Software patents put on hold in India

In a welcome move, the Indian patent office has temporarily stopped issuing software patents. "In view of several representations received regarding interpretation and scope of section 3(k) of the Patents Act 1970 (as amended), the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions... are kept in abeyance till discussions with stakeholders are completed and contentious issues are resolved," the Controller General of Patents said in a notification issued last week. Again, this is a temporary measure and given the intensive lobbying that happens behind doors, it could still be revised.

New HTTP status code for legally unavailable resources

The Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) has finally created a standard for when a page has been taken down due to legal reasons. The new status code, 451, indicates that a host has received a legal demand to deny access to a resource. Via TheNextWeb

Back to Wordpress

It seems every year I change my blog backend, hoping it will make a difference to the frequency in blogging. After 10+ years blogging, I am older and wiser enough to know that it doesn’t. It is a losing battle. Content I would like to share with my family goes to Facebook, random quips go to Twitter. Pretty much wherever there is a more suitable audience. In any case, writing or not, it is much better to move to a hosted solution, and I moved my domain and migrated my Jekyll website (painfully) to the wordpress.

Serializing structured data into Avro using Python

It is impossible to ignore avro at work - it is the data serialization format of choice at work (and rightly so), whether it is to store data into Kafka or into our document database Espresso. Recently, I had the need to read avro data serialized by a Java application, and I looked into how I might use Python to read such data.

Pagerduty's fantastic Zookeeper bug

Ok, I don’t particularly like calling a bug fantastic, in this case, it is more of a fantastic troubleshooting of a bug. What I found interesting was the layers that were unpeeled one by one to reach the probable region of the root cause. (Yeah, the root cause is probably so esoteric and confined to a specific combination of version, that it is unlikely to be looked at by anybody).

The story is more important than the tool

I have a confession to make. Hollywood has always fascinated me. Not because of the larger-than-life stories they come up with. But because of the enormous machinery that churns out a movie. To the utter frustration of my family, I always stay back at the end of a movie, looking at all the credits which flash by - to see the rest of the iceberg under the tip. The thousands of people who made this movie happen, out of which only a fraction gets the world wide adulation, but all of them were needed to make it happen.

Apple patents tech to allow Govt to block recording on mobile devices

A troubling development:

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”

In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says “covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”

apple-touch-icon 404 errors in logs

Curious about several peculiar Apple related 404 errors for images in my web server logs, I decided to find what is going on, and became knowledgeable about yet another nugget that I really didn’t want to know. (sigh)