iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Today I attended an excellent panel on the current BlackBoard patent (and indirectly their legal action against Desire 2 Learn) that featured Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, and the Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center and Matthew Small, BlackBoard’s senior legal council. Both parties took questions and talked about Bb’s patent.

This followed the morning keynote by Moglen that was excellent, as he is a great speaker and a great advocate. I recommend the podcast when it comes out. It also follows a motion filled by the Software Freedom Law Center to invalidate Bb’s patent.

Small attempted to clarify that they only hold a patent on multiple educational roles being performed by one person and that they are interested in supporting open source and that he believes Sakai is trying to fight a war that BlackBoard dosen’t think they’re in. Ultimately, Bb (which owns WebCT) has no position on software patents other than they are the law as it exists and Bb will avail themselves of whatever legal system they have to work with.

Moglen flatly denied that the patent was anything close to valid and said that any concern about it was moot as it would soon be gone. He also pointed out that what Small claimed was the focus of their patent, and the part that has no prior art, was “roles may be mixed; for example when an instructor of one course, is also a student in another course” – that line is actually found in brackets inside of The user roles comprise a student role associated with a student user, an instructor role associated with an instructor user, and an administrator role associated with an administrator user (roles may be mixed; for example when an instructor of one course, is also a student in another course). — Hardly the focus of the patent.

In response to a question about exporting, or reverse-engineering, the course archive files Matthew was understandably not able to give a technical response to the question other than to clarify that institutions did own their content when it was inside of Bb. Moglen was able to respond that if anyone were to try to import their content directly out of a Bb course archive and be sued he would be there to defend them, for free, whether retained by Sakai or not. I think Moglen sees that issue as analogous to the FAT file system patent/contention that he fought with Microsoft.

The knowledge and the certainty that Moglen invokes when speaking about this patent, and defending free software is very reassuring and I’m very happy that he is contributing to freedom the way that he is. I also want to give praise to Matthew Small and his team for coming to this conference – The WebCT conference was nowhere near as hostile to Bb as the Sakai one has been.
Excellent image of Matthew Small & Eben Moglen from iandolphin999.

The interesting observation I’ve made about Atlanta is that you really feel like you’re doing the wrong thing walking anywhere at any hour of the day.  The car is king in the south, and the four lane drive-through bank you can see on the train from the air port signifies this.  That said, I do appreciate the level of respect for the car that ensures that 1 in every 100 cars here has been modified to express the owner’s enthusiasm for the vehicle or for spinning chrome.

There isn’t a lot to do that is immediately evident.  I’m going to try to swing by CNN headquarters and Olympic Park,  but the conference program and the safety and the Atlanta streets make it hard to go very far at night.

The Leafs were here from Toronto  on Monday night and got a beating, I don’t want to continue that trend.

As I fly to Atlanta I’m starting another flurry of blog postings. The first one is my piling system.

It’s like any old filing system only the key to it is large Zip-Lock Quick Zip bags. This allows you to collect items of all sizes, including 8 ^1/2 x 11 sheets of paper (which other zip-lock bags do not). It seals everything in, you know what is in the bag at a glance and there’s no need for labels. It also has less of a requirement for being filed vertically, hence the name piling system.

I appreciate this system most when I travel because it’s easy to take things in and out of but it doesn’t lose things when you’re not looking like a filer folder does. The best pare is that you can consult things like your gate number just by looking through the plastic. There is the argument that it removes all confidentiality of the contents, but my observations of your women carrying around these big mesh bags at Brock makes me think that privacy is no longer cool.

So there you are, the piling system. Storing your important files in a zip lock bag for easy reference: it’s what out-tripper’s in the back of canoes have known for years.

I’ve been using the new 2.66 GHz Quad Core Mac Pro (That’s two Intel Xeon server spec’ed processors each with two processors sharing one die) for a week now: Wow!

My impression may have a lot to do with two factors: The other ‘new’ computers I’ve come in contact with recently were G4 based PowerBooks. The G4 was a processor that was long outdated before Apple switched to Intel based processors and mobile machines, though convenient, are never as powerful as desktops and servers. The other factor might have been my previous work desktop machine was a dual G4 450GHz that was manufactured around 2000/2001.

I’ve been struggling to try to use this new beast to its full potential, but it’s not easy. The hardest I’ve worked it so far was only 87% of its CPU(s) power – and that was transcoding two videos at once. (Oh and don’t expect any interesting video from me shortly, I was transcoding video only for the sake of trying to use 100% of my CPUs). I imagine I can’t actually use all of the CPU power in this machine unless I get more RAM and a faster hard drive, but I barley need this amount of power as it is.

My experience has been that four incredibly powerful cores means that Mail.app and iTunes still take about 4 seconds to launch, but they always take 4 seconds, even if you are transcoding video at at the same time.

The last thing I have to say about the Power Mac is that it is just a brilliant piece of industrial design. The expandability and layout of the internal structure is genius, and again, the power! I’m sure that if I work for Brock for 5 more years this machine would be an ideal platform throughout.  Information week just named it the best Windows desktop out there.

Here’s the rig. Note I use a Dell monitor. It’s just as good as the Apple (both use LG electronics) but 2/3s the price. My self and George W. Bush both recommend Dell monitors.

Sensus data suggests that Britain’s fourth- largest religion is Jedi.  Based on this two Star Wars fan asked the United Nations to recognize JEDI as an official religion.

All I can say to these guys is, Yo’da man (men)!
From the SUN www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006530500,00.html