Jesse Ezell Blog

A company named “Fogent“ is claiming that it owns the rights to the JPEG patent and is suing the pants off of IBM, Apple, and 29 other big guns [1]. Now if software patents should be valid, JPEG compression should definately be a patentable technology. After all, it is rather complex and isn't something anyone is going to come up with over the weekend. However, the patent Fogent is using [2] (4,698,672) is dated “October 27, 1986,“ and Fogent didn't even start pushing companies to license until 2002, which makes their claims quite annoying. After all, I would be willing to bet that one of the major reasons that JPEG gained acceptance as a standard was the very fact that it didn't have royalities associated with it! Maybe today is too early to overhaul the entire patent system, but the USPTO should at least start requiring people submitting patents to submit information about their licensing strategy as well. This way, the USPTO could examine licensing strategies to make sure that companies wouldn't be able to use their patent storehouses to kill innovation. If, for example, a company had no immediate plans to license their technology, then the patent should be invalidated, because its existence will merely stifle innovation by others. This might require a 2 stage submission process, since licensing decisions usually come later in the game than invention, but there could at least be something like a 2 year window in which a licensing strategy must be submitted along with the patent.

The JetBrains guys have a release date set for M2 of ReSharper. The old release date was “Mid-April“ if I remember correctly, so looks like things have slipped a month or so.

Working with ActionScript bytecode can be an interesting adventure. Although Macromedia defines the format of 99% of the ActionScript and SWF tags, they don't do such a good job when it comes to how the Flash player deals with the tags themselves. Until now, this knowledge has been kept secret by the SWF decompiler guys and Macromedia (I know of zero articles or references on this, and believe me, I've looked far and wide), but I'm going to start making this info publicly available as I dig deep into the SWF 7 file format with SWFSource.NET (note that classes were really introduced in MX/Flash 6, so doing this stuff will require Flash Player 6 or higher).

Robin Duebril has a very exciting project in the works (thanks to Brian LeRoux for the link). Robin is using ANTLR to create a C# lexer/parser that loads its results into classes modelled very closely off of CodeDom. The parser still has a bit of work to go, but looks like we may finally have an ICodeParser implementation for C#.

“NEW YORK - Within days, Internet search firm Google Inc. is expected to announce it will carry out an initial public share offering, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.” [1]

I just ran across the clearest description of the idiocity of the EU commission that investigated Microsoft (echos a lot of the very things I have mentioned previously). It's a seven page paper written by Microsoft's legal team and it is extremely well written and extremely interesting. I highly recommend checking it out. Just a sample:

“...Macromedia used to have a product that did well at the medium/big enterprise - Macromedia Generator. The Generator codebase was getting old and hard to extend and many of it's functions could easily be done using clientside Flash. Due to that, Macromedia discontinued the product (no sales or support) and they had nothing new to replace it with. They could have kept Generator there without doing anything with it and now claimed Flex to be the successor. By not doing this, they caused a lot of frustration with the enterprises that had put their bets on Generator.

There has been some discussion about the pricing of Flex. We don't think $12000 is a lot for enterprice companies. This is not a high volume product like Flash or Dreamweaver and its feature set is great. Let's just hope the enterprises forget fast and that Macomedia will not change the entire API for each new release like they've gotten sort of a reputation for? Some of these companies also bought Generator for the enterprice price of almost $40000 just to see the price sliced to one tenth the month after. A few months later, Generator was discontinued. Now Macromedia will try to sell Flex to the same companies. That could be a hard sell, despite the rave reviews. “

“...Tonight I've launched a new feature at Artima called Interest Groups, a free service that allows communities to keep informed and discuss issues. Each interest group is essentially a news feed that serves a specific community. The news feed is moderated by one or more volunteers from the community. Anyone can submit news items for consideration. The moderators check the accuracy of the submissions, and decide which news items to approve. Approved items appear on web pages at Artima.com, in two RSS feeds, and form a topic for further discussion in the Artima Forums...“ [1]