Hyperlinks From CD To Web Patent (#6,314,574): I Have Prior Art, How Do I Help?

Disc Link, a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies Group (an organization that basically buys up patents so that it can sue anyone who violates them), claims that it's patent number 6,314,574 covers hyperlinks from documents stored on a CD that send users to sites on the web.
Last week …

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TurboTax E-Filing Server Bogged Down

Well, looks like I might have to run down to the Post Office after all. The TurboTax filing servers have not been working for hours. I thought that after midnight EST, things might calm down, but I don't know how long to waste before just printing out the forms and …

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DeveloperWorks Podcast About Jolt Awards, With Rosalyn Lum and I

DeveloperWorks interviewed Rosalyn Lum and I about the Jolt Awards (IBM was a big winner this year).

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Override Chicago Manual Of Style 13th Edition Rule 8.3

Eye-tracking studies by Jakob Nielsen lead to the recommendation "Show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers." This contradicts the traditional style rule of writing out numbers less than 100 (or sometimes 10) (I really had to stop and consciously use numerals for those!).

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Map, Everything's An Object, and Inline

One of the reasons that functional programming is worth studying is that it abounds with opportunities for implicit parallelization. As Jon Harrop discusses in this post, the map function takes a function object f and an array [a, b, c, d] and returns [f(a), f(b), f(c), f …

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System Freeze Update: Acronis Rescues Me

In the way of computers and their miserable antics, my attempts to figure out my system freeze led to a disaster. After determining that my system continued to freeze even when using the "VgaSave" graphics adapter, I began to suspect that it might be my Wireless Network Card (a WMP54GX …

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System Locking : Circumstances Point To Firefox (!)^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Mystery

My system has begun locking up and the circumstantial evidence, much to my surprise, ~~seem to point to Firefox~~. The lockup is a hard one: the screen freezes with no mouse response, no perfmon counters, no hard drive activity. Have to go to the big red switch. I recently re-installed …

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Insect Retinas (Retini?)

Todor Georgiev, a scientist at Adobe, has etched a lens so that it creates many images. "Software merges the mini-images into a single image that the photographer can focus and refocus at will." (Link to BoingBong report, not original, which may be BoingBoinged/Slashdotted.) So that's what we'll be using …

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I Dream of Djinni

"But this isn't a silver bullet!" Fabian insisted. "It's a djinni-bearing magic lamp! Not just one thing?you get three things!"

...My April 1st column for SD Times is now online...

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