denyerec.co.uk

Software patents bemuse me. Whilst I can see one side of the arguement, in that a software idea or concept should be judge no different to a physical one, it still doesn’t seem quite right. Take for example emoticons. Lets say someone tries to whack a patent on the system by which an ASCII emoticon is replaced in realtime or at parse-time by a small graphic. Given that people are trying to whack patents on scrollbars and text boxes I hardly think this idea is too outlandish, so, to continue… The problem is that these crazy lawyer-fuelled maniacs aren’t just protecting their own source code, they’re trying to protect with a thick wall of cash “intellectual property”, or ideas to you and I. Why is this bad? It’s bad because there are some fundamental ideas, some devices and methods of doing things that are so basic that not only is it difficult to attribute them to a single originator, it just doesn’t make sense to. I don’t pretend to be a legal expert, but given how the US legal system works (Whoever has the money gets the “justice”) there would be nothing to stop a certain software vendor buying up every patent out there and, BAM, all of a sudden if you want to write software to count to 10 you have to pay a fee to them, simply because they have rights to labels, text boxes, OK buttons and the concept of displaying information on a VDU in a box, or “window”, if you will.

Can I patent smiling? Can I put a patent on the reaction between having a humerous thought and conveying it to someone else using a visible physical medium? Didn’t think so, I’d be laughed out of court.

Maybe if I tried again with a few billion US dollars I’d have more luck. Then I could sue the arse off the judge I had to bribe with a billion US dollars for not paying his smiling licence fee.

The people at the Protecting Innovation Website know far more than I do, please check them out.

Following a discourse in good old channel #Webdev, it ocurred to me that although my work is for sale (Yes, it is true…) it’s not nearly well advertised enough. In fact the only mention of it is in my website FAQ which thanks to its lack of advertisement no-one seems to read. (I get a fair number of emails , one could say I received them frequently, asking questions which are answered in the FAQ.)

The willpower to put up a full-blown automated sales system is not within me, not only that but I really don’t want to turn into a bargain-basement stock salesman which, if you sell images above 1024×768 is rapidly what you’ll become, afterall, no-one gives a crap about photographic rights these days anway. On the flipside, I’m not actually selling anything anyway at the moment so you could argue something is better than nothing. Would the images find their way into the public domain? Would someone use them as their own, build them into a website, print them in a brochure or a flier after paying only a small fee to “Use it as a desktop wallpaper” ?

One line of discussion was about music and the way in which an awful lot of people don’t pay to listen to it.
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Things have gotten very slack around here and I do apologise. The usual story of no new photos, no new posts, no advancement of the site and also no progress on the Gallery project.
Ho hum.

On a better note, I can make rent this month, which is nice.

Despite the lack of updates this page is still receiving around about 450 unique hits a day which makes me wonder what they’re looking out for My top search term is sadly still “Veiled pages” and I think that’s some kind of dodgy porn thing, though I’m not quite sure. If you got to this page by searching for “Veiled pages”, please drop me a line and let me know what you were really looking for.

Once more I shall promise to become more active, though the nagging thoughts of “Why should I try for more traffic?” still plague me and I’ve not quite figured it out yet.

There are oodles of photo’s that need uploading and, really, printing and putting in some kind of print portfolio. If anyone out there has a cure for terminal apathy, get in touch.

I made a post a while ago about how to make the winky little favicons, the little 16×16 icons that appear in the address bar in decent, working browsers.
This morning a mail dropped into my box concerning a favicon gallery which is a great site made even better by the fact that my monkey made it in there, ohh err!

In other news, I’m starting to get a little paranoid about my blog/website crashing to peices and also about me forgetting the plethora of passwords I’ve had to create for things over the last few months. I suck with remembering things in a bad, bad way. So far, Natwest have had to reactivate my online banking account no fewer than 3 times…

Take a moment to go and read this…aplus » moments
A very well presented, informative and downright useful web-log website. Hats off to the owner Aleksandar Vacic. Just what is it with these Eastern Europeans?

This quote from Bash.org made me laugh rather too much.

My PC is flagging, again. Gotta love the install/re-install cycle that certain operating system vendors force you through. This time I was a little frustrated by the awkwardness a certain emai client provokes when it comes to backing things up. It makes it LOOK like everything is in one file but I learnt last time I went through this that the “all in one personal file” malarky is a downright lie. Your emails go into one file, your mailbox rules another, the application’s settings can only be backed up through a special wizard you need to install and finally if you’ve given anyone a nickname, the Gods forbid that you be able to actually back this up with their name and address. Noooooo. You have to go hunting for a special nickname cache file that if you don’t rescue, you will lose and then wonder why on earth you don’t recognise anyone in your address book anymore. *Sigh*

I have noticed through distant examination of MS Windows that it attempts to centralise certain files and settings. However, this approach only works if the application designers conform which, sadly, they don’t seem to most of the time and beyond this you have a multi-user environment to further mix things up. You have some user-based settings scattered to the wind inside deeply-buried user directories, you have general settings stored in the registry (Nightmare!) or in .INI files in the program folder or, worse, stuffed down in some system DIR and then you have files that may or may not be important crowding places such as “Common files” and the like.
Good grief.
What I’d like to see is the following kind of approach:
1- Install software to a given directory
2- In a multi-user environment store all relevant settings in a username.settings file and all user data in a username.data file , stored within the application directory somewhere by default but give the option to relocate.
3- Regardless of where settings need to be to actually be active (Registry, etc) create a shadow program.settings file that is always updated with the current program settings and can be read in by the program to restore things like registry entries if they’re not found.

I’d like to see programs that made it mindlessly easy to backup everything you need and also programs that you can move from OS install to OS install simply by copying the folder. Some do, some don’t. I like the ones that do.

Anyone living in the UK will know DFS. They’ve been around for a while, retailling (naturally) quality seating to residents of this merry green isle.
They also always have a sale on which, always, ends this Sunday.
Perhaps someone was a bit too zealous suggesting that the original sale (Probably started some way back in 1985) should end “This Sunday” and thought it’d be hillarious to continue ending the sale on every Sunday from the date they started until, well, at least until now.
Thinking about it, if you have a sale on every day of every week then your baseline prices would be said sale prices. That would mean that you are never really presenting a below-average-price saving to your customers and, really, shouldn’t be advertising the fact you have a sale on at all.

I wonder if the advertising standards agency has considered this?