By anders pearson •
i made saint today on perlmonks. saint is the highest level at perlmonks. i hope i don’t lose interest in it just because i “beat” it. oh well, i guess i still have other people’s high scores to try to beat.
<p>technically, to be canonized, you’re supposed to be dead and have performed at least two verifiable miracles. i’m hoping nobody comes around to enforce the ‘dead’ part. i wonder what the miracles i performed were…</p> By anders pearson •
lani and i managed to keep from going totally insane with boredom in dexter. i think that had something to do with all the allergy medication that lani had to take to deal with my parents cats; they made her basically sleep through most of the boring spells.
<p>on saturday we went down to wiscasset for Jesse and Alene’s wedding. nice little ceremony by the ocean. reception afterwards with about a billion batesies and an open bar. it was good to see people and catch up with them.</p>
<p>kamden dropped the real bombshell though. he informed us that he’s decided to leave the johns hopkins program in nanjing that he was doing to go to harvard this fall and take <em>pre-med</em> classes. yes, kamden has now decided to become a doctor. i guess this is probably only shocking to those of us who have known him for a while. he specifically mentioned that he might want to be a urologist — or, “peepee doctor” as kamden calls it. </p>
<p>the part-time job he’s applying for to help pay for school and get some experience sounds interesting though. he wants to work harvesting corneas, pancreases, and kidney’s from accident victims. i guess <em>somebody</em> has to do it.</p> By anders pearson •
lani is in dexter visiting me on vacation. i feel kind of bad because there really isn’t much of anything to do here. took her on a short tour of town: “there’s the abandoned shoe factory… and there’s a tractor driving through town… and those are some trees… “
<p>on saturday we’re supposed to go to a friend’s wedding in wiscasset. i have no idea what we’ll do until then.</p> By anders pearson •
to save some money, my sister recently decided that she should get a roommate to share her house with her. yesterday, her new roommate moved in. she brought with her a very large dog. well, actually, it’s only half dog. Misty is half collie and half wolf. i must say that she is an absolutely gorgeous dog and probably one of the most friendly and laid back dogs i’ve ever met. she’s enormous but with really soft fluffy fur and the most intense eyes i’ve ever seen on an animal.
By anders pearson •
went to the pearson family reunion on saturday in deep river, connecticut. quick summary: lots of swedes, potato salad and beer. deep river has a big fife and drum muster every year that we managed to catch. there must be a thousand fife and drum corps in new england and they were all there. it was truly amazing how long it went on; band after marching band. i was most impressed by the one that was truly a ‘fife and drum’ corps: just two people, a fife player and a drummer.
<p>back in dexter now. i’ll be hanging out at my parents’ and my sister’s house for the next two weeks. my friend cj is up with his drums and i’ve got my guitar so we expect to make a bit of noise. around august 3rd, lani will be coming up and we’ll be heading to our friend Jesse’s wedding.</p> By anders pearson •
probably by now, many of you have heard that Forgent Networks is claiming a patent on some of the compression techniques used in the JPEG image format and actively trying to get licensing fees from anyone who uses jpeg compression in their software. the patent was filed 16 years ago and they’ve waited until now to assert their ownership. of course now jpegs are so widely used that there’s no way the technology can really be eliminated or replaced without causing a lot of harm. so any companies that distribute software that handles jpegs are stuck either paying licensing fees or getting sued. open source developers are, of course, even more screwed. when Unisys pulled a similar stunt with a patent on the LZW compression used in gifs a few years ago, there were similar problems. many powerful open source image libraries such as perl’s GD library had to remove support for gifs.
<p>obviously, i’m not very happy about this whole situation. i wrote the following post on the <a href="http://www.webdesign-l.com/">webdesign-l</a> list:</p>
<p><blockquote></p>
<p>i’d really love to see someone with high paid lawyers attack the<br />foundations of software patents. patent law specifically forbids<br /> patenting mathematical processes and techniques. companies are somehow<br /> getting away with patenting computer algorithms. anyone who’s studied<br /> computer science and is familiar with things like the lambda calculus<br /> knows that any computer algorithm can be represented as a mathematical<br /> process.</p>
<p>in my <em>introductory</em> linear algebra class, we went over a basic lossy<br />compression algorithm similar to what jpeg uses. the idea is that an<br /> N x M matrix can be decomposed into two smaller matrices (eg, an N x 1<br /> and a 1 x M matrix) that, when multiplied together produce<br /> approximately the original matrix. if your original matrix is actually<br /> a bitmap where each element in the matrix represents a pixel, what you<br /> end up with is basic jpeg compression. for a small image (say 10<br /> pixels by 10 pixels), you can do the whole process by hand on a<br /> blackboard. the compression technique that the patent covers is a<br /> little more complex than that but is still essentially <strong>math</strong> which<br /> you shouldn’t be able to patent.</p>
<p>i’m not holding my breath for anyone to actually put this argument<br />forth in court though. any of the companies with enough money to<br /> challenge the foundations of software patents realizes that they<br /> benefit too greatly from them. microsoft, <span class=”caps”>IBM</span>, lucent, etc. all<br /> maintain huge portfolios of software patents, many over really trivial<br /> algorithms. between them they just make agreements: you can use my<br /> patents in your products if i can use your patents in my products. but<br /> they have patents on enough basic algorithms that they can effectively<br /> lock out any smaller competitors that they want to (or use the threat<br /> of patent lawsuits as leverage for takeover bids, etc).</p>
<p>software patents are the single greatest threat to open source<br />software development. particularly the stupid, simple patents and the<br /> patents like this one that pop up 16 years after the fact when the<br /> algorithms are already in too widespread use to replace.</p>
<p></blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/">eric meyer</a> then gave me a little hope by replying with link to a story about how<br /><p>in general though, i expect this same kind of situation to happen over and over again, causing serious harm to the advancement of computer science and software development for as long as software patents are legal.</p> By anders pearson •
walking by a construction site on 110th st today, i noticed a small (but very official looking) sign at about waist level that said:
TEMPORARY
SIAMESE
interesting.
i also picked up a copy of Amélie on DVD today. joy.
By anders pearson •
i was walking back from lunch today down amsterdam ave. with some coworkers. a light turns green and this black jetta peels out, does a wide U-turn into oncoming traffic and skids sideways into a parking space on the opposite side of the street, right next to where we were walking. the kind of move you’d see done by a stunt driver in an action movie. another guy is standing next to the spot, waiting on the sidewalk for the guy who was parking the car. he sees us watching, shrugs and says “it’s a rental”.
By anders pearson •
thraxil.dhs.org is gone. i warned you all weeks ago. please, if you link to this site, change the link to point to http://thraxil.org/.
<p>thank you.</p> By anders pearson •
read about this on ars technica.
<p>Universal Music has apparently smartened up a little and come out with the first (potentially) viable business model for selling music online. they took their catalogue of older, hard to find albums and put them online. for a fairly low rate, you can get unlimited access to download mp3s. i haven’t actually plopped down the money yet, but it looks intriguing.</p>
<p>i’ve always used napster and the various p2p networks to find music that i just can’t find for sale in stores on CD, and to check out new bands without having to actually spend money only to find that they suck.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.emusic.com/">emusic</a> seems to have come pretty far to meet my desire to find older, hard to find stuff. the prices are low enough (as long as you have a broadband connection) to be appetizing. download speeds are rumored to be pretty good. the ars technica article mentions that the mp3s are only 128kb/s, which isn’t ideal, but is as good as 80% of the crap you find on napster anyway. having somthing of a guarantee that the albums were ripped well is probably worth the cost of the subscription alone. all the other attempts at selling music online have been pretty lame; either they insist on using some copy protected format that prevents you from burning backups or mixes (and usually don’t have a linux player for) or the prices are too high and the selection too small.</p>
<p>the only thing holding me back from signing up now is that i’d still prefer a system where the record companies were just out of the equation entirely. if artists owned their own work and all got together and set up a similar system to sell their music online, that would be ideal. </p>
<p>so i’m considering signing up. whatever i do, i’ll be watching closely to see if it succeeds.</p>