Author: kevin

Open Call From the Patent Office – washingtonpost.com

The patent office has decided to open up the approval process to anyone on the net. Allowing internet users to make claims regarding the voracity of a patent’s uniqueness and also show evidence of prior art. The first group of patents that will go under this public scrutiny are from the software industry.

On one hand, this is brilliant. There have always been the horror stories of the insanely extensive and overreaching software patents awarded to companies who had done nothing. These companies then went about suing every other company on the planet until finally someone stood up to them and challenged their patent. The patent examiners get a zillion patent applications a year, many of which require specialized knowledge of the arcana of software design. It is understandable how some stuff would get by them, and this new plan should help.

On the other hand, this could be a total and utter mess. Most professional software developers aren’t allowed by their companies to look at the patent office web site. The fear is that if the developer’s company got sued for patent infringement and there was a record of someone at that company accessing the patent website, the company could not prove that they didn’t know about the patent they were infringing. That is the crux of patent infringement defense. You can’t infringe on a patent that you don’t know about. So, then, who is going to be contributing to the patent review process? Well, I would imagine that the big companies would be contributing legions of lawyers to support their own patents and challenge their competitors. I would also assume that college professors may contribute, and they might have the best contributions, but doing this ain’t exactly gonna pay their grad students, is it, so how much time are they gonna spend trolling the site? Who is going to contribute the most? Random internet folk, the same kind of people that start flame wars on every site that allows users to contribute content.

Yeah, that’s is going to elevate the process.

The only problem I had to deal with in my quickie switch from interland to dreamhost was changing the Unit Circle store from ASP pages to something else (I haven’t decided if I’m going to do a Flex thing, a zencart thing or a PhP thing yet). The first hurdle I had to deal with was that the old store used an Microsoft Access database backend. I’ve switched 100% to macs and my old PC was dead, so I couldn’t load the mdb file on my home machines, at work we don’t have the full office license, so I couldn’t use Access on my work PC. I searched around the web and found some shareware that theoretically could convert from MDB files to other types of files, but none that I tried worked very well (if at all). What I did have on my work machine was Visual Studio. On a whim, I opened up the server tab and tried adding the access file AND IT WORKED! I could browse the tables, but there was no way in VS to export them. So I wrote up a quickie C# app, which I’m posting here. Ya know, for the kids.

Some caveats:

• I haven’t written C# professionally for a couple years.
• I haven’t added the code to actually grab the table list from the access file and enumerate those. It is left as an exercise for the reader.
• It doesn’t handle quoted values in table values explicitly (it passes them through, but any CSV importer will get confused).
• I wrote it in about 20 minutes.
• In other words, don’t judge my coding skills from this.

Here is the code.

By the way, I had formatted the code using the C# code formatter on Manoli.net which is very cool, but it completely screwed up my blog layout due to the <pre> statements and long lines. So I put it in the separate page.