Diary of a Network Geek

What an interesting idea…

So, as many of my long-time readers know, I tend to straddle two worlds. By day, I’m a highly proficient, one-man, network-ninja death squad, but, by night, I’m a frustrated, hopeful writer who’s always looking for high-tech reasons to procrastinate. I think I may have found a project that bridges these two worlds in an article titled Subversion for Writers.

Subversion is a version control system which is primarily used by software developers to, well, track the version of their programming code. But, code is just specially formated text with very specific syntax and a really boring plot, so there’s no reason at all to not use it to track versions of a story or novel. And, in fact, that’s just what the author, Rachel Greenham, is proposing. I think it would be especially useful for novelists, since you could keep track of all the possible plot deviations and revert back to an earlier branch if things started to “go wrong”. In any case, it’s worth a look, even if you don’t use Linux or OS X, which is what she uses. (In fact, if you’d like to use Windows to do this, LifeHacker, who linked to her article, has a post with links to Windows clients for Subversion.)

Well, anyway, if you write a lot and are a geek like me and have some time to waste, it’s worth looking into, at the very least.

I have my doubts.

But, according to this article on AustralianIT, that’s just what the W3C is argueing. Apparently, there’s a one-man company called Eolas who won a $521 million law-suit against Microsoft for allegedly infringing a patent covering technology that “allows interactive applications – plug-ins and applets – to be embedded in web pages”. Now, that’s not the entire web, but it’s a big slice of what Microsoft pushed over the years. Even this blog doesn’t fall under that category, I don’t think, because the programs that run it aren’t actually embedded in the web page itself. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve been working on PERL lately. It’s not tied to one particular company or browser. Hey, it’s not tied to a browser at all!
What astounds me about this case, though, is that Tim Berners-Lee, the “inventor” of the web is going to bat for Micro$oft! He says the patent is invalid due to “prior art”. He goes on to say that any redesign of IE “will render millions of web pages and many products of independent software developers incompatible with Microsoft’s product”. My thought is, “so what”? People Micro$oft is NOT the Internet! They’re not even the Web! And most of these “plug-ins” that would be effected are just junk that slows me down anyway. I don’t want streaming sound or video to my PC, thanks. Just the words. Just the ideas. For that, I don’t need Micro$oft’s restrictive product.
In any case, Micro$oft is obviously going to appeal. It’ll be interesting to see how this one turns out.