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.

For those who don’t know ShantzTodayChanger is a small Windows Mobile tool that allows you to cycle through your wallpapers/themes or run applications after specified intervals of time automatically and provides you a lot of tweaking options to control this.

Sometime back I formatted my laptop which I dual booted between Windows XP and Linux (Ubuntu, if you may ask). Now I installed Hardy Heron back onto thenew system within an hour but just can’t get myself motivated to “finish” the Windows install by getting and installing all the drivers after having to sit through hours pointing, clicking and rebooting to get just the base installed. And moreover, there is no drive in me to boot into windows now just to work on ShantzTodayChanger any more. So, I thought that I’ll release the source code so that if someone is willing to continue the development. I’ll still be available for questions, discussions, explanations etc about it if needed.

A webhost that puts building relationships with customers before making money is definitely a good webhost. And this works out to be good for you as well as the webhost in the end. Now, why am I saying this all which should be part of a “Doing Business 101” course. Because, in this world of unprofessional webhosting, where people lure you with fool’s gold, promising everything unlimited and cutting you off with even the slightest of deviation from their “AUP” mumbo jumbo,  there still exist good webhosts which promise you very little but are good enough to deliver on them and then some more.

A friend called me today and happened to mention his biggest gripe about Lotus Notes, that it hangs ever so often (ok that’s acceptable), but the clincher is that if you kill it through the task manager it will not allow you to restart and relogin until you reboot your PC. Now, that is a serious problem and a hit to productivity. But the omniscient angel I am, I had the solution ready (because till a couple of years ago, I was also haunted by this very issue every day). I told him about a small 20 kb application, simply but aptly named “KillNotes.exe”. When run, this utlitiy will properly terminate the process(es) that loaded nnotes.dll and turn you into a happy camper when you watch Lotus notes restart without giving you even an angry stare. I published this here in the hope that it helps someone else out there as well.