Blackboard wins patent infringement case

This is yet another example of patents out of control. A company named Blackboard apparently “invented” the idea of allowing a single user to operate with different roles for different courses in an online learning system.

More here

How, oh how can this be considered patentable. The concept of roles, and the ability to assign the same user different roles in different concepts has been around since the dawn of information systems. This is not an original idea!!!

All I can hope is that Obama’s promised patent reforms will address issues like this one.

More and more, I’m leaning toward the position of “NO SOFTWARE PATENTS”. This based on the fact that I have yet to see software patent that actually has merit.

Patents getting ridiculous

IBM is trying to patent the practice of giving customers free stuff while they wait:
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/240588926/article.pl

Something has to be done about the sorry state of the US patent system. Just about anything can be patented, opening the doors for patent trolls to sit back and wait for someone to become successful, then sue for patent infringement.

The patent system used to be about protecting inventors from being robbed by big business. It has been perverted into a system that allows lawyers to rob inventors with the help of the almighty corporation.

Ankylosing spondylitis

I have been living in pain for the past 5 years or so. Recently it has gotten so bad that I can’t sleep, sit, or watch TV without feeling like there is a vice tightening around my rib cage.

Thankfully the last X-ray has allowed the Doctor to give me a tentative diagnosis. Apparently I have arthritis. Specifically, Ankylosing spondylitis. Read more about the condition on wikipedia.

The really good news is that the good doctor has prescribed some anti-inflammatory pills to get help stop the inflammation of my spine.

Wow! What a difference. When I’m on these meds, I’m like a new man. No back pain … for the first time in 5 years. No more limping, and crying out in agony whenever I need to roll over in bed.

Bring on the roller hockey. Bring on the football. Bring on .. whatever. I’m back!

Who needs a tower anymore?

I have recently moved from a managed hosting service to a dedicated web server where I essentially have my own machine. This is nice because it gives me full root access to install whatever I like and the performance is superb. However I’m on my own for all of the little things that I used to take for granted.

The first thing that I faced was the need for a DNS server. I’ll leave that adventure for another post. The next thing I realized was that I am responsible for my own backups. After pricing around for a backup server I decided that it would be just as well to do the backups locally (i.e. periodically download copies of important files to a local machine. I have been living in a laptop world for the past 4 or 5 years so my desktop computer situation is sorely lacking – and for this sort of thing I do need a desktop with a persistent internet connection.

At first I was thinking of just purchasing a cheap old G4 tower (I would rather at least have a mac). I recall that they used to be pretty fast, and you don’t need much for back-ups. Then it occurred to me that if I’m going to put a desktop computer into my little one-bedroom apartment, I might as well multi-task it. Craigslist has a good selection of G4 towers in the 400MHz range for about $150 or $200. Then I saw a Quicksilver 800Mhz model for only $220, and I started to think a little bigger.

“If I had a Quicksilver model, it would run Leopard, and ….” . Well the Quicksilver guy never returned my email (of course he didn’t post a phone number), so I started to evaluate my decision to upgrade to a Quicksilver. I asked the question: “How much faster is a Quicksilver than the Sawtooth (400MHz) model?” Thanks to lowendmac.com for providing benchmarks for all of the old macs so I could make this comparison. I noticed that Lowendmac listed something called a “Geekbench” score for almost all of its computers. Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmarking program that ranks a computer’s performance on a number of factors. I then stumbled across this little goldmine of a page that compares the performance of all Macs G4 and up.

The power mac G4 450MHz scores a 309
The Quicksilver 867 MHz scores 415

This is a small improvement, but nothing to write home about.

This is where trouble started brewing in my mind. I currently use a Powerbook G4 1.67GHz for my job and my fiancée has a Macbook 2.0 GHz intel core duo, so I thought I would see how they ranked so that I could make a comparison in tangible terms that I could relate to.

My powerbook scored a 774.
The macbook scored a 2534!!!

Wow. I didn’t realize just how much a performance difference there is between the G4 models and the current Intel core duo models. There is a huge difference.

In fact, up until last night, I was living in a world where I still thought that the G5 would hold its own with just about anything out there. The single processor G5 1.8GHz scores a 1049 on the Geekbench. These machines are currently going for around $800 to $1000 on craigslist. Even the dual processor 2.7GHz only scores a 2251 Рless than my fianc̩es laptop. Just a note, the G5 duals go for anywhere from $1000 to $2500 on craigslist.

So I got another thought. For a long time, I considered the smaller computers like IMacs and Mac Minis to be inferior to the tower computers. Hence for some reason I had the idea that it was better value to buy an older G5 tower than to buy a new Mac mini. Well, the Mac mini 1.83GHz Intel core duo with 1 gig of RAM retails for $649! And its Geekbench score is 2365! Higher than the mamoth G5 of yesteryear.

In fairness the latest towers are now ranking over 10,000 on the Geekbench charts, but you’ll be spending well over $5000 to get that sort of machine. For average home use and amateur video editing I can’t imagine that the added power would warrant the added price tag.

So, long story .. well… long… I bought a new Mac Mini. It will serve as my universal business machine. I will be primarily using it for backups, but it will work out nicely for video editing, email, and pretty much everything else too.

And – its footprint is negligible. Its about the size of a cable model, and it is silent!

So where does that leave the old towers of yesteryear that people are asking $1000 and $2000 for? Sure they have more expandability, but most people out there will never want to expand. And in the era of USB2 and firewire 800 it is easy to expand externally. E.g. I’m running two external hardrives on my Mac mini for my backups.

The moral of his long, drawn-out story is to think before spending money on an older beefed up tower when you can get better performance, smaller footprint, and a sexier look from a new Mac mini.

Anti abortion == Irrational Christian Conservative

Last night we filmed yet another Steve Hannah show. This filming went a little different than usual in that we got on to the subject of abortion and decided to ride the debate out for a while. This was different because it was very serious in contrast to the usual light but absurd view points usually expressed on the show.

One thesis that was proposed was that the Pro-choice lobby has effectively won the fight already by causing anyone who would defend an anti-abortion stance as irrational Christian Conservatives who are making the stand based solely on their religious beliefs. In reality this is far from the truth as there are many logical reasons to oppose abortion, not the least of which being on the grounds that it is murder (you don’t have to be a conservative Christian to believe that murder is wrong).

In today’s climate it is very unfashionable to be against abortion. For politicians it is tantamount to political suicide. If you look at the democratic presidential candidates in the US (Obama and Clinton) both support the pro-choice movement. I’m not going to question their motives for their beliefs, but the fact is, they wouldn’t have a chance of winning office if they stood on the other side of the fence on this issue. Of course Republican candidates are far more likely to support the anti-abortion camp, but they have been wearing the reputation of stuffy old conservative Christian white man for centuries, so this is no surprise. Perhaps this is where the perception that anti-abortionists are all irrational Christian conservatives – the fact that on the political level, many of them actually ARE!

If a man is against abortion, does that make him callous and uncaring? Certainly he cannot fully understand how it feels to carry a child, to give birth, or to have an abortion. He can only try to empathize. With an issue like abortion, though, would emotions and feelings not serve only to cloud the matter? Can we not talk about abortion policy without invoking how it makes someone feel? Can we stick purely with logical and moral arguments and not delve into the black hole of a woman’s feelings.

During the debate, one of the hosts introduced another interesting thesis: that one can be pro-choice and anti-abortion at the same time (I am paraphrasing); That perhaps the reason why the abortion issue is so heated is because any legislation that takes a person’s choice away as it pertains to their own body (as an anti-abortion legislation does) oppresses that class of people. That an anti-abortion law would serve as yet another symbol of woman’s sub-ordinance to man which has been forced on women since the dawn of civilization. What, then, if we take the stance that a woman retains the choice of whether or not to abort – but that we disagree with any choice to abort barring extreme circumstances? If we take this position, we are basically hoping for hegemony (i.e. we allow the woman to have an abortion but we hope that she will choose not to).

Perhaps this stance is more inline with our society’s values, as democratic society is largely based on hegemonic control, and not on the iron hand. An interesting thesis whose adoption as a belief would certainly be less likely to elicit judgement as an irrational Christian Conservative.

Patch and Diff

This post is basically a note to self because I find myself having to do a google search every time I want to do some diffing and merging of file trees.

If I want to create a patch to bring the source tree in www up to date with the source tree in www_new, I would do:

#diff -urp  www www2 > mypatch.patch

Note that this doesn’t include creating new files or deleting old ones (i.e. applying this patch will only modify files – not create or delete files).

The flags are:
-u : Unified format – not sure why this is necessary, but presumeably this is a preferred format of diff.
-r : Recursive so that it will merge files in subdirectories too.
-p : ??

Now to apply this patch we would:

#cd www
#patch -p1 < ../mypatch.patch

We entered the www directory because that is the directory we want to patch.

Flags:
-p1 : This means we will be stripping 1 level of the path from each file. This is because we made the patch from the parent directory so all of the files will be specified with paths beginning with www/ or www2/ . But our new context should only contain the portion within www.

ReCaptcha: The “human” folding project

If you’ve used the internet even casually over the past few years you have probably experienced CAPTCHA already. From wikipedia:

A CAPTCHA (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human.

It is common to see an image like this:

and be asked to type the letters you see into a text field. If you answer correctly then your input is accepted. Otherwise you are assumed to be a robot, and your input is rejected.

CAPTCHA is an annoyance to the user because it makes him spend extra time every time he submits a form on the internet. It is, however, necessary, thanks to spammers.

This “annoyance” sparked an idea in some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, to try to derive some good out of this situation. They made a key observation about CAPTCHAs:

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

If this catches onto some high-traffic web sites (say Facebook, or Gmail), imagine the productivity that we can attain in digitizing these old books.

I have to say that this is one of the cleverest ideas I have seen in a long time. It takes wasted energy and transforms it into useful energy.

Using sed to convert PHP short open tags to proper tags

In the good ol’ days of PHP is was quite accepted to just use <? to signify the start of PHP code. PHP installs by default would accept this short notation so you could safely distribute scripts that made use of it. However, in the days of XML, this short notation is a little more dangerous, so PHP now comes with short_open_tags turned Off.

This is a short little command line snippet that uses sed to convert all of the php files in a specified directory from the old short tags, to the proper and full <?php tags:

for file in *.php
do
sed -i 's/<?$/<?php/' $file
sed -i 's/<? /<?php /' $file
done

Enjoy!