“It’s an institutionalized form of madness, outrageous, all-consuming, and incurable. I’m ashamed to have been a part of it.”

It’s interesting then, that now, a little over a month later, the team that I am working on has decided to file a invention disclosure with IBM. Before IBM will pay to file a patent, the inventors must convince an internal review board of the uniqueness and importance of the proposed patent to ensure that IBM does not waste money filing patents which have not been adequately researched or have no potential to generate licensing revenue.

The patent that my team wants to file is, of course, a software patent. I don’t know how I feel about this.

I can’t discuss the specifics of the project we are working on, but judging by our initial research of prior art, no one has yet patented this type of application with the features we wish to claim. In addition, patents have been granted for similar applications which makes it look likely that ours would be granted.

But when I think about the software tool that we have created, I cannot really convince myself that it is patent-worthy. The software was developed to re-engineer a tedious manual process. We saw a need, and decided that it could be filled with software. There are no unique algorithms (although algorithms are not patentable), no amazing new code tricks, just functionality that the people at IBM decided it would be nice to create software for.

Unlike Mark’s patent, this software would not be applicable outside the semiconductor industry, which makes me feel better about potentially filing a patent for it. But I’m not sure that I agree with the concept of software patents in general. Patenting a software program is about the closest you can get to patenting an idea. The patent system is not about protecting ideas – it’s about protecting specific implementations of ideas, however broad they may be. (For an example, check out the Google Patent Search for random number generator.) The inventor must demonstrate in the patent that a prototype would be feasible to construct. Software, however, is independent of its implementation. It doesn’t matter whether you wrote the thing in C++, Java, or even Scheme, it’s the compiled (or interpreted) machine code that matters. Software is not even tangible; it only exists as an encoded stream of bits on a computer. In order to patent it, you have to use special wording to the effect that you want to patent the memory containing the software that makes the computer perform the steps you are claiming.

I’m really interested to hear what others think about this issue. What is your view on software patents? Or on the patent system in general? Let me know in the comments.

After a little bit of searching, I discovered a site that will allow you to calculate the distance of any saved path in Google Earth. If you highlight the path name in the sidebar and copy it, you can paste it into the box on the site as xml.

The picture above is the run I did last Saturday, before exams destroyed my life. School is on the left and the Cobb’s Hill Reservoir, my destination, is on the far right. The path I made put the distance at 9.3 miles. I’ve made the kmz file available for download.

I suppose I could just measure the path once, but I really would like to be able to keep these paths, for two reasons. It would be nice to be able to change them later on, in case I make a slight variation on a run. But the real reason is that I just love data. I think it would be really neat to make an entire collection of the runs that my team does, and then put them on the internet for anyone to download – new freshmen, other area runners, etc.

I also want to use Google Earth to find some new places to run this summer. I’ve been canvassing the same trails for five or six years, and they are getting worn out. A lot of my runs need to be extended to fit college training distance as well.

When I think about this more, it makes sense. The Macintosh is not the platform of choice for hardware designers, who are probably using UNIX or Linux. The VHDL simulation software that we use in school only runs on Windows, but there are some command-line simulation tools such as GHDL that have been ported to run on Mac OS X.

I’m considering writing my own bundle, which would be a good excuse to buy that new TextMate book that I’ve been wanting. Syntax highlighting and commonly used snippets/declarations would be the main priority, followed in the future by GHDL integration. Of course, I would add the bundle to the Macromates SVN repository once it was in a useful state.

If you got here from Google, what functionality would you like to see in a TextMate VHDL bundle?

I’ve been using iTunesVolume for a few days now and it works well, always changing the artwork within seconds of changing tracks on iTunes. The display preferences are numerous – the three components can made transparent and not all of them need to be shown. I only have the volume controller and the artwork running, as seen in the screen capture below:

One caveat: activity monitor shows that this program seems to utilize the CPU more than it should. I didn’t notice any significant speed issues while I was using it, but bear that in mind if your Mac seems slower after installing it.

The author’s website is currently down due to overusage of bandwidth, but the program can be downloaded at this mirror until the site is fixed.

P.S. Jokes relating to Coldplay and The 40-Year Old Virgin will not be appreciated

Choose the year you want to review from the source list. The years are found under “Library” which should be the first item on the list. After adjusting the pictures to an appropriate size using the slider in the lower right hand corner, click on the scroll button and drag it at any speed down the scroll bar. As you do this, the months of the year will overlay the photos so that you can see everything that happened that month. You will only see the overlay if you are using iLife ’06.

Last year brought me my 19th birthday, many track meets, my 5th Vermont City Marathon relay team, jaw surgery, my first lobster, a Dave Matthews Band roadtrip, a week of camping in Deering, New Hampshire, many visits to friends and family, a Ben Folds Concert, and a fine Christmas. I hope 2006 was good to you as well.

Enable Fullscreen: This tip comes from Macworld. The easiest way to get fullscreen in QuickTime without buying the Pro version is with a simple AppleScript. Open up Script Editor, located at /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app, and copy and paste these next few lines into a new script.

tell application "QuickTime Player"
present front movie scale screen
end tell

Save the script as an application (File Format: application), and put it in your applications folder. Now, whenever you are watching a movie in QuickTime, simply run this application to have the movie appear fullscreen.

Fullscreen Preferences: First, find your Quicktime Player preferences file. It is located in the Library/Preferences directory of your home folder, and it is called com.apple.quicktimeplayer.plist. The .plist extension may or may not show up in the Finder. Then, open it using Apple’s Property List Editor. To do this, you must have the developer tools installed. If you do not have the developer tools installed, you can edit this file with a simple text editor, such as TextEdit, but be careful of what you change!

Here we notice, after expanding the root node, that there are a number of preferences with the prefix “Fullscreen.” These preferences are not available through the GUI to users without Quicktime Pro. The preference we are most interested in is FullscreenPreferenceScreenNumber. This may have a very large value, but you should be able to change it to 1 or 2 to enable either your main or auxiliary monitor. Those on a text editor, change the value between the <integer> and </integer> tags under the line <key>FullscreenPreferenceScreenNumber</key>. Save the file, and reopen QuickTime.

This step is important: Drag the movie window to the monitor on which you want it to play in fullscreen. Then run the fullscreen script. If the monitor on which the movie is played in fullscreen is not the right one, try running the script a few more times. If this doesn’t work, you can try experimenting with the value of the preference. Each time you change it, you must reopen QuickTime. If anything does go horribly wrong, just delete the preference file and QuickTime will make a new one for you the next time it is opened.

There are other preferences that can be experimented with:

• FullscreenPreferenceEnableHUD – determines whether the movie controls show up in Fullscreen
• FullscreenPreferenceHUDFadeOutTime – determines how long before the movie controls fade out
• FullscreenPreferenceCaptureAllDisplays – determines whether the background color (usually black) is displayed on every display

Feel free to experiment with the other preferences. Always make sure to restart QuickTime Player after any changes are made, and if anything goes wrong, just delete the preference file. I cannot be held responsible if you manage to irreversibly alter your system (but I can’t imagine an instance in which that would happen).

I can’t really believe that I just paid for a browser, as I’ve never done that before in my life, but OmniWeb so impressed me that I bought it within the first five minutes of using it. The feature list is extensive – live previews of tabs, multiple workspaces, ability to set viewing preferences by site, an integrated HTML editor/viewer of sorts, and an absolutely gorgeous interface. Its also extremely intuitive; every button is exactly where you’d expect it to be. Don’t pass this one up!

There are two cool hacks that I came up with for this script. Both involve changing ~/.bash_profile (or the startup script for whatever shell that you use). If you don’t have a file named .bash_profile in your home directory, then create one. AppleScripts can be invoked from the command line by using the osascript command, and we can use this to our advantage in two ways.

1. Every time we start up a new terminal, randomize the color. Simply add the line

   osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt

   somewhere in your .bash_profile (all on one line).

2. Set an alias to the above command so that we can change the color very quickly without needing to navigate to the script menu with the mouse. To do this, add the line

   alias newcol='osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt'

   to .bash_profile (all on one line). Now, whenever you type newcol at the command line, you will get a new color scheme.