On Patents

Interesting piece and a nice thought !
His actual idea is debateable ofcourse, but the underlying principles based on which he makes them are pretty convincing (atleast to me YMMV :p)
Though I am pretty much against the current rat-race to file patents on anything and everything (particularly two giants in s/w and n/w) , I do see the merit in patents in principle.
Patents have become a touchy subject with adverse and usually very polarised views.
Most of the proponents of either side have already lost sight of reality - arguments of incremental development are as much valid to other fields as to s/w so they dont hold much water (to some extent , they are slightly more relevent to s/w : but then we are talking about degree of relevence).
Blanket ban on patents can be as bad (maybe more) as granting frivilous patents.

PS :
Not interested in getting into a flame war.
This is my personal opinion, so personally I dont really care much of whether you disagree.
IF you have illuminating points which will lead to a healthy debate - welcome , else sorry but keep away.

Check these out !!


Find how "google suggest" works here , NICE !!

While we are at it , check this guy out too - too cool !
In case you dont know him , he is Sun's chief gaming officer - ya I know : the work is just too cool !! , maybe someday I will join their team :D
But for now , I am more than happy to be in the disco runtime team.

To end things : in case you want to know what I am reading nowadays for work, check these out : 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 (well this one is not really part of work ;) )

Back to basics

I am going back to basics - well not exactly a new years resolution, but something that I decided that I needed to do over the long weekend.
I am starting up with OOAD , going to spend sometime reading up on all the papers , articles and books : revisit and reinterpret them based on what I have gathered in the months/years since I read them.
This has already been enlightening for me - so will continue in this vein for sometime (maybe about 2 or more weeks).
After that , will switch track and most probably will go towards specs and rfc's that I work with.
Lot of assumptions that I made while reading these will be revalidated , corrected or thrown away based on what I learned since then.

Have been neck deep in work - and now I can see light finally :)
Finished research on a complex framework, finished reading and understanding a few JSR's , articles and papers : overall , past few weeks have been hectic to put it mildly and have been hugely rewarding intellectually !

* The only other fun that I had was in playing online AOM dm (bloody addictive !) , online chess and Pirates! that I bought recently.
Sid Meier is a legend and a personal hero and I always like ensemble studio games :)

* Season's greetings :
Wish you all a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

* Restructured the right bar a bit , added some links - removed some others
* Might remain MIA for some more time ... so the blog will be in a state of stasis : until later !
* There are some amazing pics on Kousik's blog - really brilliant ones !!