dretblog

XML Pumpkin

what else is there to do in the last week of october? when everybody is busy thinking of costumes and covering places with fake spider webs? in this situation, carving pumpkins is a very important activity, and being the one-dimensional... Read more →

The Last Goggle

it is one of those things you don't think about when you don't have problems, but which are annoying when there are problems with it: how do you find swim goggles that fit? i accumulated mountains of goggles because i... Read more →

Google Machine Translation

today, google switched from systran to its own translation engine. maybe this is a small improvement, but it still is a far cry from what any human could easily do. read my blog in german or read it in french... Read more →

Bike Accident on Skyline Boulevard

hey biker! in case you are googling for bike accident on skyline boulevard in oakland on sunday, october 21, i really hope you will find this page. if you were the biker pushing my bike partner so that he fell,... Read more →

U.S. Patents Online

while complaining about one more blatant abuse of the U.S. patent system, i tried to locate the patent in question. the patent is United States Patent 6487200, and when you google for that, all sorts of private providers show up,... Read more →

Sueing for Fun and Profit

now that verizon and sprint have had their fun and profit wrecking vonage, it's at&t's turn to try to get some profit out of this. at&t claims patent infringement, as the new york times writes, over a single patent in... Read more →

WiMAX Wins

WiMAX just got a big boost and it looks as if it is going to win over competing proposals for wide-area high-speed data transfer standards. WiMAX fits in the gap between Wi-Fi (which is reasonably fast, but has very short... Read more →

Make Money Fast

wondering why my monthly bill was even higher than usual, i went through my iPhone bill and ran into something called a restoral fee. for a mere $36, at&t claims to have restored my service. according to some information on... Read more →

Native iPhone Apps

apple will open the iphone to native apps is the latest news regarding the question of whether iphone users will ever be able get something on their phones which is not created by apple. only briefly after apple unleashed the... Read more →

HTTP GET with Message Body

when thinking about how to implement Atom access using query features, at some point queries are just getting too complex to be embedded in the URI's query string. probably because of the way HTML forms handle the HTTP request method,... Read more →