Extreme XML: Revamping the RSS Bandit Application. Dare Obasanjo revisits his RSS Bandit C# application and improves on its previous design by using various XML features of the .NET Framework to build a rich .NET client application. [MSDN: .NET Framework and CLR]

Auto-complete text boxes.

There's a great new article up on Sitepoint describing a technique for adding auto-complete functionality to normal HTML text input fields using Javascript. The code uses a whole bunch of browser-specific code, but it has to thanks to the unconsistent ways in which different browsers handle text selection ranges. Unfortunately the article doesn't actually provide a demo of the code in action, so I've posted one here. It's a very nice effect. [Simon Willison's Weblog]

Neatly done.

Skyping.

Just got Skype.  Try Skyping me using the Skype button under my portrait.  There has been some problem finding people so Skype might be mostly hype.  It's VoIP technology might be up to snuff, but it sure is difficult finding anyone to talk to.  If situation doesn't change, it's being uninstalled after a few days.  Yipes!

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Software Patents from the Inside. There has been much lamentation and gnashing of teeth in recent times about the evils of software patents. There is wild controversy about whether the whole idea is fatally flawed—for example, Dave Winer has argued that software patents are bad economics and (in the U.S. context) constitutionally unsound. Further, there is a widely-held belief that the US PTO has been too uncritical, and insufficiently attuned to prior art, in issuing such patents. Here’s a confession: I currently have two software patents in the US PTO pipeline, and did some work on them last week. Herewith some narrative of what the process is like from the inside, with commentary on the broader issues... [ongoing]

Interesting article, worth a read.

I am struck by this:

Are Software Patents a Broken Idea? ... It felt much more rigorous than the way we go about inventing new technology in the software space...

and reminded of an old Morcombe and Wise sketch with Andre Previn in which Eric is supposedly playing some classical piece but plays Chopsticks - to a complaint from Mr Previn Eric replies "its all the right notes, but may be not in the right order".

I just don't see invention in the software space. Each new line of code I write could be considered an invention - rather too many US patents are really expressed by just a relatively few lines of code - and often they are an old tune just played in a different order. 

Yesterday I invented a way of turning floating point numbers into strings ('cos an OS routine was broken) without relying on floating point libraries (it was an invention to me) - should I (try to) patent it? Today I invented a way of passing licensing information around within a process space - should I patent it? Twaddle I should, both are built on other library code and both took about 5 minutes of thinking.

Ray Ozzie describes Saving the browser

Interesting, and includes this loverly line:

I am quite embarassed to say that we frankly didn’t “get” what was so innovative about this newfangled “Web” thing, given the capabilities of what had already been built.

He wasn't the only one - I spent my early days of dealing with the web (1994/5) thinking "crikes this is primitive" - though that being primitive has largely what as led to its success; there're ain't much more openess than plain text commands whizzing around everywhere rather than difficult to unpick (proprietory) binary data structures, but I digress.

My problem with Mr Ozzie's contribution is that, IMHO, he does little more than demonstrate OLE:

In essence, the linked-to document we’re about to open has embedded CD records that describe 1) that an object is to be embedded into the page, 2) the class of object (in this case “EXCEL”), 3) the pointer to the object (in this case X:TEST.XLS”, which is a reference to a spreadsheet object that is potentially on a remote server computer represented by drive letter X., and 4) a parameter indicating whether or not this object should be immediately activated upon browsing, or whether the object needs to be double-clicked before activation.

The patent document describes that OLE/OpenDoc exist and that they are not prior-art for the patent (inability to work over the network). As I've said before - I don't see how this is so, and all Mr Ozzie's article does is say to me, yep, OLE/OpenDoc is what this patent is about. I don't understand the US patent system (soon to be in a European country near you - gawd help us).

Good grief, following on from my bit about the patent, I wandered around that amazing place the Internet. Products I haven't touched for years (they are no longer published) and yet there's a number of mentions. Honourable mention is awarded to Magpie for this:

....Syracuse were among a number of similar magazines which used Longman Logotron's Magpie browser which held sway in the days long before HTML....

Ahhh, the days before HTML when everyone thought multimedia was it. On usenet I found an announcement about Magpie and Genesis from 1993 and our support for Acorn Replay - the external application that played by video files.

A demo Zeepe 7 application has appeared over in Zeepe Applications:

Originally written for IE4 some years ago (about 1997/8), this games presents randomly generated sums for drill'n'skill excercises.

More on US Patent 5,838,906 (Eolas)

IMHO, the patent covers the following:

1. The 'automatic' invocation of an external interactive program in response to seeing some data stream within the 'source' document - not in some document 'attached' to the source document, but the original document.
2. There must be external (to the original document) data for the external program to access.
3. There can be communication between the host browser and the external program.
4. The external program can contact, by some means, for whatever purpose, a process running on the (originating) server.

What is not covered.

1. Invocation of non-interactive code (e.g. provision of utility functions with no interactive function).
2. Automatic download and installation of the required code for the external program.
3. Invocation of code that does not access the external data source. Applets etc that simply provide alternative forms, UI, visualisation from client side collected data are not covered. 
4. Invoked code that cannot communicate with the invoking browser nor appear within the browser window.

I must admit that I don't understand how OLE/OpenDoc is not prior art - just saying 'make OLE/OpenDoc work on a network' doesn't appear much, if anything, of an invention, http is nothing more than a simple file system - but there we go, I don't understand the US patent system. Nor do I understand how client/server RPC is supposedly an invention in 1994.

There were multimedia apps in the UK in the early 1990s on RISCOS that did video playback in the window - one in particular (Genesis) was very text file based (it had text documents that refered to external data) and could have very simply supported (i.e. no changes to the underlying code) what Eolas claim assuming that Acorn/anyone had written a module (http:) that worked like other RISCOS filing systems (adfs:/scsifs:/netfs:/strangedevicenamefs:) - Genesis did whole file reads so this would have been a doddle. I wrote a different one called Magpie that did similar things but worked on a single file for the whole MM document, so supporting http: would have been a bit more difficult. The data was stored in a compressed binary format (computer stored text does not equal binary data - discuss). What's funny is I've been meaning for years to rewrite Magpie using HTML - I did some of the work a few years ago - but now I won't be able to because of this patent, just because HTML runs over http - perhaps if I write it in HTML but it won't access a server, just the local file system then it won't breach the patent....

 

SMEs don't know, don't care about broadband. Why should they? [The Register]

And the transformation was? v. silly article.

Ellison sees new software pricing model. SAN FRANCISCO -- The model of pricing enterprise software on a per-processor basis should be replaced with a flat annual fee that allows businesses to use as much software as they want, Oracle Corp.'s chairman and chief executive officer Larry Ellison said Tuesday. [InfoWorld: Top News]

"Where I think we'll go is towards enterprise licensing. ... You pay an annual recurring fee and use as much software as you want, and I think that's a much more sensible model to use."

Oh good - we do use the word enterprise, though the standard license could also be considered an enterprise license. Yep, its a sensible model and has been for years.