Danny Angus

Eek! a Patent Troll

2011-10-19T14:09:00.001+01:00

So, yesterday a patent troll in the form of a company called Kelora Systems, LLC came to my attention, for reasons which need not concern us at the moment. And having followed up on it a bit I can now understand why so many companies are involved in the aparently insane pastime of suing and counter suing each other through nearly every court in the world. I'll tell you why in a minute, but forst to kelora.

What staggered me is that they claim that they hold a patent, 6,275,821, known rather familiarly as '821, which covers "a method and system for executing a guided parametric search"

What is that? I'll tell you in a few short lines what the patent takes pages to painfully struggle to express:

In order to help people select a product from a catalogue the system displays a list of products and product attibutes.
Then, on the user selecting values the list of products is filtered to show only matching products, and the available attribute values are filtered to only show ones which still apply to the subset of products.

Or more simply still, if your system shows a list of products and gives the user the ability to filter this list by price, or size, or colour, you are potentially infringing the patent. My favourite example can be seen in the left hand column of this page (on a website which isn't within the jurisdiction of the US courts).

I hear you, you just said OMGWTF, didn't you? Yeah, so did I.

So I dug into it a bit and uncovered some interesting bits and pieces, first of all these trolls are gunning for just about everyone you could imagine, and a whole lot of other folks too. And it seems like there are legal challenges afoot by a number of big hitters to get the patent overturned, this from last year which was only partially sucessful and another move in the federal courts to be heard in November (2011).

I know theres a lot of talk about software patents, but for someone to be allowed to use a patent for something as self evident as the "method" and as dated and stuck in the 90's as the "system" is a total indictment of the whole notion. I could understand the intention (but not necessarily agree with it!) if the company had invented a useful product which was differentiated on the basis of the method, and sought to protect their investment, and if it was limited to the field of use originally intended, but this is little more than a patent on the application of common sense to a well recognised pattern of problem (how do you let people browse an online catalogue).

If the US patent office allows people to patent things as non specific as this its little wonder the courts are filled with patent cases, this isn't protecting your R&D this is a land grab for the common sense of the future. And if the courts continue to uphold patents like this, and the patent offices of the world carry on granting them we may find ourselves in a situation where innovation is held to ransom by lawyers and patent trolls.

Note to self, how to get a list of recipients from the maillog

2011-10-19T12:39:00.000+01:00

I spent a while figuring out how to get a list of email recipient addresses from the maillog, without duplicates, for a specific day on RHEL. In the end I distilled it into to one line.

I'm sure I will have to do it again, so I'm making a note of it here, meantime if you need to extract recipient addresses from maillog you're welcome to try it. just paste it onto the command line and hit the go button, its surpisingly quick.

cat /var/log/maillog | grep "Oct 19" |\ 

 grep to= |cut -f5 -d":" | cut -f2 -d"=" | cut -f1 -d"," | \ 

 sed 's/<//' | sed 's/>//' | \ 

 sort | uniq > addresses.txt

Penis seen from space IV

2011-09-22T13:58:00.001+01:00

In my ongoing quest to keep you up to date with these important developments here's another one..
Penis Seen From Space For the other stories check out seen-from-space

Dipping a toe in FCommerce

2011-08-19T11:55:00.028+01:00

FStore Homepage

Today AllSaints launch our Facebook store (US store follows next week), click the link to browse, view products and buy them directly from within Facebook.

We spent a lot of time looking at other peoples' facebook stores, and rather than try to cram everything in we decided that ours should not be only a replacement for our web store, instead we thought that as we have too much in our catalogue browsing it in facebook would be too cramped an experience. Rather it is intended to promote our web store to our facebook fans, and allow us to do more to monetize our investment in facebook.

FStore category view

We wanted it to blend in well with facebook, and to be a familiar environment for facebook users, not look just like our web store in an iframe. As we see with ASOS and JC Penney. I'm sure that works for those guys, but we wanted to take a more joined up approach to "fcommerce" and to augment and enhance our customers choices and their experience of our brand.

So we have created a place where we can showcase a selection of products, in a specially selected range of categories. Our visual merchandisers have full control of the catalogue, using the same systems that they use to merchandise our other online channels, and I hope that in the coming weeks we will see the facebook store take on a character of its own, seperate from, but complimentary to, our main web site.

FStore product detail


FStore embedded "cart"

And now our fans can buy things that we promote on facebook without having to find them again on our website.

Good Job Team!

+1 button

2011-06-07T12:54:00.002+01:00

As an experiment (and before I let anyone go anywhere that near my employers precious website with it) I added the google +1 button to this blog today.
Unfortunately while I understand the idea of giving a bit of content an Big +1 I can't see where anyone would know that I've +1'ed anything.
If you have more of a grip of reality than I do, do let me know!

UPDATE! I found out, you need to use google.com not google.co.uk[1].. hardly had I done this and +1'ed things than +1's started showing up in my search results..

[1] I had to go to my google profile, enter a search term in the search box, then click "reset search tools" and I was on google.com instead of .co.uk

Colleagues go mad for "cheap" TV

2011-05-03T16:49:00.000+01:00

OMG, get-a-cheap-tv fever gripped the workplace today as my colleagues (who should've known better!) went on a fevered buying spree after woolworths appeared to be selling Sharp 37" & 42" LCD TV's for £150.
Sadly no-such-luck boys and girls, woolies T's & C's retain the right not only to cancel your order but also to ... ".. continue with the order at the correct price" which might embarrass those who chose to order several of the two grand machines!
There were reports of orders being cancelled, however the on-line price was still £150 as this post "went to press", so if anyone else fancies a go...
Pictured (left) are Colin (Products Development Manager), Kevin (Lead Technical Consultant) and Stuart (Technical Services Manager) at the height of the madness.

note to self, MySQL query profiler

2011-01-27T12:35:00.000Z

Update The original article mentioned in this post is no longer available, but if you are still interested in query profiling in MySQL, check out this http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/show-profiles.html
I will write up an quick start guide to profiling myself here, one day.

-- original post
this article is a great way to get started using the mysql query profiler.

If you've never used it before take some time to check it out, it will change the way you think about the database forever.

Note to self, how to get the top tens from MySQL slow query log

2011-01-19T17:47:00.000Z

Use these two commands to get the top ten and top ten repeaters from MySQL's slow query log.

mysqldumpslow -t 10 ./slow-log > /home/danny/top_ten_slow_query.txt

mysqldumpslow -a -s c -t 10 ./slow-log > /home/danny/top_ten_repeat_slow_query.txt

Quote of the [specify period]

2011-01-18T12:19:00.001Z

This [period]'s quote is from Nicola Morrison, ScottishPower online manager quoted on computerweekly.com, here, in a piece which quite frankly looks like marketing blurb placed by a PR agent on a day when the editor was hungover.

Anyway, Nicola have an award for improving customer service not by answering customers questions but by analysing them!

Working with [tech co][1] has ... given us an unparalleled insight into our customers' requirements through the ability to analyse the questions they are asking.

[1] I'm not going to repeat the name of the company involved, I don't want to draw attention to them!

Note to self, how to delete files older than

2011-01-13T09:32:00.002Z

Yes, yet another one that I always have to look up, I think it must be my age!

find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} \;

misprint of the [specify timeperiod]

2010-11-03T14:03:00.000Z

How apt:

employment rose causing misery for many.

From this, also worth a read.
Have an award.

Note to self, how to get row numbers in a MySQL SELECT

2010-10-20T09:15:00.000+01:00

I've often wondered, idly, how to get MySQL to output a row number column, which would rank sorted and grouped results.
Well thanks to this excellent post I've found out how:

SELECT *, @rownum:=@rownum+1 as rank FROM ( 
-- Your Query Goes in Here
        SELECT t.*
        FROM table t
        WHERE something
        group by 2,3,4
        order by 1 desc limit 20
    ) day_rank, (SELECT @rownum:=0) r;

Note to self, how to install apc

2010-09-23T15:03:00.000+01:00

Want to install apc on CENTOS or RHEL?
REad this: http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/howto-install-pecl-apc-cache-centos-without-xampp

Note to self, want stats on nfs usage, try this

2010-09-21T13:06:00.003+01:00

I thought I'd put this in as well, since I had to google for it, using -n will make iostat provide you with stats for nfs shares too.

iostat -nh 5

You can also use nfsstat

nfsstat -cvn -o nfs

e = internet (a logo for IE9)

2010-09-17T11:26:00.001+01:00

I found this fascinating blog post on MSDN's IEBlog about the logo for IE9, thanks to Sam Ruby's wonderful Planet Intertwingly.
You should read it too.

CAPTCHA for CASH - The end is nigh for the CAPTCHA

2010-09-17T10:58:00.002+01:00

I thought you may like to know (unless I'm the last one to cotton on!) that a scenario we've theorised about on the ASRG mailing list for years is finally here, there's now at least one commercial service that will translate CAPTCHA's for cash.

I found the link (shown below) to a service that will decode captcha's for you for $2 per 1000 successes. (Ironically it was in an ad served to me by gmail.)

So to anyone who ever proposed a spam "solution" that relied on differentiating between people and machines, and doubted us when we told them that the commercial imperative would be its downfall, read this:

We told you so, and it only costs two bucks for a thousand!

I predict much more of this in time, with costs falling as more competition enters the market, and I honestly think it presages the end of the useful life of the captcha.

That link: http://www.decaptcher.com/client/

-- correction: Kevin H. politely pointed out, in a comment, that I hadn't read it properly

That isn't $2 per success - it's $2 per 1000 successes. Minimum purchase is $10 = 5,000 spam, er, advertising opportunities

Thanks Kevin, I've updated the post to reflect this.

-- updates: According to ASRG folks

a) This site has been known about since Oct, '09, so yes I am last to the party as ever!

b) Chris Lewis kindly point this out:

... found sweatshops in India quoting some small number of rupees per thousand, claiming to be able to supply up to 250,000 per day. At _least_ three years ago.
...
Incidentally, some of the spam filter companies, as part of their technology for trying to figure out whether the jpeg is naughty or not, _claim_ they can solve >90% of all captchas on the fly.

c) More intriguingly Steve Atkins said:

There's even a neural net implemented in javascript as a greasemonkey plugin that'll solve some simple captchas in the browser.

I had a Googlearound and found this, that may interest you http://ejohn.org/blog/ocr-and-neural-nets-in-javascript/

I found that particularly fascinating, because last year Nikki was telling me all about cognitive psychology and various theories of word and character recognition in humans. I still have all that to look forward to, in my OU degree, but I'm beginning to get an idea of the kind of things I could do for my project if I ever get that far!

note to self, how to change the definer of a mysql stored procedure

2010-09-01T17:25:00.001+01:00

This is a useful one if, like us, you find that the account used to create the procedure doesn't have the privileges required to execute it, or perhaps you've revoked the original definers grant. (DoH!)

ALTER PROCEDURE procedure_name SQL SECURITY DEFINER;javascript:void(0)

Facebook, you make me want to cry!

2010-09-01T16:48:00.001+01:00

It seems that the way in which facebook chooses an image to show alongside a posted link differs for links posted in different ways.

Oh how fucking hilarious. Not.

On our product page if you "attach" the link, or share it using facebook sharer (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php) it picks the big product image as the first image in the list for you to choose from. This is a Good Thing, and exactly what we want to achieve.

However if you click the like button, its picking up a random image from sets of smaller images elsewhere on the page.

e.g. Share this dress' page through the sharer, or by "attaching" and you see this image:

but if you use the like button it shows us this image,

which is for this dress.

Arrgghh that's annoying. Get a damn grip facebook, at the very least you could try to be consistent. Read about the principle of least surprise.

Oh Dear poor facebook!

2010-08-31T13:59:00.003+01:00

Facebook appears to be unavailable for many users, our office included.

This looks like a DNS issue, looking up www.facebook.com reveals no answer, but facebook.com does resolve.

So I added this to my hosts file[1], its one of the addresses for facebook.com, and it all came rumbling back.
(update, I've updated the line to include the login hostname)

69.63.181.11 www.facebook.com login.facebook.com

Facebook.. if you're listening, fix your DNS, and you owe me!

[1] Windows users, use notepad, you'll find that file here:
C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Just copy'n'paste the line at the end

note to self, how to use your favourite editor for the crontab without changing it permanently

2010-08-31T13:04:00.000+01:00

I like to use nano to edit the crontab, but I don't want to change the default editor.
(Some people are very un-funny about that kind of thing!)

This is the one-liner to use nano, and I seldom remember it.

env EDITOR=nano crontab -e

note to self, how to make a mysql instance read-only

2010-08-25T15:19:00.001+01:00

Another piece of DBA hoodoo that I seldom need!

SELECT @@global.read_only;
SET GLOBAL read_only=1;
SELECT @@global.read_only;

note to self, how to skip a mysql replication error

2010-08-25T15:11:00.001+01:00

Another one that I have to google every time.
Not being a DBA I don't do this very often, but now and again I find myself in the Hot Seat.

SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1;
START SLAVE;
SHOW SLAVE STATUS;

note to self, how to convert pfx to pem without passphrase

2010-08-18T15:21:00.000+01:00

I do this so infrequently that I always have to google it.
Now I can search my own blog!
openssl pkcs12 -in mycert.pfx -out certificate.cer -nodes

I've been Scammed! (not really... but he tried his best)

2010-08-06T17:48:00.001+01:00

Be safe.. the following describes an attempt to scam me into giving someone remote access to my PC, I was in a playful mood so I strung him along, don't you do that same thing unless you *know* what you're doing. And above all never let anyone remotely access your pc unless you're 100% sure that you ant them to.

I just got a call from a company calling themselves "virtual pc doctor".
He said that I was being called because I was a microsoft registered user.

The guy got me to log into my pc.

Then we clicked the start button and he got me to tell him if it said "computer" or "my computer".

Then we looked at the event viewer, he told me that the errors and warnings were some kind of dire "online infections" that can't be detected by anti-virus.

Woo, scary techno-shit, I thought (not!)

Then he asked me to open www.logmein123.com.

I didn't. I googled it instead.

He told me that a technician would log in, and cure these infections and install a "gateway" which would prevent further infections.

At this point I challenged him about the "online infections" and told him that I didn't think "dhcp client cannot obtain address" was very serious at all.

He said that if I thought that then that was my choice, but my computer could be irreperable damaged.

"oh!" I said, "how?"

"by corrupting the harddrive and the operating system" said he,

"OH!" I said, "Thats, bad. But what kind of software is capable of damanging the hardware? I can just re-install windows can't I?"

"No, because this is new, in the past few weeks, thats why we are giving you the call"

So I asked him where his company was located, and when he said the UK I asked him for registration details.

He Rang Off.

I reported the scam to trading standards.

If he calls you, hang up and report it yourself. Be safe!

FIFA win the Queen Victoria memorial reactionary fuddy-duddy-ism award

2010-07-05T21:20:00.001+01:00

In the spirit of the World Cup I'm going to veer off into football for this award, possibly for the only time ever.

I'm not a football fan, I prefer to follow "another code" (rugby union for those who don't speak in riddles) and I've been amazed and appalled at the number of times in this world cup, that the ref has appeared to have his hands tied and his eyes poked out by the victorian attitude to refereeing as expressed by FIFA.

International Rugby has sucessfuly benefited from video replays and from penalty-tries, and indeed from a clock that counts the seconds of play, cleverly pausing for injury or other "time out". None of these things interrupt the flow of the game. None of them compromise his authority.

The introduction of goal line "technology" however, would. That would delegate the decison to a machine.

In both codes the ref's decision is absolute and final, as it should be, and he has the option to exercise his opinion and experience at every stage of the game.

But by FIFA denying ref's access to the *option* to consult a video ref (or tv match official) or the *option* to award a goal for goal line offences we are saying that we do not trust their judgement. If FIFA do not trust the judgement of their referees what does that say for the game? Not to mention the appaling messages the handing of these incidents sends to our kids.

Decisions forced on ref's in this world cup undermine sportsmanship, and for that reason, FIFA, you get the Queen Victoria memorial award for reactionary fuddy-duddy-ism.