSS Bandit, only one file a number of files need translating and these include RSSBanditText.resx, the resource files for the main GUI, and the resource files for the various dialog boxes. An example of a translated version of that document is Torsten's German translation; RSSBanditText.de.resx.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

Folks at work have been cracking up about the Rick James skit on a recent episode of the Dave Chapelle show. Linked below are two video clips from the show. Pure comic genius.

Chappelle's Show: MORE of Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories

Rick James asks the philosophical question “What did the five fingers say to the face?” in this all-new Charlie Murphy-inspired clip.

Eddie Murphy's brother Charlie tells the tale of Rick James:
Habitual line-stepper.

You will need to download RealPlayer to view the video clips. Speaking of which it seems Real Player is much improved from the last time I used a couple of years ago.


 

March 7, 2004
@ 12:07 AM

For the past few years I've had my taxes done by H & R Block and each year their prices get steeper. This year the price tag would have been a bit shy of $200. Considering that all the tax preparer did was enter some values into some fields after being prompted by the tax preparation software that seemed a bit steep. A couple of folks have recommended TurboTax so I've decided to give it a try this year. At a cost of about $30, it seems this year I'll not have the ripped of feeling I usually do after filing my taxes.

 


 

Categories: Ramblings

March 5, 2004
@ 02:18 AM

I became addicted to reality TV after I watched a 2 hour block on Fox that ran between 10 PM  & Midnight consisting of Elimidate, 5th Wheel, Blind Date and Change of Heart. My experience mirrors that of Justin Berton who wrote in his article Embracing the Idiot Box

So far, in my month long experiment with the set, all the shows I expected to be good are bad, and all the bad ones are really good. In this peculiar calculus, nothing is worse than the reality dating show genre. And lowest of the low is Elimidate, which, of course, makes it the best thing on TV.

There's no irony here. A dude goes on a date with four women. They drink lots of booze. As the date goes on, the dude eliminates one girl per round.

I'm now a reality dating show junkie although the stuff on prime time (e.g. the Batchelor and Joe Millionairre) are a bit to sophisticated for my tastes.


 

Clay Bennet says it better than I ever could with his Vote Nader billboard cartoon. While you are at it you should also check out who really should have won the Oscar for Best Actor


 

Two recurring themes have shown up in my development of RSS Bandit and usage of news aggregators in general

  1. There are feeds I'm susbscribed to whose content I never end up reading because there is too much content (e.g. Weblogs @ ASP.NET) thus missing the good stuff.

  2. There is no easy way to find content that I'd find interesting.

I've noticed more and more people complaining about the information overload that comes with being subscribed to too many feeds and wanting some way to sift through the information. I spoke to someone at work yesterday who said he'd stopped using his aggregator to subscribe to individual feeds but instead just subscribed to RSS feeds of search results on Feedster. Similarly some RSS Bandit users subscribe to a lot of feeds and just use Search Folders to sift through them. Both approaches are slight variations of the same thing. The first person would rather read all information in blogs about a certain topic or keyword while the other would like to read all information about a certain topic or keyword from a select list of feeds.

The goal of RSS Bandit is to encourage both approaches. For the former we provide functionality for viewing Feedster [and other search engines that return RSS feeds] search results in the same manner one would view an RSS feed. In the next version we will provide the functionality to directly subscribe to such search results in two clicks (type search term in address bar, click the search button, results come back as an RSS feed, click subscribe to search results). The last piece is currently missing from RSS Bandit but will be in the next version. For the latter scenario where users subscribe to lots of feeds but only read the ones that match the searches in particular search folders I am considering improving the search capabilities by supporting query-like functionality. Currently you can create a Search Folder that shows all items that match a particular key word or key phrase. However sometimes you want to perform searches over multiple terms (e.g. “Microsoft AND Longhorn”) or fine tune certain searches by ignoring posts that may coincidentally match your keyword but are not of interest (e.g. “Java -coffee -indonesia”).

As for finding new interesting content, RSS Bandit already provides a way to search for feeds by keyword on Syndic8 but there is a bunch more that can be done. There are a bunch of other ideas I have about enabling users to manage the deluge of feeds on the Web and finding new interesting content. Including

  1. Only show posts that have been linked to by other feeds you are subscribed to. This would work for news sites like Slashdot or high traffic feeds like Blogs @ MSDN.

  2. Add a way to integrate with Technorati's Interesting Blogs and Interesting Newcomers lists whenever they are implemented.  

  3. Only show posts that have a certain threshold of incoming links (e.g. 5 or more) as measured by Technorati. This may be infeasible due to causing high load on Technorati.

I'm supposed to be hanging out with Lili Cheng in the next couple of days, I wonder what she'll think of some of these ideas and perhaps she can set me on the right path.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

March 3, 2004
@ 06:48 AM

I just checked in rudimentary support for Mark Nottingham's Atom Syndication Format 0.3 (PRE-DRAFT) and Mark Pilgrim's Atom Feed Autodiscovery (PRE-DRAFT) into the RSS Bandit CVS tree. I expect there to be bugs and incomplete feature support but it is good enough to read the various ATOM feeds being produced by Blogger since I can now subscribe to the ATOM feeds of Evan Williams and Steve Saxon.

The screenshot below shows Mark Pilgrim's ATOM feed.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

I just stumbled on a guide on How to Stop Receiving Credit Card Offers on Kuro5hin which I definitely need given the aggravating amount of junk mail I get from credit card companies. It begins

Tired of annoying "pre-approved" credit card offers? I sure am. According to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970 as amended in 1996, the four major credit bureaus have the right to sell your information to companies that want to offer you a credit card. Fortunately, the amendment also stipulated that credit bureaus must provide a way for consumers to have their names excluded from pre-approval lists. If you're a United States citizen sick of getting pre-screened credit card offers, this article will show you how to avoid receiving them

Lots of useful information here including a number you can call to opt out of credit card junk mail. According to the article, 1-888-5-OPTOUT is an automated service run jointly by the four main credit bureaus. With one phone call you can opt out of pre-screened mailings from all four bureaus.  Sweet.

A quick Googling confirms the information in the Kuro5hin article which seems to be a summary of the following PDF on the FTC website, Where to Go To "Just Say No"  .