Visions of Aestia

ongoing � More Patent Funnies

This is NOT funny. Google has just this month received a patent on “highlighting matches to search terms in retrieved documents".

How could this even happen? One of the criteria for a patent is supposed to be that an idea is non-obvious. There are plenty of RDF tools that could be considered to be covered by this.

There is no longer any justification, in my mind, for a 20-year patent (what business plan goes out more than 5 years, anyway?). And I’m seriously thinking of joining the camp that says all patents are worthless.

The point of a patent is that if you invent something, you, rather than some copycat, get to make money off of it. The problem is that in today’s world, you don’t - either you spend all your time and money in monitoring and litigation, or you use it as a weapon against competitors.

This patent should never have been granted. I personally had prior art in 1991, nine years before the patent was even filed. And I was still in high school at the time!

Just got back from my surprise vacation for our annivesary. We ended up going to Nelson instead of Rotorua - was disapointed at first but now really glad! I just wish the weather had held out so we could have gone to Able Tasman. Ah well, next time. Would have been hard with a little!

Cecily was, as always, an absolute surprise. Barely a protest on the plane there (daddy nearly crushed her against the seat!) and very little crying on the way back (she was over tired). She settled in fairly quickly at the hotel even though she’s never been away from home like that, and she had great fun at the beach building sand castles with daddy, at the petting zoo where she ate most of the food meant for the animals, and picking berries - where she again ate more than we took home!!! She absolutely adores berries.

All in all it was a great vacation, and I was sorry to come home, as much as I love wellington. I’m sure a good deal of regret was due to leaving the rental car, I’d forgotten how nice it is to have the freedom of a car… and I really liked that town.

I’m still shaking from the relatively small earth quake we had this morning. I’m such a wuss! Not sure why I’m so worked up still - even the slightest rumble sent me into tears for the first year or so after the 6.9 we were in in Seattle, but that was in 2000 or 2001. I wonder if its what you call post traumatic stress disorder? Then again I still wince when I hear a plane flying low….
Anyway when the 5.5 hit this morning I literally fell apart and nearly made John stay home. I’m still convinced there’s going to be a bigger one - the reports say they think small ones ease the pressure and prevent bigger ones, but after the 8 on the 18th I’m wondering if this isn’t a warning.
Not to be crass but hopefully it hits while we’re gone! My darling husband has surprised me (for only the second time in our 10 years together) with a trip to rotorua for our anniversary! YAY!!!

I wish I could write something so touching and beautiful as he did to me, but any effort I make now is going to pale in comparision. Will have to think of something to make up for it! After all, all I had planned for our annivesary was dinner to our favorite resteraunt this weekend!

Four years ago today, I was married. Of course Ama and I had been in a committed relationship for several years prior to this event, but things still changed.

Not the things we feared might change - those continue to evolve at their normal rate. No, the things that changed were deeper in many ways.

My faith in Ama’s love became unbounded. In making such a public and premeditated pronouncement of her devotion to our lives together, she made it much harder to back out of that commitment.

In addition to the moral and spiritual obligations that we had already built between us, we also appended a variety of legal and social obligations that had nothing to do with our profound love for one another and everything to do with how other people viewed us. But still it had an effect, in that, in so much as can be measured, I became more responsible.

(Those who know me now may wonder at how I could ever have been less responsible - perhaps Ama will share.)

When I am upset, or tired, or finding it difficult to make it through the day, it is the thought of Ama waiting for me at home that empowers me. When I am stressed by work or money matters or any of the hundred of life’s annoyances, the memory of my beloved’s smile, or her touch, is enough to dispel my burdens.

True, we fight. True, we have sorely tested one another. It is not marriage that keeps us together, it is love. For all our travails, I dare not imagine life without Ama, and my faith in her love and talent and genuine beauty only deepens over time. I would not trade even the worst day of these four years for anything. It is all to be treasured, even the tears and the pain, because it is time spent with her.

It’s nice to see that Google is aware of and doing something about comment spam. I’m definitely upgrading my WordPress installation as soon as this is implemented.

Wow, one day she refuses to even stand, the next she’s toddling everywhere! She cant make it across the room without tipping over but she’s getting there She even showed off by walking all around when I took her to the after hours clinic after a rather nasty hit to the head resulting in a nasty looking dent (that was monday with the hit, visit yesterday - today she’s fine).

I’ve added some stronger comment spam tools, and optimistically re-enabled comments. Have fun.

Silly man, didn’t even post about this!

Today is Cecily Rose’s FIRST BIRTHDAY! yay! I can’t believe how fast it went. We had a big party yesterday with all of our ‘adopted’ family - I never knew how many good friends we had until they were all together in the same room. It got quite crowded!

Happy birthday to my girl, I’m so proud of how much she’s grown!

This morning there were over 100 spam comments sitting in the moderation queue. I’ve disabled comments until I can install more powerful anti-spam measures.

I’m still allowing trackbacks at the moment, so that’s the only way to leave comments.

Everyone is blogging about this, but nobody seems to be linking to the actual list of patents - so here it is.

500 patents

The really interesting thing is the way the license is phrased; open source developers can use them without issue, and proprietary developers can use them so long as they do not sue open source developers.
In other words, we can all share IBM’s toys, but bullying someone means you have your toys taken away.

I’ve changed the template to generate an RSS 1.0 feed by default instead of the RSS2 or 0.92 feeds. In theory nobody will notice.

This is prerequisite to getting syndicated on some Planet feeds.

Now that I have a few minutes on the computer….

Yesterday, I FINALLY got some time with my friend Liz, who I thought was a good friend. She’s here till the 8th, because she is getting married on the 7th and then going on to ChristChurch where they plan to settle. I haven’t really seen her much in the past year, so I was looking forward to finally getting together for coffee. I was under the impression we’d be getting together alone - fair enough that she brought along her friend from SA, who she hasn’t seen in years. It was alright, I guess, that she brought along another friend that lives just over the hill. They’re both nice so I thought, okay, I’ll just get to know them too.

The entire outing was spent having coffee while the three girls talked (I had to interupt several times just to be let in on the subject at all), and the subject was mostly about what they were going to do that evening. Every detail of where they were going, what they would wear, how drunk they’ll get, plans for one of them to get laid….. I just sat there, feeling akward, trying to add what I could like suggestions of places to go, all the while realizing that not only was I not invited (sometimes those things are very clear without being said, but the proof came later) but that the girls were not interested in talking to me at all…. let alone Liz making an effort to talk to me.

I perfectly understand why the other girls didn’t invite me. That was Liz’s place since I was her friend. But when she dropped me off, she asked me what I was doing for the night. “Nothing,” I said, putting on a sad face, slight pout. “No where to go and nothing to do". That was her opening. All I got was a not-so-sympathetic smile and a “oh what a shame… I’m sure you’ll have fun with your little one". “No,” I said, desperate to make it clear I didn’t want to be home tonight, “She’ll sleep through the whole thing.” Liz merely laughs and says her goodbyes.

Ouch. Bitchslap. What a lousy thing to do! I had been, kindly, invited to Liz’s hen party on weds by one of the girls in secret, and accepted happily though I made it clear I’d have to make an early exit…. *sighs* I can’t be bothered…. losing precious sleep when I have to take care of a very active 1 year old would be worth it for a real friend. I find it hard to justify to myself the effort now.

Today was Cecily’s first Christmas. She really, really enjoyed herself opening her presents. She started going “ooooh” every time she opened a new present, and was very excited over most of them.

All after noon she’s been playing with her new toys and just having a ball. I was really happy just to see her enjoy herself so much.

She also got to have some fruit cake and learned to say “uh-oh” when she knocked down a block tower. Her maternal grandparents got to see her open the presents on Webcam and were very pleased to see her having fun.

It’s hard to believe thar it’s been less than a year since she was born. Her personality is forming up very nicely. A little stubborn, but warm and loving. She loves books, laughs all the time, is bright as a button, and just seems to enjoy life. Her favorite food to date is cheese and she prefers plain water to juice. She’s going through the terrible twos a year early but speaks wonderfully. Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds and the new toys and books will grow it even more.

I suspect we got very lucky. She’s a low-maintenance child and if we don’t make any major mistakes in the next couple of years she will be a complete angel when she gets older. I think fatherhood suits me - because I’ve rarely been happier than I have been this year.

CD Baby: JOHNNY “BOWTIE” BARSTOW: A Bowtie Christmas And More - hear and buy it at CD BABY.

Out for one day and has already sold out (it was in stock last night)! AND a five-star review.

“This is where I wish your family and Rachel’s were here as you all miss out on so much… Anyway, I feel badly that you all miss out on so much…especially the holidays, time for making those family memories…Cecily is missing out on so much…I realize that you did not grow up with grandparents and john didn’t have contact with his very much…but we are real grandparents…cecily is also missing out on knowing what real cousins and aunts and uncles are…and I
disagree that it is the same, with you there…there is not that tight bonding…at least zedok, knows his aunts and uncles here and has a “family” so I wish you and john would think about comming back…before cecily is too old…to care…”

The christmas card we finally got from my lovely mother-in-law was basically the same thing. What kind of xmas card gives you a major guilt trip? I opened the mail thinking yay, a card, we never get those, and its full of a short version of above… then today I get the above email (condenced to show the depressing bits, the rest is all about how much fun their having baking for christmas…). I’m still crying… what right do they have? SHE can visit, without any trouble, we’re not stopping her…. we can’t leave until we get residency or we lose our visa’s, and on top of that its a pain in the ass to fly with a child on a 24 hour + flight. Does she think we’re doing it to spite them? Does anyone fucking care how depressed I am I have no family on christmas and I definitely don’t need a reminder? I have a friend thats dropping by out of pure pity (she made it clear she only has time for a few minutes), and the rest of the day is just us three - thats depressing enough without help thank you. I’m used to big to-do’s on christmas with family and close friends, I don’t need to be reminded that I have a now hugely extended family having a good old time without me. And I certainly don’t need to hear about how Cecily will be missing out, as if we’re purposly keeping them out of our life…. America is horrible now, especially for bringing up kids; there’s no way I’m bringing her back there to live. And no one is bloody stopping HER from visiting so that Cec CAN meet her grandparents.
Damnit i’m too angry to finish and I cant see the screen through my tears. Why do people do things without thinking how it will hurt someone? How does us living away from home give HER the fucking right to make me feel like shit?

So I don’t forget about this later.

Why you should never share a computer with a programmer:

Once again I cannot get into the linux side, and windows xp2 is completely in ruins so I’m stuck with minimal activity, or I’ll crash. Why can’t I get into linux? Because I’m sharing MY computer (thats right, MY computer: he literally melted HIS) with a bloody programmer that can’t keep his little mitts to himself and leave bloody linux damn well alone so I’m not constantly fighting to get IN to linux each and every day. And the only reason I’m even ON linux is at his insistance and because he wont update windows for me, something I wouldn’t even know how to do. Linux is NOT for the non-programmer, I have no idea how to do anything with the stupid thing and am force to rely constantly on my partner to install and update stuff - no wonder the stupid thing isn’t very popular and windows is still on top, they make the damn thing bloody useless to the normal person!!!

As to my darling partner… if this happens again I’m forsaking linux all together, I’m sick and tired of being left locked out of what you have now left me dependant on since it has all my damn files. YOU WILL REINSTALL WINDOWS THIS COMING HOLIDAY. PERIOD. I’m TIRED OF THIS!

How sad is this. Cecily didn’t wake until 10 this morning, and now is down for the past 2 hours… and I’m BORED. Have I fallen so far behind on my own life that I have nothing to do when she’s asleep?

The other downer to this, every time she sleeps this much, it means she’s getting sick… and it usually coincides with a new tooth. I hope we don’t have another weekend of high fevers and worry!

My music CD was released to manufacturing today. Should be on sale any day now.

At least it’s out before Christmas proper, though it may be difficult to get copies in time for the holidays.

Coming Soon! - Latest News

I heard rumours about this the last year or two; unfortunately the loss of Stephen Biggs (Dr. Franklin) caused a script rewrite.

Looks like the new script has finally been approved and filming can begin!

Animal Planet is going to be airing a segment on dragons. On the one hand, as an avid role-player, I certainly applaud any documentary that approaches one of my favorite creatures.

http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/dragons/dragons.html

On the other hand, I can’t help but worry about the general state of science programming on television. This feels very much like all those pseudo-documentaries about mummies and UFOs that get constant air time. No real substantial debate, mostly speculation, and constant repetition of key themes with little or no rigourous review of challenge.

In other words, pseudo-science instead of real science. Sure, “Scientific American Presents” and “Nova” present real science, but you’ll notice they get little traction against the huge volumes of rubbish being pumped out. Not a good trend at all.

Well, it was a nearly six-hour queue to get it, but my passport has been stamped to allow me to continue to work in this country through till February. Hopefully we will hear about our residence application by then.

Ama, however, gets to have me drop hers in the drop box instead of waiting for hours, because she was smarter than me.

I’ve been waiting to hear from my darling husband about how our application for our visa extension is going… waiting since he left before 8AM this morning. I also have important information for him ABOUT the damn application (which I spent an hour on the phone getting for him) that may save him a lot of trouble…. but gee, I can’t get hold of him at work, so he’s obviously not there or not at his desk, so I’m left with a knot in my stomach wondering what’s going on, if there’s a problem, or if everything is just peachy and he didn’t bother to tell me.

CELLPHONES ARE USEFUL DAMNIT! But he refuses to keep one on him. I wonder how he’d feel if something happened to me or Cecily and I couldn’t reach him because he’s too stubborn and silly to carry a bloody cellphone with him. Grrr I’m getting heartburn.

Here are some tips on getting HL2 installed on Linux.

1 - You need Cedega 4.2 from Transgaming. Standard WINE won’t cut it because of the CD protection enforced by the publisher.

2 - HL2 will install into the Steam directory. I had to reinstall twice because of this; remember that installers don’t understand symlinks. I ended up making an entry in my config file that pointed a Windows drive to a big partition.

3 - The CD-based installer locks the drive, preventing you from swapping disks (at least on some machines, may depend on your CDROM model). After several false starts, I copied CD1 to the hard drive and ran setup from there. It still pulled everything off the CD, but I was able to swap discs without a problem.

4 - The whole registration process is a pain. Be prepared for some very long waits and a few failures. I understand that after the content is decrypted there is a way to play in offline mode, but dang if I can find it.

5 - There appear to be problems with the 2.6.9 kernel. Be prepared to roll back to 2.6.8 or forward to 2.6.10 if necessary.

Number of installs before success: 6. Not a stellar success story. However, it *did* work in the end, which is the most important bit.

Of course, the machine did not reboot successfully after running the game, but I’m fairly certain that’s because the nvidia driver needs updating.

Ama came downtown and stood in line with me for two hours so we could get our visas extended. We were told to come back early the next morning in order to be seen by an immigration officer.

I’m not happy. It would have taken them two minutes, all our info is already on file. I’ll get happier when you can file for an extension online; I’m sure most (80%) such applications can be granted immediately with a very small amount of work.

Cecily took two whole, unaided steps from the chair to the table today! YAY!!!!! Uh… okay thats good enough, lets wait another few months for the walking….

Also, now i’m really nerotic because three people have pointed out she seems to have an inturned eye. Its not horribly pronounced like her daddy’s was (still shows sometimes even now) but it seems to be getting more noticable. Off to the doctor

Okay so not alone but she was using one of those four wheel plastic car thingies, which would (and has) tilted when more than a token amount of weight is put on it… so she DID walk! All the way from the kitchen to us, with a big grin on her face as she wobbled her way over to us, proud as can be!

John asked me to repost my day so here I am. I don’t really feel like whinging again, as my mood is improved, but I suppose now it will sound like a rational tally of my day rather than a big whine.

My day starts with a quick shower, then feeding Cecily, feeding myself (unless the counter needs picked up, then I notice there’s food on the dishes so I have to rinse those, then oh wait there’s some stuff on the table that she can reach so….> … err. Feeding myself eventually, then picking up Cecily’s toys in three rooms and the hall, vacuuming her room, the hall, the bathroom (where I typically get distracted by cleaning up the counters and bath), the living room, and the kitchen. Kitchen floor gets mopped every other day unless the sink is full of dishes
Hem. I digress. Then I put all the toys back on the floor, play with Cec for at least a half hour, go online to help with the mums msn group I started and run with three other ladies, put Cec down for a nap (here’s where I sit down to catch a breath for the 30 mins she sleeps), make her lunch, have lunch myself, vacuum or mop up the mess she’s made….

Now noon rolls around.

Anyway, thats my mornings. I don’t exactly laze around the rest of the day… we go to get groceries or some various errand like paying the bills, or today where I was left sweating and panting before I even got to my destination (ever try to carry a 10kg 10 month old and a 20kg stroller onto a bus alone?) of a bi-polar group so I could talk about my depression with sympathetic ears and not over-stress my hubby with every problem… which I’m failing to do it seems.

Just had an IM conversation with Ama that has improved my mood considerably. It only goes to underscore the importance of communication in a relationship.

She deleted her posts from this morning - shame. I could have used them as a reminder of what she is going through when I’m not there.

I’m leaving mine up - it’s a little painful to leave it out there, but it’ll remind her of what I’m going through when I’m upset.

DELETE I give up

DELETE I give up

Except it would probably work if we were using Windows xp, which is completely messed up after the updates, but hey he has time to whinge about that instead of reinstalling windows xp and likely having it work right off the bat………

The so-called safedisc protection that publishers use is supposed to decrease piracy. Except, as most of you know, when it increases it.

We just spent $100 on a new game, and it flat-out doesn’t work with our CD drive. Why? Safedisc prevents the game from running. So now I’m looking for a no-CD crack that will work with the version I bought so my wife can play the game. And if I find a reliable source, I just might become a pirate.

I mean, why play $100 to buy a game I can’t play, when I can get a free copy that actually works? Don’t the publishers even consider the long-term satisfaction of their customers? Yes, that’s rhetorical.

I know you’re there boy, I see the time of your last entry. Get your cute ass on GAIM please

Oh my gods, I log on to read what you’ve written so far. This is what the world sees of you? You write more about programming and this other stuff than you do about your wife and daughter. For shame! I must find the whip for when you get home!

PS to those that are weird enough to read this: he really talks about this stuff offline CONSTANTLY. I’m learning more useless information now than I did in all the 20 years before I moved in with him five years ago combined. Pity me. Please.

iStockphoto.com - royalty free stock photography community
This site has an interesting model; you (as a photographer) upload images for others to download and use. They pay 50 cents per image downloaded, and you get a 10 cent credit.

So, if you submit a picture, you get a ‘free’ image for every five people that download it. You can cash out your credits if the amount earned passes $100 (that’s what, 1000 downloads? Not bad.)

Wordpress doesn’t have an obvious way to change the orginal author of a post. Which is a shame, since I meant that last post to be credited to me, not the site admin.

Looks like more research for me. *sigh*

What spam? Where spam? I see no spam… where you see spam?

In less than 48 hours this blog started accumulating comment spam. Easily taken care of, thanks to Wordpress configuration options, but annoying nonetheless.

The thing that was really amusing was that all the comments were quotes from the Communist Manifesto, with the spam link in the signature. Of course, now I have to install the Comment Moderation Plugin, but it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.

:P There are you happy I’m posting. Your daughter has marmite absolutely everywhere on her face and hands and I can’t bear the smell of her. How can anyone STAND that stuff?

There we go. I’ve installed and configured a blog.

And there was much rejoicing.