today

By emile 24 Jul 2002

i am 23 today. i am no where near where i thought i would be when i did a 5 year projection at the tender age of 18. things have taken a strange course.

a wolf in sheep's clothing

By anders pearson 24 Jul 2002

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.

pearson, pearsons, everywhere

By anders pearson 22 Jul 2002

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&#8217;ll be hanging out at my parents&#8217; and my sister&#8217;s house for the next two weeks. my friend cj is up with his drums and i&#8217;ve got my guitar so we expect to make a bit of noise. around august 3rd, lani will be coming up and we&#8217;ll be heading to our friend Jesse&#8217;s wedding.</p>

software patents, submarines and linear algebra

By anders pearson 19 Jul 2002

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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;t be able to patent.</p>

<p>i&#8217;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 />
these kinds of &#8220;submarine&#8221; patents may be made illegal
<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>

Interesting thraxil inconsistencies.

By sarah 19 Jul 2002

http://thraxil.org/ls.pl leaves me with a blank page. And when I uploaded an image, a) it uploaded and then gave me an error that the .jpg was not in the right file format. Then when I tried to upload it again, it said that I uploaded it already.

<p>And I can&#8217;t find where the picture was uploaded to. Hmmm&#8230;</p>

temporary siamese

By anders pearson 18 Jul 2002

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.

happy happy joy joy

By lani 18 Jul 2002

the fruits of my labor have finally been rewarded. my sony clie PEG-NR70V, the personal entertainment organizer is here. yura and i are going to spend all afternoon waiting for it to charge and to make it’s first sounds. :)

<p>&#8220;the only thing it doesn&#8217;t have is a midget to fan me!&#8221; </p>

rental

By anders pearson 16 Jul 2002

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”.