Archive | June 22, 2003

Made it back without incident. Glad to break that string of bad luck!

Abe Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch
Discovered a neat algorithm to squelch
CompuServe incorporated it into the GIF
Good programmers soon caught the drift
The format was published, free and open
Many useful things started to happen
Then Unisys Corp purchased the rights
And changed the terms on LZW overnight
The useful algorithm was off limits
Ransom to corporate greed and profits
On June 20, 2003, the LZW patent expired
Shame on Unisys for what has transpired
Someday Unisys books will be in arrears
While the ideas of LZW survive the years

Funny. From Slashdot.

David Pogue previews the Treo 600 for the New York Times. The good news: the best phone-PDA combination to date. The bad news: “to date” is a bad phrase, as it’s not due out until the fall. A little FUD to depress sales for the summer, both on competitors and on Handsprings’s earlier models.

Looks gorgeous.

I’m traveling back to the client this afternoon. Hooking up with Andy Kramek in Detroit and sharing the flight from there. I guess I’m learning to make this more of a routine practice and less of an event. I’ve got checklists and To-Do lists and bags of stuff. I’ve been pretty good the last few trips in remembering all the important stuff, and only needing to pick up minor stuff like toothpaste or sunscreen.

Three day turnaround from DevCon to Knoxville is just barely enough time to unpack, do the laundry, pay bills, monthly bookkeeping, repack and throw a combined birthday/Father’s Day party. Sleep? Oh, darn. Knew I forgot something…