jwg | Entries tagged with geekery

Repeating a phrase with emphasis on different words can be interesting because it makes you think about that particular item and variations.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

I have been naming my computers after Renaissance or Medieval composers for years. I am about to need two names since a new MacBook Air is on the way to replace my too heavy, too slow MacBook Pro and will I get a new iMac - 27in screen.

My current iMac (2010) is Gesualdo da Venosa; Robert's iMac (2007) is Clemens non Papa; my MacBook Pro (2009) is Ludovicus Episcopius; my iPad is Pierre de la Rue.

I'm thinking: Josquin des Prez and Guillaume Dufay.I don';t object to reuse and now I am using full names and not just last names.

Computers to be discarded:

Ockeghem is on the floor - it is a very old PowerPC Mac with 9.1 on it; I just tried to boot it up but something is wrong - doesn't see the screen.

Obrecht is a dual CPU PowerPC G3 (2003) Mac running of 10.2.8. It doesn't do WiFi WPA2 which is what my router does and there is no ethernet where it is so it is useless.

delaRue is a PowerBook G4 (2002) running 10.3.2.

In the past I have had computers named Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin (a Windows machine), Lassus, and Palestrina.

I have three old laptops in a closet - 2 Windows un-named and one Mac which was also delaRue.

In late May (May 29, 2014) at the end of the Project MAC 50th anniversary celebration that I wrote about here, there was a Multics reunion with a bunch of technical talks. The last scheduled item was a Panel Session led by me with 4 distinguished members of the Multics team in the late 60s'/early 70's. It was filmed and the video is now available. This was a project / product and follow-on that I worked on from 1967- 1988.

Here is the Agenda for the Multics session.

This 65 minute video is pretty interesting - it's not very technical so non-geeks should have no problem following it. You get a good picture of this project and other related topics and the politics associated with such projects - also a lot of vignettes of the people who worked on it, some of whom have been important figures in the industry.

Click here for the video
MulticsPanel2014

The Supreme Court just issued a unanimous decision disallowing the patenting of human genes. It's about time; the idea of patenting something discovered in nature is so ridiculous.

For a few years in the recent past I was a consultant on a number of patent suits - both defense and offense. The patents were mostly computer software (my area of expertise) and a few hardware. In the course of this work I read over 1,000 patents and studied 100-200 of them in detail. In my opinion most of these patents should never have been issued because they weren't original ideas or they were obvious.

One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a "person having ordinary skill in the art" would not know how to solve the problem at which the invention is directed by using exactly the same mechanism. That is pretty hard to check.

My understanding is that the patent examiners have very little time to review each application. And believe me it takes a lot of time because you have to relate the claims (the statements of what is being patented) to the often poorly-written design description which is needed to clarify what the claims actually mean. And then there is reference documentation and cited patents that are similar (but cited to show that this invention is something new) which should be checked and finally there is knowledge about the "state-of-the art" which is needed to judge whether the invention is actually new.

And then if a patent is issued and the holder sues for infringement a lot of sleuthing has to be done to defend the suit. I remember one patent that I worked on whose holder sued two companies for infringement. I thought the idea was clever but not really original and the patent shouldn't have been issued. The patent holder hadn't succeeded in making his own product.

Both cases were in Discovery Mode and thus I was given the source code and technical documentation of both products - there was a lot of it; if printed each wold have been ~1,000 pages or more.

It was interesting to note that one of the products was written in C and it was very messy code because the product had to be able to run on Macs, Windows, a DEC OS, a Novell OS and Unix and thus had to deal with machine and OS differences when compiled. How they ever got that mess to work is a good question. The other product was mostly written in Java which made it and was much easier to understand and I'd suspect was a more reliable product; it's design documentation was much clearer too.

I wrote some tools to examine the source code to look for potentially infringing code and think I found all the right stuff. I wrote up my findings, and went over it multiple times with the attorney. One case was going to go to trial and I didn't want to participate since it would have meant traveling to Chicago several times and hanging around with little to do; so I declined to do more work. My understanding was that neither case actually went to court (this is what usually happens), but there was some form of settlement. Both companies that were suing were bought by larger companies and I don't know what happened to the products.

If that patent hadn't been issued I and the attorneys wouldn't have earned any money; other than that nothing else in the world would be different. Patenting things that shouldn't be patented and then dealing with the subsequent law suits is a big industry that keep lots of people employed. There are people/companies who buy patents and then sue for infringement - they are called Patent Trolls. It is estimated that patent trolling in the US resulted in 29 billion dollars of costs in 2011.

On Tuesday I went to the Expo portion of Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012 - essentially a conference on the equivalent of social-networking in business. This used to be called Groupware and the academic side equivalent is CSCW (Computer Support for Cooperative Work). Going to these expos is about my only exposure these days to technology other than what I see on my screen or install on my computers.

I like to ask the demonstrators how their products support review or inspection of documents and relate this to my 20-years ago experience in this domain.

( Background about software inspection and our system )

In our system, called Scrutiny, inspectors look at the document on their computer and make annotations. Then at an appointed time they all sit at their screens, the moderator zooms his/her mouse over a portion of the document and that gets highlighted on everyone's screen along with the annotations made to that portion and the discussion ensues via the text messaging component to identify the defect and classify it. We first demoed at the CSCW Conference in the fall of 1992. We wrote a few papers - I was usually the lead author and among other places got the this one: Scrutiny: A Collaborative Inspection and Review System accepted to the European Software Engineering Conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

( What happened next )

None of the vendors that I talked to can easily support the synchronous meeting portion. Some use screen sharing which is a partial solution but no-one had the capability of allowing everyone to easily see other people's annotations (in our system this was automatic). Too bad, I still think this would be a useful function. There are some products available today - such as CodeCollaborator by SmartBear software that look like they do a pretty good job at this function but I've never seriously explored it.

( A bit further in the past )

--This is a repost -- last night's version didn't appear on friends (or at least some) pages for some odd reason. ---
I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (just in time since it I had to return it to the library today and can't be renewed).

It is a really fascinating book about this amazing person who was one of the most obnoxious people I've ever read about but yet an absolute genius as a business person and technical designer. Isaacson has done a nice job of writing about his whole life both as a person and as an inventor/business leader. Isaacson also wrote biographies of Kissinger, Ben Franklin, Einstein - so he's picked some other extreme personalities.

Jobs was overly obsessed with detail at every level from the big picture down to the shape of a screw on a case. When he was contemplating opening the first Apple Store he had a life-size mockup built in a warehouse so that it could be tested and changed - and there are lots of changes. He has patents on the glass used in the staircases in the stores. He really wanted to build a great company that made great products and pushed his people over the edge to do what he wanted. Some people got used to the fact that when he said "this is shit" he really meant that it wasn't nearly good enough, but that creative, intelligent discussions about the design and how to overcome various technical and non-technical issues would eventually lead to his saying it was great.

I liked this quote in a conversation Jobs had in 2008 with the Fortune managing editor. "So you've uncovered the fact that I am an asshole. Why is that news?"

I've been an Apple product user for a long time. My first one was a MacPlus I got in 1986. I'm writing this on Gesualdo da Venosa, my year and half old iMac. Robert's iMac is Clemons non Papa; my MacBookPro is Ludovicus Episcopius; I have an older dead iMac: Machaut (I need to extract the disk before getting rid of it); Obrecht (10 yrs old) and Ockeghem (15 yrs old) (running 9.1) are two old sort-of working macs and de la Rue is an old PowerBook that still works running 10.2. I have had Dufay, Lassus, and Palestrina. Josquin was my only Windows machine which I disposed although I still have the Windows XP image runnable on my iMac. (Yes, I like Renaissance composers). My iPod that I use at the gym is at least 8 years old. I don't yet have an iPad or an iPhone.

I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (just in time since it is due back at the library tomorrow and can't be renewed).

It is a really fascinating book about this amazing person who was one of the most obnoxious people I've ever read about but yet an absolute genius as a business person and technical designer. Isaacson has done a nice job of writing about his whole life both as a person and as an inventor/business leader. Isaacson also wrote biographies of Kissinger, Ben Franklin, Einstein - so he's picked some other extreme personalities.

Jobs was overly obsessed with detail at every level from the big picture down to the shape of a screw on a case. When he was contemplating opening the first Apple Store he had a life-size mockup built in a warehouse so that it could be tested and changed - and there are lots of changes. He has patents on the glass used in the staircases in the stores. He really wanted to build a great company that made great products and pushed his people over the edge to do what he wanted. Some people got used to the fact that when he said "this is shit" he really meant that it wasn't nearly good enough, but that creative, intelligent discussions about the design and how to overcome various technical and non-technical issues would eventually lead to his saying it was great.

I liked this quote in a conversation Jobs had in 2008 with the Fortune managing editor. "So you've uncovered the fact that I am an asshole. Why is that news?"

I've been an Apple product user for a long time. My first one was a MacPlus I got in 1986. I'm writing this on Gesualdo da Venosa, my year and half old iMac. Robert's iMac is Clemons non Papa; my MacBookPro is Ludovicus Episcopius; I have an older dead iMac: Machaut (I need to extract the disk before getting rid of it); Obrecht (10 yrs old) and Ockeghem (15 yrs old) (running 9.1) are two old sort-of working macs and de la Rue is an old PowerBook that still works running 10.2. I have had Dufay, Lassus, and Palestrina. Josquin was my only Windows machine which I disposed although I still have the Windows XP image runnable on my iMac. (Yes, I like Renaissance composers). My iPod that I use at the gym is at least 8 years old. I don't yet have an iPad or an iPhone.