wabson

Fortunately, it’s been a while since I felt the need to rant about software patents, the EU not yet having tried to resurrect that dead duck of a piece of legislation over the patentability of computer implemented inventions that it ended up having to drop last year.

I’d presumed that this was just a temporary setback to the thundering IP juggernaut, but perhaps the tide is beginning to turn. As well as Microsoft and IBM - possibly the two most active patent-ers in the IT industy - standing up to demand reform of the US patent system, an appeals court judge back on this side of the Atlantic has this week openly questioned the need for the patenting of computer programs in a seminar for the Society for Computers and Law in London.

The interesting irony in this story is that ZDNet’s article on this has a link to an MP3 of Jacob’s talk on the topic. For anyone not in the know, MP3 is that offshoot of the work carried out by the Motion Pictures Expert Group back in the nineties and a format so encumbered by patents that you need a licence to distribute any codecs that allow you to play a file encoded in the format. Fine perhaps for firms like Microsoft and Apple who can easily afford the licences, but not so good for Linux distros like Fedora and Ubuntu which can’t currently include these in their operating systems (although some clever people over at Fluendo - who are also doing some interesting work with the BBC on their new royalty-free Dirac codec - seem to have now come up with a solution to this problem).

Wikipedia’s article on the MP3 format has a bit more on the licencing and patent issues around it.

Thomson Consumer Electronics controls licensing of the MPEG-1/2 Layer 3 patents in countries that recognize software patents, including the United States and Japan, but not EU countries. Thomson has been actively enforcing these patents. Thomson has been granted software patents in EU countries, but it is unclear whether or not they would be enforced by courts there. See Software patents under the European Patent Convention.

I don’t think the connection occurred to the author of the article, but this seems like a great example of how software patents harm technological innovation by creating legal uncertainties and other such evil means. Let’s just hope we never have to worry about it too much at least in Europe, anyway. Say no to software patents!

If there’s one thing I’ve realised over the course of the last few weeks, it’s that I have a lot to learn about Linux. Although I’ve been hooked since I first installed a copy of Red Hat 9 on my old PC and have now been using Ubuntu as the OS on my main PC for some time now, I’ve mostly stayed clear of delving into the actual code and tinkering around with it. Until now, anyway.

One of the benefits of not having a full-time job is that it gives you time to do a few of those things that you’ve been meaning to do for a while but just never got round to. So this week I checked out the source code for one of my favourite Linux applications - the GNOME music player Rhythmbox - and tried my hand at building the application from there.

Needless to say, it wasn’t as easy as I first thought. I had to download a whole heap of development libraries, master the black art that is accessing a CVS repository on the command line and get the hang of using the various GNOME build tools needed to compile the code. I even had to correct a couple of errors in the C code that prevented the application from compiling at first.

But I did it. I now have a working version of the Rhythmbox development code built, installed, working and running on my PC. This is the code straight from CVS HEAD that people are adding to and improving on a daily basis. And I can download, build and use this on a day-by-day basis. I love open source software!

One of the best features that’s only in CVS at the moment is AudioScrobbler integration, which updates your last.fm music profile with the tunes you’re listening to at the moment. There’s no nasty plugins or anything: any time I listen to a piece of music in Rhythmbox it’s automatically added to my Recent Songs list, assuming I have a network connection at the time. And even if I don’t, Rhythmbox remembers which tracks I’ve listened to and submits the list to the server the next time it gets a chance.

Actually, that’s quite scary… Perhaps I should delete those S Club songs…

Recovering from: Yet another job interview, but it went well!
Talking to: Naked people on the phone

Today started off as rather a non-day. I intended it to be such, having told myself I wasn’t going to touch any work at all today and have some time off.

In particular, I vowed I wasn’t going to do any more coding on the semi-work related monitoring tool I’ve been writing in Python over the last week, and which has been taking up large amounts of my time, both at home and at work. I tried doing some more work on it yesterday whilst at work, but I just couldn’t focus at all and ended up just watching Big Brother on the plasma screen in the office. I’m hoping having a day away from it will help and I can be more productive tomorrow.

So looking for something else to do (aside from putting my washing out on the line and having to bring it in half an hour later because it’s pouring with rain) with my day, I ended up installing F-Spot on my computer to have a play around with it.

It took a few minutes to import the fourteen thousand or so digital photos in my Photos directory, but it did so without a hitch, leaving me ready to begin the laborious process of adding tags to the photos to describe their content. I was a bit sceptical about how managing your photos in an iPhoto-type application was better than just arranging them in subdirectories on my hard disk as I’d been doing until now, but now I’m a complete convert. Having all your photos available in a single place that you can browse by date or by the people in them, or by the place they were taken at just rocks and I’m discovering photos I’d forgotten I even had.

Suddenly looking through my photos is a pleasure rather than a chore, and I’m hoping that this will help me put together the photography portfolio that I’ve been wanting to do for a little while now. All thanks to F-Spot, which is possibly the first bit of Novell software I’ve used that actually works.

So today, I was enjoying my day off work when suddenly and mysteriously my PC turned itself off. Further investigations confirmed that the power supply had quietly passed over to the other side whilst I was browsing the web.

Luckily, one of the joys of being a geek is that you always have a plentiful supply of spare parts lying around the place in case of such a disaster occuring. So out came the scewdriver, and the PSU from my old PC that I have stored away in the airing cupboard was yanked out and used to replace the sadly deceased component.

With the computer now working fine but making a noise rather like a light aircraft, I wasted no time in buying a new silent PSU and a new silent processor fan to go with it. Consumerism is so bad for me.