February 2008

IBM screws geeks who buy their datamining book

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IBM, holder of the world's largest quantity of patents, has just published a book on datamining. Good stuff, or so you'd think. Except that anyone who reads the book opens themselves up to patent violation because the book covers technologies that IBM has patented along with sample source-code on how to implement the concepts. Uh, sorry, but that's just evil.

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Acts_as_Conference is awesome

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Yesterday I attended the first day of Acts_as_Conference and I have to say it was awesome. This is my first time to attend a tech conference (2003's CES doesn't count) and I'm looking forward to attending more. The conference is Ruby-on-Rails -focused with lots of training sessions on various aspects of web development - the first day had several interesting ones and the second day looks to be even better.

HD-DVD is dead, long live HD-DVD

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With the recent mass defection from the HD-DVD camp to Sony's BluRay it has been only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped - hardware support. After the defections Toshiba started flogging their players for half what they were before Xmas, even with a bunch of movies thrown in for free, which was a very obvious sign of desperation. Sure enough, today Toshiba announced a halt of development of new HD-DVD hardware, and the other manufacturers can't be far behind. So, so long HD-DVD, it's been good.

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Lunch_fu.orlando was great

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Today's lunch_fu was great, chatted with other geeks married to foreigners about being geeks married to foreigners (uh, I'm the foreigner..), Macs, and a variety of silly things. I also got to chat briefly with Ryan Price, who I've not seen in months. I'll be picky about when I get to go again, though, as unfortunately by 4pm I'd only gotten in 4 hours of billable work.

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