waider

I still haven't heard back from my tester, but if any of y'all own or have access to Sony Network Walkman devices and a Linux box, I'd appreciate if you could grab the MPLE code from my website and give it a gepoken. Especially if you have (access to) anything other than a NW-S23.

I’ve just spent several hours reading through European legalese, and boy do my eyes hurt. Also my brane. Despite all the flapping in various places, it seems like the Council (in the dramatis personæ, the Bad Guys) have actually accepted the bulk of what the Parliament (the Good Guys) proposed, and the only two major points of disagreement between them are (a) cleaning up the line between patentable and unpatentable items, and (b) exemptions for interoperability. The latter is a sort of offshoot of the reverse-engineering thing I mentioned last night; in summary, it appears to say that if you need to get two pieces of equipment to talk to each other and the only way to do it is via a patented mechanism, then we’ll look the other way while you violate the patent. Obviously I’m paraphrasing, glossing, and removing any useful restraints from the actual wording, but Parliament want this to go through as-is, and Council think it’s asking for trouble. As for the line between what can and can’t be patented, well, that’s always going to be a problem anyway, but a wily Frenchman named Rocard has put together a damned fine document which does as good a job as I’ve seen yet of nailing this particular piece of jelly to a tree.

The upshot is, I’m no longer sure what I’m lobbying my MEPs to do, other than "Follow that Rocard guy, he’s good". Unlike some of the more militant people in this particular scrap, I’m not actually an advocate of a blanket ban on patents for software or anything else; I’m an advocate of sane patents and prevention of companies using abuse of the patent system as their means of business. I figure if I’m smart enough to come up with something that, in computer terms, is the new sliced bread or paper clip, I should have some means of sharing that with the community but at the same time getting something more than a slap on the back and "good job, waider!" for my troubles.

I've more-or-less completely overhauled the half-assed API I slapped together for the first run at the Sony Network Walkman tools. The new API is a lot saner and does pretty much all of the things you'd need to do. There's still scope for a few extra utility functions in order that you don't end up messing about in the data structure internals, and I'd like to abstract away some of the string format conversion, but these things will, I'm sure, eventually come to pass. Unless I get distracted by ... oh! bright shiny object! (Sony bits here)

Irony of ironies, my own submission to /. was rejected, but someone else who described me as, and I quote, a "brave hacker" managed to sneak a link past the editors. Or whatever. Anyway. For the benefit of me, mainly, getting this stuff off my chest, but also anyone who's actually interested,( top 10 things about what I actually did )

( A little tale of reverse-engineering )