Vous savez peut-être que les Etats-Unis ont une nouvelle législations sur les brevets: le America Invents Act (en anglais).

La section 18 est digne d'attention: "TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM FOR COVERED BUSINESS-METHOD PATENTS" (programme de transition pour les business methods couvertes par un brevet).

You may know that America has a new legislation regarding patents, the America Invents Act.

An remarkable part of it is sec 18. "TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM FOR COVERED BUSINESS-METHOD PATENTS". My understanding is that, in short, this is the result of banks lobbying after having been sued for business methods infringement, for some (trivial, wide-ranging) methods they used to create their products.

 setattr(obj, name, value)

sets property name of obj to value in python.

You can do the same in php with

 $obj->$name = value

note the $ in front of the name
$obj->name = value would be in python

 setattr(obj, 'name', value)

or simply
obj.name = value

Before gmail and others, the e-mail was a 20-100 MB storage provided by your ISP with a POP / IMAP mechanism to retrieve it.

Gmail and others have turned it into a value-added service by

• providing unlimited storage
• having search capabilities

Although web access does add value, I see it more as a general tendency, that is something not available over the web has just not kept pace.

The case: you connect to a remote computer with ssh, or may be you just do su to become another unix user, then start something like

 gpg-agent --daemon /bin/bash

or may be you worked hard so gpg-agent is launched from your .profile or something like that.

Then, you try to decrypt a file:

 gpg -d my-file.gpg

and you expect gpg to enter into some dialog to ask you the passphrase. Furthermore, you expect that you won't have to enter the passphrase again if you decrypt the same file once more a few minutes from now.

This is bug #742017

The solution is yet to be devised, but at least we know

How popularity-contest works

popularity-contest is a script that sends a periodic report to Ubuntu (or Debian) about the installed and used packages. At the time of this writing (popularity-contest version 1.51 on Ubuntu 11 / Natty Narwhal), popularity-contest is a Perl script.

How does it work ?

At the heart of the script are two imbricated loops.

• Explanations and previous reports
• More graphical presentations from this report.

A little of a surprise, at least for me, is that, although China consistently shows up in the various top 10 of the report, and APNIC has been out of IPv4 addresses this month, RIPE seems actually to be leading adoption, be it by hit number, number of distinct addresses or number of distinct networks seen. This is quite clear on this graphics.

This is part of my series on (trying to) foresee IPv6 deployment.

It is difficult to predict how IPv6 will first take off, who will be first, who will be second and why. These are the next few months or years. However, it is much easier to say when the big switch will occur, how and why.

This will be between mid-2012 and mid-2014.

What will happen then ? The ISP's IPv4 pools will be dry, with no hope to refill them, so they will activate their new customers using IPv6.

This is part of my series on (Trying to) foresee IPv6 deployment.

Can we identify populations of IPv6 users such as IPv6 adoption logically follows from one population to the next ?

[*]poule = the french for chicken, and IPv6 is a chicken-and-egg problem, like the introduction of many new technologies where you need several components for the cocktail to ignite.

IPv6 has no business case, except business continuity. There are additional costs, and no additional revenues.