wiredfool

It’s snowing, I was just about to make cookies, when the power went out and we heard a boom in the distance.

I think we lost a power transformer somewhere upstream of us. (turns out that it was a branch on a line) Here we go again. The last time this happened, it was a 22 hour whole island thing. This time, hopefully a lot less.

There is phone and internet, but I’ll be turning off the net to save power on the UPS.

I <3 upses.

Update— Power is back @ 7pm, so 4 hours down. Might think about that generator that I saw at the hardware store….
Update 2 — Down again, @ 5am. Rose saw the room lit in a brilliant blue than orange light.  That was a transformer… And back up at 7:40.

A couple of final things from Mindcamp —

• Fidalgo Bay Coffee was there as a sponsor and at times, as a barrista. Christian brought a nice espresso maker along that was making some really nice shots around midnight. The ones in the morning weren’t as good, but that might have been a tired palate or tired brain.
• There was a lot less in the way of user contributed snacks and caffeine, it was basically the left over soda from dinner and coffee for most of the night.
• There was another Tom Bihn giveaway, and this time Rose won one. It’s a smaller one that matches the one I won last time. I won a pound of Fidalgo Bay coffee this time, so I’d say that 90% of winning something at mindcamp is showing up. Just wish that there were more ipods to give away.

Got back from Werewolfcamp saturday night and slept for about 12 hours on Sunday night. I think i’m close to back to a normal sleep cycle, but I’m not so sure about the caffeine levels yet.

There was a werewolf game that ran from about 10pm till about 9:45am. I was ‘only’ in on it for 4 or 5 hours till I quit to sleep for a few hours. I joined in once in the morning, but my heart and brain weren’t really in it. I did manage to win a couple of times as one of two werewolves, and once as the seer for the village. Generally in the following games, I was a villager and got lynched early. But that happens.

I paid a short visit to the pre-coffee hacks coffee making session. We tried out some Yemen, but it wasn’t as impressive as it was in the coffee shop. The Espresso was great through, Christian was pulling straight shots of Fidalgo Bay coffee, and they were really nice. Smooth and not bitter. An excellent kick for a 11pm refresher.

Got to play with a lensbaby lens. I like, I want. It’s tilt-shift and soft focus, with strange color tweaking as well. It’s not a fidelity thing, it’s just kinda fun. I expect that this look will get old in a couple of years.

I didn’t wind up doing as much show and tell as I was expecting too, I think part of that was not actually getting out any of the toys till after midnight. I should have pulled out the Photobooth/Flickr thing at the signin, where we could have gotten a lot of people captured. i should have done a 5 minute demo or something.

I was up on stage for the Amazon Web Services talk, but I only talked for a minute or two, and spent the rest of the time handing the mic back and forth. Unfortunately, this talk conflicted with another one that I really wanted to go to — real world rails, or what happens after that first 15 minutes. I was disappointed that the UI review session didn’t happen for a lack of projector. I suspect that I could use the help.

• Pageless scrolling for large datasets, Demo
• Massive Blimplike thing. This sounds like something out of Snowcrash or Diamond Age. In that “Delivering something halfway around the world for 5 cents and helping the invisible hand” sort of way.
• Physical->Virtual machine converter. I’ve wanted this for a long time to do a functional backup of my windows box. And now VMWare is (for now) giving it away. The price for doing this sort of thing was about $100/machine the last time I checked, priced for the corporate it types, not the low budget ones.
• New version of Moo.fx, a light weight javascript library that now looks like it can do everythign that Iw as doing with scripticaulous, but at a lighter weight download. It’s doog for pages where people tend to refresh often to get new data but you’d rather not have them grabbing 100k of javascript everytine they do it.
• Mochikit Animator looks interesting.
• Dojo Chart Engine. No safari support. But I could use a graphing module, and I’m not finding ones that I like on the serverside.
• This chickpea curry is really good.

• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001
• 2000
• 1999

Millions of pages
Millions of links
But the one you seek
Is not here.
Chaeck your speling.

I think I’m a little too wired into the programming thing. My electronic life is
leaking into the rest of my life, and it worries me a bit. In the
programming world, I’ve determined that languages are easy to pick up, but
familiarity with the APIs are where the work is.

Yesterday I was going to a different grocery store than I normally do. My
current default grocery store is undergoing renovations; moving items
around and dropping 4 or 5 products that I usually buy. I had been
to this other one once before, and I wasn’t very impressed at the time.

This time, I looked at it, noticed a better wine section, better bulk teas,
and thought, ‘Ok, the API is different but better.’ I’ve got to change
API’s anyway, I might as well evaluate which one will be the easiest to go
up the learning curve.

Stores know about this. They design their layout to be comfortable enough that the shoppers know where things are, and that they feel a bit out of place if they go anywhere else. I was at the point where I could do a full shopping run in half an hour. But now that I don’t know where anything is, all of the stores are on equal footing again. (Except for Safeway, whos privacy policy annoys me)

Amazon.com has obtained a couple of patents on business methods that seem like a simple implementation of a database+cookie scheme. From my cursory reading of the patent, it appears that these are reasonably basic items that someone skilled in the art could come up with rather easily.

My own limited knowlege of the extant software patents would seem to suggest that there are very few that would be considered valid from a novelty or prior art point of view. The legal system being what it is, that view has little or no bearing on the realities of the situation.

The purpose of the patent system was to encourage innovation by granting a monopoly to the inventor to exploit the invention for a limited period of time. There are several reasons that this is not the effect when patents are granted for software.

In the software world, it is reasonably obvious that a tremendous amount of innovation is occuring without the patent system interfering. In addition, the patents that are granted are at least 2 years behind the leading edge of innovation. Since the pace of change is such that entire industries change between the application and awarding of a patent; the chance that a patent will still be an innovation is low and the chance that others will have independantly arrived at the same end is high.

Many of the arguments that have been put forward in defense of software patents allude to the amount of time spent on the idea Unfortunately, the time to generate the idea and the time required for the implementation of the idea are entertwined. Implementations are already protected by copyright, so there is no need for a patent there.

Patents prevent some reverse engineering efforts to ensure compatibility. Since a patent covers a process, even if you independently create every piece of that process in a clean room, you can still be infringing on a patent. This is an important consideration when there is a possibility for submarine patents.

Finally, the process of patents and patent defenses distract from the process of innovating. The effort required to get a patent puts it out of the reach of lone hackers, and puts a tremendous drag on small companies.

But in today’s climate, there are software patents, and they appear to be legally valid. In this sort of climate, Amazon is acting as they have to. They are protecting core business methods from being attacked by a patent poacher. This is a necessary step for one other legal reason.

Amazon.com has lots of minority shareholders, and their stock has been falling. In today’s legal climate, there’s a significant possibly that they will have to defend against minority shareholder lawsuits.

Not defending their patents is probably a good way to lose these lawsuits. If the patents aren’t defended, especially against direct competitors, it can be held as an example of management not excercising due diligence.

My conclusion is that there are too many lawyers (Hi Sis!) promoting a climate of litigation that prevents companies and individuals from doing what is right.

No Doubt, by ‘every study,’ I do not , of course, mean to include the study of how to be a pompous ass, which is the only study to which your offspring are likely to be inclined. *

It had to happen. There is an attempt to restrict what students at university can download off the net. Ok, so they’re surfing for pr0n, mp3’s, and political websites. They’re surfing for things that are not directly related to a class.

Good for them. Universities are dedicated to the expansion of knowlege. Even if it isn’t related to a class. I went to university at where the intention was to provide for study in every field for every person. And they sort of succeed.

Excepting (of course) the study of how to be a pompous ass.

The utility of a university is maybe 10% related to the goings on in the classroom. It’s who you meet. It’s the odd things that you can explore at 3am. It’s the research in the labs and the libraries. Finding that book that you’d never find if you were looking for it. The freedom to noodle.

Restricting speech and action at a University is a denial of the very reason for its existence.

But the university isn’t buildings, professors and students. It’s the collection of people in search of knowlege. When that search is restrained, the University dies. And restricting speech is a primary restraint.

* Quote from Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill 1988. p 3