2007-02-04 Patents Are Only For Old Machines
Patents Are Only For Old Machines
When walking in the countryside, we discovered an old and rusted farming machine for the harvest of the hay. The machine by itself looks very strange but I was surprised by the metal label on top : "patent melichar-hajek". Yes, a part of the machine was patented (around 1944, thanks Google for the new patent search). I took a picture of it for the history… I'm still convinced that the patent system is an outdated system for today's world.
2007-02-11 RSS Everything
RSS Everything ? or how to improve RSS to follow the UNIX principle ?
RSS is nice and its potential is very big. Ok, that's not a new statement and a bunch of interfaces in the Web2.0 (and the old Internet too ;-) jungle are extensively using RSS. But what's the issue ? The simplicity to generate RSS feed is not really integrated in the operating systems. Last week, I had a very simple question : "How can I generate a static RSS feed from a local directory ?"… I thought there were already a nice free software doing so. not really. There are some interfaces to the Apache HTTP server to make a dynamic RSS feed like Apache::RSS but it's dynamic and rely on the HTTP server. So I made rssdir.py, a very small Python script to generate an rss recursively from any directory on the filesystem. The interface is still very minimal but it works :
rssdir.py --prefix http://www.foo.be/cours/ . >rss.xml
It will generate recursively an RSS feed from the current directory and using the specified prefix for the urls. It's not really rocket science. The script could be improved but I'm still wondering why we don't have a collection of rss tool à la Unix. Maybe it's coming from the use of XML in the RSS format. It's more error prone to have a kind of "cut" or "grep" or "cat" using RSS format. But it should be possible to have something like that :
lsrss /etc/passwd | updaterss --description="passwd last update" >/u/barfoo/web/mysec.xml lsrss --perm=777 / | mergerss /u/barfoo/web/mysec.xml
The idea is to benefit from the feed reader use. The 'mergerss' is a kind of cat for RSS format file where you are able to merge the items of two (or more) RSS files and create a new RSS file. Like that, any Unix user could be able to create their own feeds from any information available to them under an Unix shell. Of course the mergerss command has to take care of the pubDate value to keep the items ordering. I have to dig into it. Maybe I'll found some blocking situation but that could be useful (at least for me).
2007-02-17 Being Tagged
Being Tagged
Jean-Etienne tagged me : it's a game where you share five things about yourself that relatively few people know. Jean-Etienne triggers me about privacy and this "blog-tag" game . As I'm still free to participate to the game and select the five things that I want to share. I think I'll voluntary "sacrifice" a small part of my privacy for playing the game :
- I don't drink alcohol. Just because life is too short to add an additional risk. Don't worry I still have a lot fun.
- More than seven years ago, I met my lovely girlfriend (should I say my wife now…) in a party. The funny part is I was invited to meet another girl. At the end, random is often more efficient than organized rendezvous.
- I have some half-sisters and half-brothers around but I have no contact with them.
- Sometimes ago, I have swum in an exterior public pool at three o'clock in the morning. I accessed the exterior pool by climbing the wall. For my defense, the temperature was really high and I was younger.
- There is no point five. In other words, I'm a big fan of Monty Python and their surreal humor.
I won't explicitly "blog-tag" anyone I just have some people in my blog roll who were never "blog-tagged". So if you have the envy and you are willing to "sacrifice" some privacy… it's time to take your keyboard.
2007-02-17 Simplicity and Complexity
Simplicity and Complexity
John Maeda is an artist and graphic designer working at MIT media lab. I just read his last book : The laws of simplicity. I was always very impressed by his imagination on how to use computers to generate art (if you are interested, you can have a look at Maeda@Media). His last book is about simplicity, a nice reading and useful book if you are planning to design a hardware, a software or a web service. The small issues : the cover is far away from being simple. The last part was a little bit unclear or unfinished to my taste. At the end, it's a good book for gathering ideas or paths for building simpler products/services. The path is complex to build simpler services/products.
Tags: simplicity design maeda art
2007-02-25 There Is No Ethical Patent
I have been to the FOSDEM 2007 this Saturday, a great free software event. I won't talk about the event itself but about the move I saw from FFII regarding the patents. They started a new initiative called ethipat in order to promote the creation of a new ethical patent system. The discriminations exposed on the ethipat website are shared by all the opponents of software patents. I would like to sign their pledge but there is something important that we should keep in mind. Why do we want to continue in a 'patent system' ? Why not simply improving the use of an open publication scheme for the industry ? Software is covered by copyright and authors'rights why not better excluding software from the patent system. and promoting the use of authors'rights in the perspective of innovation and its metric. The main advantage of copyright is its very low cost and its automatic assignment. Why not improving a registration process of copyright and authors'rights (for SME, large companies or individual authors) that could be used as a better metric, an open publication scheme and help to reduce the volume of orphan works. I fully agree with FFII regarding the current situation of the patent system… but is it worth to invest in another broken patent system ?
Update 2007 03 04 : FFII has posted a clarification about the ethical patent campaign. I agree on the point regarding that the disclosure process in the patent system is not working. Every programmer knows that's often impossible to implement anything from a patent description as it is often rewritten by lawyers. But jumping in the patent system for building a new patent system based on general good principle is dangerous just because not all the players in the patent are playing fair. Promoting existing authors rights as an industrial measure and metric for innovation looks more useful in my eyes. I hope that FFII will clearly state in their campaign that software/computer programs are only protected by the authors rights /copyright and not by the broken patent system.
Tags: innovation patent nosoftwarepatent fosdem ffii copyright
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