What is significantly different in Google Patent Search is that now you can search full text of U.S. patents since 1790s. That’s approximately 7 million issued patents. Google did that by using the same technology that powers Google Book Search. Google has taken the entire image database of U.S. patents and extracted the plain text from all relevant sections of the patents. That has made full text search possible for patents that only existed as page images on USPTO.

The service is in beta. It may stay that way permanently though like many other Google services. Obviously there are features that are missing like the ability to print or save patents. And there are those little things that need to be ironed out as it matures. For one, mistakes made in character recognition. Sometimes P is recognized as an F. It could have been funny but in the end it makes finding relevant patents really difficult. Even without looking hard I’ve also seen B in place of E. Another is that words that are divided at the end of one line and continued on the next line of text cannot be found. It appears they’re not recognized as full words at all.

It’s interesting how Google presents the patents - the same way it does with books. You always get to see images of all pages of a patent. Also, you get bibliographic data and text of a patent when USPTO has it available. When you do full text search, the images you see have the search words highlighted. For old patents you don’t get the full text of a patent as USPTO does not have it. It’s obvious that Google does have the full text, does searches on it, and then generates the image with the highlights - yet not giving the full text out. That is because it is built on the platform of Google Book Search where they do not want to give away the text to avoid possible issues with publishers and right owners. I’m not convinced it should be the same way with patents though.

Does anyone know what technology Google uses for character recognition (OCR)?

Even though it’s dialup it’s not cheap, so I can’t spend as much time online as I would like. So I am changing my internet usage patterns. Downloading all email to my notebook from Yahoo! Mail and Gmail instead of reading it online. Writing emails offline, and then sending them all at once when I am online again.

Oh, and now blogs. Blogs are such pain in the ass, pardon my french. I simply don’t have the time online to read them, and that hurts a lot. I am using the R|Mail blog to email service now to get all blog entries in my email that is downloaded to my notebook, and then I read it all offline. Still, it’s not perfect at all. A blog entry in full is a rare species. Usually it’s a thing with a “more” link that you have to click on to read the complete entry. So the rest of the entry does not make it to my email. Oh well. I think you can feel my frustration now.

ADSL option is available where I stay, but it’s not cheap either. It’s $40-$45 for 64kbps link and 1Gb of incoming traffic, or $75 for 2Gb of incoming traffic. Outgoing traffic is not counted. You pay hefty installation fee and the cost of two ADSL modems, and in a little while you’re all set. Only it seems that I use about 10mb per hour while browsing or downloading my email on dialup, which gives me… about 100 hours of browsing before I run out of my prepaid ADSL traffic allotment. Forget about downloading something interesting.

I get nearly everything I used to read online in my mailbox now, with the exception of few forums that don’t have the RSS support. Another excepion is the wiki that I maintain. Often than not I have to go out and read the blog entries in full while online. That’s how I burn my dialup minutes at disturbing speeds. Everything moves fast on the internet, and I do need to know of happenings earlier, not later. Anyhow, it’s a very different setting from what I used to have in the States, but I’m getting used to this all. It will work out, eventually.

One thing I understand better now is why and how many people here don’t have that feel of the internet and its surroundings that inspires me and other people with new ideas and killer applications. They simply don’t feel the pulse of the internet.

There are lots of other social bookmarking services now, each with its unique twist. The thing with most of them is that none are up to the level of convenience that I’d like to have. One thing I would like to have is a better interface, another is the ability to file my bookmarks faster, possibly skipping the step of tagging, yet being able to find a particular bookmark when I need it. Now LookLater might be the answer to this. First I heard of it from the post Startup blog, day 1 on The Business of Software. The idea was to have the first beta release out in 12 days! If you scroll down the original post, you’ll find out that Doug Martin, the author of the idea, is someone who really has the vision and experience to make it happen. He set up the development blog so that others could watch his progress in reaching the goal.

The first beta release did not happen yet, but it is about to happen anytime now. In the meanwhile, Doug released a couple of pre-beta demos, and they were quite impressive. It had that rare quality of being pleasant to use when I tried. I called those little bookmark pieces that were created on my clicks the looklets. Yet a very important thing to me was that Doug really listened to the users, and came up with things than can make me switch to LookLater indeed!

Anyway, don’t just read about it. Get out, read the development blog, try the demos, touch it, and feel what it’s like. You might like it as much as I did.

Until now, due to the eBay’s pricing scheme for the use of their API calls, the sniping tools I’ve been using employed the strategy of scraping the content of the site. Not only did not that conform to the eBay’s User Agreement, it also had the tendency to break once in a while due to changes in the pages layout that eBay made routinely. Starting today, eBay dropped all fees it charged for the use of the API (when you use their new unified scheme), as well as the fees for the membership in the Developers Program. The programs and tools developed by people still require certification, but it’s free now as well, see Member Benefits and Fees.

Anyone who has been using sniping tools knows the feeling when a bid did not go through due to the tool being broken because eBay changed the page layout. Hopefully with the use of the eBay API these tools can reach a higher level of realibility that I’ve been looking for. I also had an idea for an interesting tool that I called “Concise eBay” about a year ago. After careful calculation, and reading the eBay forums, I decided against it. The idea still stands, and I might even get back to it sometime now, who knows!

The materials from the camps are often published on the web in form of papers, podcasts, or video.

There is also an event being organized in Washington DC area: BarCamp DC. The date is not set yet, however, and it’s been so for a long time now. I’d like to see it happen, and I hope I will not be away when the event takes place.

Another thing that I think should be mentioned in this context is NerdTV, a weekly one-hour online show that offers interviews with famous people from the world of technology. It’s video, not just the audio, so you have a chance to see all these people. I watch it since the first show was released, and I am not going to stop. Each show has a version with subtitles, but they’re permanent (and ugly), not your usual on-demand subtitles that come with DivX movies and can be turned on or off. There is a transcript for each show, it’s helpful for those who are not fluent in english.

Most of these conversations don’t make it to the printed media, so I can’t read them anywhere. They are lost unless they’re listened to. Listening to them can give you a new view to whatever you’re thinking of, and give you new ideas that you don’t find anywhere else.

I wanted a wiki for my site, as I find wiki a wonderful tool for collaborative development of ideas. I needed to make a choice, so I googled for wiki comparision tables, and reviews. I found several of them, and at first I chose MediaWiki as the most well known wiki out there. Well, after I have downloaded it and have taken a quick look around, it ticked me that it was way too big than what I imagined it would be. After careful investigation of the same comparison tables I put my finger on WikkaWiki that, compared to lots of other lightweight wiki tools is still being developed.

Installation was a breeze, quick and easy. I put a full copy of the distribution in a separate directory, and linked to it from where I wanted my wiki to be. I wanted several of them in different places and separate, and that way I was able to make that happen with ease. Everything happens on a single installation page, and after you have filled it with all necessary data, it creates the database tables for you, and initializes your wiki. The configuration file is put in the local directory, and you are free to modify it if needed.

Nothing is perfect, as you can imagine. For my installation, I wanted the wiki to be private, and for that I needed it to not allow freely available registration. There was no option to do that, so I had to hack the code, remove the registration part, and move it to a special administration page inside the wiki where I could create new users myself. Also, the defaults are set in the configuration file to allow public access to the wiki pages, and I changed it to allow registered users only. The most interesting (and somewhat disturbing) thing was that WikkaWiki creates a cookie when the user logs in, and that cookie is not linked to specific wiki, but rather to the host. That is, when you have several wiki on your site, once you log in to one of them, you get logged in to all other wiki automatically! I will see if I can fix that as that’s not quite what I want.

Here are some of the annoyances that I encountered while setting up the blog using WordPress:

• It was very unclear how to set up your theme elsewhere other than in WordPress internal themes directory. Blog was not the only thing I was going to have on the site, and I did not want my content to go somewhere deep inside the WordPress installation. After lots of experimenting, and reading of the WordPress code I found a solution. I set up a theme directory in my website root, and had the necessary constants set to point to that directory. Here is the contents of my /index.php:

  <?php
          if (!defined('WP_USE_THEMES')) {
                  define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
          }
          if (!defined('TEMPLATEPATH')) {
                  define('TEMPLATEPATH', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/MyThemeDirectory');
          }
          require('./wp/wp-blog-header.php');
  ?>
  

• Wordpress support is a form of community support done by volunteers in the WordPress support forums. Developers seem to be rarely set to investigatate the problems, and that leaves experienced users no real option other than fix the problem themselves. I had this nasty problem with comments RSS feeds that I was fighting for over two weeks, and nobody could help me out there. I finaly figured out what’s happening, and put a fix in place in my copy of the code. I also submitted the bug report. The way it looks now it’s probably going to be fixed for the WordPress 1.6 release.
• For some things extra I put together a WordPress plugin for my installation that has a set of the functions I want. It is interesting, that a third of those functions are reimplementations of the WordPress’ standard functions that produce links, but do not provide the title attributes for the links, and have no way of passing those to them. I like having it all consistent and with the title for each link I have. I’ve also rewritten the calendar to not include any future posts, give me a slightly different interface, and (again!) provide the titles to the links. I tried to use some advanced features, such as replace the names of the templates that WordPress is looking for, and add some of my own using the template_redirect action, but failed miserably. Using the include()/require()/require_once() statement did not work and produced errors in completely distant places of the code. Partial success was when I used load_template() function, but in the end of the day that did not work either, giving me a set of similar problems for some of the templates I tried to include for specific actions. I finally gave up, after I discovered that it’s a long-standing problem. Needless to say that the support forum people were unable to help me with the problem (sigh).

As I studied the code a lot, I have an opinion on it. It’s a mixed opinion. The main thing is that the code just works for all standard applications and settings. That’s why people use it in the first place. Customizing it to suit your specific needs might be difficult, however, depending on what you want to accomplish. Some nontrivial bugs can drive you crazy, and I did not find much support in that area. I might not have looked in the right places for it though. The overall feel of the code that I’ve got was that it is structured well, yet it’s somewhat mushy, not clean and lean, and not very consistent. Also, it came as a shock to me when I turned on full warnings, and the system spit out a hundred of warning about undefined variables each time a blog page loaded in the browser. Hopefully the code gets improved as it matures.

I never had a blog, and frankly I never thought I would ever have one. Still I am not sure yet that I will have the time and desire to keep up with writing on a periodical basis, and make it into a habit. Anyhow, this is the first real post.

One of the reasons for starting a blog was that I had several ideas that I wanted to see developed into something real, and so I thought of having a personal website with a blog, wiki, and whatnot for sharing the ideas with trusted friends. I was thinking of a blog as a way of sharing my thoughts, musings, and ideas with those who knows me, and might be interested in joining me in further development of the ideas. The other thing was that I don’t see some of my friends as often now as I would like to, and a blog might be a way for us to still have that exchange of ideas that we used to do in the kitchen having a bottle or two of cheapest vermouth with nothing to eat.

We’ll see how it goes.