This week Microsoft sued Motorola over android. The way the news portrays it you would think that motorola's android mobile technology is based on windows mobile code. What they are really suing over is this:

synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

Notifying applications of changes in signal stength and battery power on a mobile platform is essential and I highly doubt microsoft was the first corporation to come up with such an algorithm. It is the computer equivalent of granting a corporation a patent to cook food in pots and pans or to carry water in a container. The thing is microsoft and other large corporations have the ability to pay for all these patents or buy up smaller corporations that own them. It puts way to much power in the hands of big corporations and stifles the development of new technology.

I think a lot of the patents were granted because the people granting the patents had no idea what they really meant. It is pretty easy to make something so basic seem complicated and specific.

I find it ironic that the same large corporations that vie for free markets in order to ship their jobs off to 2nd and 3rd world countries with cheaper wages rely on this total government bureaucracy style protection. If someone can make something better or more efficient using different code, then let them.

If anything allow people to use copyright to protect the expression of the idea (the entire software package/product) but prevent patents on ideas.

In connection with computer software, copyright law can be used to prevent the total duplication of a software program, as well as the copying of a portion of software code (both of which are examples of "literal infringement"). In addition, copyright does provide some protection against non-literal infringement, such as the creation of "cloned" software.

I hope the windows 7 phone fails miserably. Then I hope they go out of the mobile phone business once and for all.

Found this pic of me smashing rocks for gems at Ace of Diamonds on (e:Terry)'s phone. The striped shirt gives it a real chain gang look.

I can't believe how much money I was made off of this thing. My $125 original investment made in 2002 has yielded thousands.

I wish I had time to play more because I am sure I could make much more. Maybe I should stop working so hard on my real job and start concentrating on more interesting things.

Rounded corners have been really annoying the last 10 years. Everyone loves them but there was really no easy, efficient way to produce them.

In order to make them work you needed all kinds of extra markup or images cut out and stuck on all the corners. The problem with the markup up is that even when you create a function to auto generate it serverside or with clientside javascript you end up with a ton of unnecessary markup that make managing the DOM that much harder. With the images it is even worse in that they don't scale well because they are bitmap graphics and everyone zooms now on they many devices from mobile phones to televisions.

CSS3 brought support for a new style called border-radius and the browsers began to accept it but only with their own proprietary prefixes. I don't understand why browsers do this. Before they accept the new styles they always add their own prefixes.

e.g. -webkit is safari/chrome, -moz is firefox, i.e. has nothing to do with this yet.

So in order to get the comment bubbles to appear rounded on the front page I need this.

border-radius:15px 15px 15px 15px;

Seems simple enough, but no stable browser supports that yet. Instead I need that, for when they do, and then these custom prefixed values of the same thing. Here is the mozilla one.

-moz-border-radius:15px 15px 15px 15px;

Then to make it even more stupid, chrome can't handle the shortcut of adding all the corners on one line which makes it require these four lines.
-webkit-border-top-right-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:15px;

This article covers it all

I was so curious how the buttons in google analytics are rendered so I took a look at the source. To my surprise, they were so mangled in tables and excess markup that I almost can't believe it.

They look pretty much the same in all browsers.


But is it worth this kind of ridiculous markup. Even that table is in a nested table. Its like the web I worked with back in 2001. And those extra empty tags on either side of the text.


My new thing is to just use buttons and let the browser render them natively. I don't care if they look different in different browsers so long as they look good and work in each. I think the days of pixel perfect matches between browsers with such diverse rendering engines is over.