Given the date and content of the previous post, I thought the title of this one is somewhat appropriate…

Anyway, in the five months since that post, Joyce and I got married, went to New Zealand on our honeymoon, moved into our new place and have started to settle down at our new place.

For some photos from the wedding taken by Jenny, go to her website and follow these instructions:

1. Click on either the FLASH or HTML portfolio link.
2. Click on CLIENTS down the bottom.
3. Enter as password: “wdkj090328″ (colour) or “wdkj090328bw” (black & whites)

For some photos from the honeymoon, I wouldn’t hold my breath because I haven’t really gotten around to going through them yet… requires more emotional and mental juice than I have spare at the moment.  Hopefully they’ll be done in the next few weeks.

On another note, I’ve finally signed up for World of Warcraft.  It’s great to while the hours away between the time when Joyce sleeps (she sleeps early) and when I actually feel sleepy.  It requires virtually no mental activity (at least not at my n00b level anyway), and provides just enough stimulus to not be boring.  Great for zonking out after a tiring day at work.

One thing that I’ve found interesting is that the Auction Houses in the game are a fairly close analogue to real life markets.  At the end of the day, you’re faced with the big question “How much is this worth?” (pricing).  I’ve had my account for about four weeks, and really only started paying attention to the AH for about a week or so.  I’ve written an addon to mine the AH data for analysis and so far in the 3-4 days that I’ve been “trading”, I’ve made about 300g.  Not bad for about 15 mins each day on the AH… could just be beginner’s luck

Another thing I find amusing is the almost Pavlovian “ding! grats” response.  For those who aren’t familiar, whenever someone gains a new level, they shout out “ding!” and almost always you’ll get a bunch of people who reply with “grats”.  I think I’ll try an experiment where one weekend I’ll just march into an AH (where I believe it’s impossible to level up) and just yell out “ding!” just to see what responses I get…

Anyway, thanks to an inadvertent over-consumption of caffeine during the evening, it’s now almost 2am and I’m still sitting here unable to sleep, so I’m sorting out some wedding stuff.  I’ve written some Perl/LaTeX bits and pieces to auto-generate the placecards, and the order-of-service contents.  All that’s left now is to actually get the content finalised and then it’s off to the printers.

Five weeks left and counting…

Grace and Chris’ Wedding

MKC 2008

Melbourne Trip

CCC Combined Houseparty 2008

Susie’s Graduation

City B&W Night Shoot

Joyce’s M Clin Psych Graduation

Peter and Winnie’s Wedding

Muso Retreat 2008

James and Bertie’s Wedding

RICE Regenerate 2008

RICE Rally 2008

Engage 2008

KT and Erica’s Wedding

Anyway, I never thought I’d come across one of these, but for one of the properties, I found this Special Condition in the contract:

The Vendor discloses that there may have occurred within or upon the property the most extreme human and/or other obscenities the Purchaser can imagine. Without limiting the scope and meaning of “obscenities”, they may include extreme acts in violation of the criminal and other law, acts of sacrilege, Satanism, hedonism, acts in abuse of culture or custom and acts calculated or likely to induce disgust, dread, horror, repugnance and/or revulsion on any scale in good men and women.  The purchaser acknowledges that it is a matter for his due diligence to exercise his own imagination for the purpose of this Special Condition.

I wonder what happened…

In a nutshell, the participants were asked to watch something that mimiced loading of medical websites, and were asked questions about these sites.  Thrown in for good measure were some fake popups, and the researchers were really only interested in how the participants would respond to these popups.

Now, I haven’t actually read the full experiment and its findings, so I can only go by what the article says.  Apparently, the conclusion was that users are still clueless to popups because they’d click on them even when they’re fake.  I’ll let you read the article yourself for the gory details.

I wonder whether the researchers considered the fact that people probably cared less about malware on public university computers, than their own.  It’d be interesting to repeat the experiment, but the participants were required to view the websites on their own computer.  Would they expect to see the same “idiocy” rate?

There have also been other things to prepare for such as for a place to live in. Hopefully when Keith’s work releases their hold on him he will have time to look into getting us a loan. But most importantly, these past few months have been a good time to think about marriage itself, and not just the wedding. The wedding is just one day and sure, it’s an important day but I believe that one should also prepare adequately for the challenges of marriage.

From doing the pre-marital marriage inventory, Keith and I have found that our ‘growth areas’ aka weaknesses are conflict resolution, communication and something else I can’t remember. It’s been really helpful to sit down and formally think through things with an older, wiser and impartial third party. I’m thankful to God that Keith and I have many strengths together: marriage expectations, relationship roles, spiritual beliefs and leisure activities. It’s going to be interesting in our next session discussing the contribution of our family of origin into our relationship.

Please pray for us as we prepare not just for our wedding, but also for a lifetime together of commitment, love and service to one another and to our Lord. Over the months God has really hit it home that I can do nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. So please pray that we would love and follow Jesus and allow the richness of that to overflow into our love for one another.

Anyway, Joyce and I recently met up with the minister who will be conducting the ceremony.  He seems like a very nice guy, and full of wisdom — he reassured us that after being in the business of marrying people for 37 years, he can run the day with his eyes closed.

One of the things that he mentioned was regarding the part where he would ask the ceremony attendees “… if anybody has any legal reasons as to why these two should not be married, please speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Apparently, a celebrant can stop the wedding in accordance with the Marriage Act if any of the following circumstances are met (more or less summarised from here):

1. Either of the couple are not above the legal age to be married.
2. Either of the couple are currently already lawfully married to someone else.
3. The couple are related to one another (ancestor/descendant, or whole/half-blood sibling)
4. Consent from either parties is not real (e.g. duress, mistaken identity, mentally impaired)

If nobody can provide any evidence to support any of the above statements, then the marriage is considered lawful in accordance with the Marriage Act.  Should someone decide to run down the aisle and do the whole Hollywood-esque “… but I love him/her!” spiel with associated ensuing drama, then it’s “tough cookies” [I believe that's the phrase he used].  More interestingly, he could take the matter to court and the magistrate can award all wedding costs to be paid by that person.

On the subject of weddings, congrats to Nat and Sally-Ann on tying the knot yesterday!  Hope you guys really enjoy married life and all that it brings.

Now, this all sounds pretty normal.  However, the only problem was, I pulled out a ticket that expired a while ago by mistake.  (I really should get rid of these old tickets from my wallet…)

If the whole purpose of a revenue protection officer is to protect revenue, then these guys arn’t exactly doing a very satisfactory job.  I’ve seen plenty of times when people just walk through the barriers without a ticket, sometimes in the view of such officers and other station staff, who don’t seem to care much about it and continue chatting with their friends.

In a sense, I don’t blame them. Having read an article on SMH regarding the powers (or rather, the lack thereof) of transport officers, it must be somewhat difficult for them to do anything considering the offender has the right to walk away without being detained (and since I’m not a lawyer, I’ll just assume the article is factually correct).

Which then begs the question:  why have revenue protection officers that don’t actually have the necessary powers to do their job?

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.

Firstly, there’s a noticeable difference between your typical patent of a new can opener (aluminium food receptacle content exposure apparatus), and a software patent — the latter being something that is purely abstract. Whilst you can hold a can opener in your hand and play with it, you can’t do the same with software. Software patents simply grant the holder a monopoly on an abstract idea.

Of course, the whole idea of a patent is to grant exclusive rights to the inventor(s) to exercise their invention. This means that they can sue anybody that they catch infringing upon their patent. From a business perspective, this is great — you spend lots of money to come up with an invention so you don’t want a competitor (or anybody else) to be able to just duplicate what you’ve done (regardless of whether they came up with the same idea independently or not). Patents grant companies protection on their R&D investments.

It’s also in a company’s best interest to expand their patent portfolio. One reason for this is that it gives them a greater ability to cross-license technologies (in effect “I’ll let you infringe on some of my patents, if you let me infringe on some of yours”). However, I’ve been told that when you get taken to court — due to having inadvertently infringed on somebody else’s patent(s) — it becomes a match of my portfolio size against yours.

The problem, when it comes to software patents, is that the inventions are just data structures and algorithms — essentially the conceptual building blocks of all software. Now, a patent requires an invention to be novel (i.e. is not obvious, or has been done before), and so there’s still flexibility to create generic software that will not infringe on any patents. However, as soon as you start wanting to do something a bit more specialised, you start entering a patent minefield.

The result of this is that you have to start putting in workarounds just so you don’t infringe patents. This is usually inefficient, but this is the price you pay for avoiding having to pay royalties to the patent assignee(s).

It also makes life for small independent software companies much more difficult. They usually don’t have the resources to perform infringement searching, and they don’t stand much of a chance if they face litigation.

As more and more software patents get filed, it becomes much more difficult to avoid infringement. To make things worse, it’s possible (due to the verbose legal jargon of a patent) to patent something that really isn’t that novel, but is a key component to writing efficient software. With companies trying to increase their portfolio size, I’ve encountered a number of patents that are really not entirely novel, but deemed novel enough to be granted.

So what does this mean? Personally, I see software patents to be a hindrance to developing good software. Having to work around efficient yet patented solutions to problems in order to avoid paying royalties means that the end-user suffers. The more patents to avoid infringing, the more workarounds are required. Abolishing patents, however, means that companies will have to figure out a way to protect their software. It has been argued that copyright on source code establishes sufficient intellectual property rights, but this also means that the source code will be disclosed — probably not what most companies want to do.

And so, it’s very likely that software patents will stay around for quite some time…