Software patents — there’s plenty of debate as to whether they’re actually useful or not. For most people, they probably don’t care since it doesn’t affect them (well, not directly anyway). In fact, I’d hazard a guess that most people in my industry probably won’t give much of a thought about it, since it’s something that only a vocal minority group complains about.
Now, I’m not a lawyer (and trust me, intellectual property law is something that goes way over my head), but I’ve had my fair share of mucking around in this area since a chunk of my time at CiSRA was spent dealing with software patents (avoiding infringement, and drafting my own), so here are my thoughts on the whole debacle.
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I’m sure there have been substantial amounts of time and money invested into the design of toilet cubicles. I mean, these things are ubiquitous and have been around for a good deal of time. There’s gotta be some sort of usability studies on this topic. Surely anybody in the building construction industry would have no problems coming up with a functional toilet cubicle that allows you to get your job done, without fuss, and away you go.
Well, apparently not.
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Just a heads up that I’ve changed to a new web host, and so there might be some teething issues as things get migrated over.
It’s now on a US-based server and that means a whopping amount of bandwidth (3 TB per month, up from 6 GB) as well as a generous amount of disk space (300 GB, up from 1 GB). Oh, and it’s also half the price of my old one, which is always good…
Mmmm… off-site storage with backup — time for a bit of rsyncing.
Anyway, as it is plainly obvious, this blog is also sporting a new look. Joyce said she felt the previous look was kinda dark and pretty plain. Now, it’s bright and pretty plain. I happen to like simple layouts — less clutter and the focus is on content as opposed to eye-candy. What do you readers think of the new look? Drop a comment below.
Also, in upgrading Wordpress, there’s been some issues with UTF-8 encoded characters (something to do with the new Wordpress database format) and hence my old posts that contain Chinese characters in it are somewhat corrupted. There was a script to fix things, but it looks like it didn’t fix all of them.
Bah.
It must have been a case of Friday Afternoon Syndrome, or something… because it seemed like people here had a bit too much time debating a rather mundane topic.
But then again, they’re engineers. Nothing is mundane for engineers.
So it all started off with an email from someone from Admin requesting that meeting room etiquette be observed after a meeting has finished. In this particular case, that the meeting rooms be restored to their original configuration after a meeting has concluded.
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Yesterday, I walked into one of the kitchens at work and I found a brand new toaster. Now, this is not just any old toaster… it’s an electronic toaster and comes with LED displays and a slick, brushed metal construction that just yells out “nouveau”.
A few seconds later, another guy walks in and spots the brand spanking new toaster. He too, was momentarily mesmerised by the shiny new toy. Brief discussions involving reprogramming the toaster ensued.
By the end of the discussion, there was a sizable number of engineers gathered in the kitchen and the discussions turned into a brainstorming session (complete with scribbling on a nearby whiteboard) about how it should be possible to integrate a webcam and a wireless network into the toaster so as to facilitate efficient toast production.
It’s not exactly plans for worldwide domination, but it’s a small step…
I’m not sure about everyone, but I seem to pay pretty much no attention to email signatures. Now, I’m not a psychologist, but I think this has something to do with operant conditioning (see Joyce… I do listen).
To quote from Wikipedia:
Extinction is the lack of any consequence following a response. When a response is inconsequential, producing neither favorable nor unfavorable consequences, it will occur with less frequency.
So, in this case, the response is reading the signature. Reading the signature is inconsequential (and often full of disclaimers about receiving this email in error, yadda yadda). Every time I read an email signature, I get neither a positive nor negative (well, sometimes) response. Hence, according to the concept of extinction, I’m going to read email signatures with less frequency.
Oh, and the fact that I get many emails where the signature is longer than the body of the email itself, doesn’t exactly motivate me to read them at all.
Do you read signatures every time you get an email? Do you actually “notify the sender of this email and delete this copy” every time you receive an email in error? Feel free to drop a comment on your response to email signatures.
For the past year or so, I’ve been using Gallery for running my photo gallery. However, I felt that I wasn’t really utilising many of the features that it had to offer, and that it was perhaps a bit too much of an overkill – all I wanted was something that displays photos; something lightweight.
So, I decided to write my own from scratch. Well, not entirely from scratch, since I’ve integrated (a rather heavily modded) Lightbox into it.
The resulting PHP code is just 138 lines long, and chews up a lot less resources than Gallery. I also think it looks a bit tidier.
Anyway, take a look at it here. I’ve also added a few more albums to the gallery.
Feel free to comment about the new layout and please provide any suggestions on how you think it can be improved.
If you’re one of those people who like to use your notebook or laptop by actually sitting it on your lap and then tapping away, be prepared for a change in habit.
Only a month ago, news about a Dell laptop exploding in a Japanese conference made way for lots of interesting discussions on the safety of laptops. Today, it looks like another Dell laptop has just decided to protest its existence with a rather angry display of spontaneous combustion.
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Do you ever find yourself in the following situation:
You’re sitting in front of your computer with the web browser open, and you’re about to read the blogs of your friends. You go to a blog, only to find that it hasn’t been updated since the last time you visited it. You go to the next blog, but it looks like that one hasn’t been updated since your list visit neither. You repeat the process for all of the blogs that you know of and find out that only one or two of them have been updated.
If that sounds familiar to you, then perhaps you may be interested in the concept of web syndication.
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