Category: General Computing

  • Sigh — another stupid software patent

    I see on Slashdot that Friendster (never heard of them) recently was granted a patent covering online social networks.  Sound broad — it is.  The actual patent itself reads: “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”  Well, that covers quite a bit.  Anyway,…

  • Using RegEx in C#

    Something I found out today that I thought interesting.  Within MarcEdit, I have one regular expression which looks for entities and converts them to their byte equivalents (i.e., &#1B;).  Since this regular expression has the potential to be called a number of times, I decided to make use of the RegEx compile option.  In the…

  • Red Hat Patent lawsuit and its far reaching consequences

    I seen that Red Hat has recently found themselves ensnared in a patent lawsuit stemming from their purchase of JBoss.  The lawsuit is centered around the Hibernate 3 technologies — or technologies that deal with object-oriented access to a relational database.  The story can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/news/RedHat-Sued-Due-to-Hibernate-3-O My assumption, looking over this lawsuit, is that there will likely be much prior art to pull from to hopefully invalidate this particular claim.  However, in a worse case scenero (i.e., the patent is upheld), frameworks made popular by languages like Ruby and Python would be…

  • Project Gutenburg MARC records

    I’m not sure how many folks will be interested, but I had someone ask me how difficult it would be to generate MARC records from the Project Gutenburg RDF catalog records.  Since I couldn’t remember if anyone has already generated a process for creating MARC records from these sets — I quickly generated an XSLT…

  • Ruby and Rails

    So, because of a project that I’m working on — I’ve started learning Ruby with Rails.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ruby is a really easy language to learn.  I have a feeling that when Microsoft developed C# — they based it on languages like Ruby because the overall feel is pretty much…

  • MetaSearch Updates

    Ah — well, it looks like we are getting close to a formal public release….Friday actually.  There are a few things that I’d still like to work better (III’s Z39.50 server for example) — but we are ready to make it available to our patrons and start taking our lumps.  Some of the new things…

  • I wish I would have though of this

    I was looking at CNN and noticed that Symantic had identified a flaw in Apple’s Bluetooth, allowing individuals to infect a user’s machine through Apple’s wireless implementation. Its not too surprising that a flaw was found there (I’m surprised Windows hasn’t had more problems in this area) — this seems like a likely place where…

  • Google acknowledges security concerns with Desktop Search V.3

    Its interesting to see how Google’s attitude towards many things have changed throughout the years.  In a recent article posted on ZDNET, Google’s representatives officially note that their new “Search Across Computers” feature in version 3 of their Desktop Search is indeed a concern for enterprise organizations.  But their answer is somewhat gauling.  They say:…