Creative has finally come to its senses and turned to the open source community to raise its X-Fi series of sound cards from the ashes on the linux platform, which got burnt mostly due to the poor quality of the drivers that Creative was giving out. The announcement for releasing the source code, licensed under GPL v2, was made on their forums. For the announcement and download details, click here.

I guess this is a reason for us to rejoice because of two reasons:

A 404 page is an error page that is displayed when somebody tries to go to a link on your website that doesn’t exist. This could occur when someone linking to your website or typing in his browser address bar mistypes a url, or maybe that page has been moved or deleted by you. Lost opportunity? Maybe. But definitely not, if you follow this advise. Many people don’t have a 404 page altogether, a few implement with an inane message like “Something went wrong”, a few will try to help out the seemingly lost user by giving a few navigation options linking to home page, archives or most popular posts, etc. Definitely the last option among these is quite good to retain the users, but we’ll go one step ahead and turn this into an extra source of cash.

Google is known to be pretty strict with making sure that all Adsense publishers remain conformant to their policies. I’m not very old in this game but had read and heard enough (about google shutting down Adsense accounts without even warning) that I made sure to read their terms and conditions thoroughly. What got my attention was the very last line in the policy:

Hi,

During a recent review of your account we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads on [domain name removed] but do not have a privacy policy posted which discloses how the site uses third party advertising companies.

Just read over at groklaw about a ruling made last night by the US Appeals Court. According to it, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” as a pre-requisite for granting a patent. This means that a mere “idea in my head” doesn’t qualify for a patent until it is put into practice on a machine or can transform the state of an object for a specific purpose. Am no lawyer but what the experts are making out from the long judgement is that many industries will be hit hard by this ruling. Especially software companies who own most of the software patents as business practices, and a majority of these would be found unworthy of patents as they would be found too generic and stifling for the growth of industry.

For those who are new to this plugin, Shantz WP Prefix Suffix is a light-weight and easy to use plugin which allows you to add any text, HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript code to your posts and/or pages as prefix and/or suffix. (That includes even any new or old posts and pages and even your feed) Examples of use cases could be to include your copyright message, advertisements (like adsense, etc), permalinks, your other site links, any other custom messages. This works very fine with ad plugins like adsense-manager etc, as you don’t have to manipulate your posts or templates to add the ad code, shantz-wp-prefix-suffix will do that for you automatically for all posts and with the adsense plugin you can control whether to “display” the ad or not.