This is an idea that solved a seemingly intractable problem with mesh-based multi-computers. In the late 80’s and early 90’s folks were experimenting with ways to build large multi-processors using a physical grid as the interconnect – Intel supercomputers use this approach. The idea was that the connection was like city streets laid out on a grid and that the messages would zig-zag around the streets like taxi’s. Many approaches were tried and under heavy traffic they got deadlocked. It was just like in a big city when traffic backs up and blocks an intersection and that that traffic is also blocked by other traffic – we call it “gridlock” when applied to traffic. Many people tried to figure out how to solve this with really complex approaches to the deadlock problem. It was very difficult and very hard to prove that many of these approaches were deadlock-free.

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From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer

Over the years, I actually have come up with a zillion ideas for “things” that I wanted to patent. Sometimes later those things would turn out to be commercially valuable and I kick myself later. Other times those ideas never panned out.

One of my oldest patent ideas was many years ago when we all started self-service gas stations (yes a long time ago). I kept jamming my gas cap into the handle so I did not have to hold open the gas while fueling. I figured that a well-designed “H-Shaped” piece of plastic would do the trick much better than the gas cap which was round and kept popping out. You could put logos on it and sell it for a buck – all I wanted was five cents for each one sold! Like the pet rock, this seemed like a sure way to get a nice steady income.

So I went and talked to a patent lawyer at the university I was working at the time and pitched the idea – after all – they would do all the paperwork and we would share in the profits.

The patent attorney sat down with the bright 20-something kid and did everything he could to try to blow a hole in my patent using prior art – he suggested that such a thing might already be patented to hold windows up, or used to keep multiple items separate while shipping or even be part of a screen-door patent. Pretty much he told me that it was very very unlikely that my idea was novel and that after we wasted all the school’s money on the application we would lose. He even went so far as to say there was no market for the device.

Dejected and rejected I gave up trying to patent my ideas – the prior art barrier was just too high – I could not even get past the first “freely provided” attorney.
I wonder of course, if I had been paying the attorney if the conversation would have been quite different – right now – I would live in a mansion and you all would be using your “Chuck Pumper’s” emblazoned with Nascar logos and right next to the counter at all the best gas stations in the country.

So my more recent approach (now that we have the internet) is to just blog my patents. At least when someone makes a killing and files a patent – I can say to my friends – see I patented that years earlier on my blog.

My most recent blog-patent (Feb 2006) is retractible iPod earphones and a slightly redesigned iPod shuffle. I have a picture and everything.

Why Patents *work* for Things

So here is the key notion – each of these two ideas are describable.

You can look at my 200 word descriptions and a cell phone picture picture and (a) quickly understand what the invention *is* to the point where you could design and manufacture the invention and (b) instinctively know if you infringe on my patent or (c) quickly know if your prior patent or invention blows me out of the water.

These are *widgets* – describable things – the things that the patent office is trying to empower invention and innovation to allow these ideas to be revealed as early as possible (think how much better a world this would be if I revealed my pump-o-matic in the 1970’s – but without a patent I kept the idea hidden for over 30 years). Patents are designed to encourage the revealing of the innovation and establishing a publicly validated (sort of like a government-sanctioned blog) time when the innovation happened.

About a year ago I wrote this letter to the editors of the Polaris ATV magazine. I included this short movie about Brent and his ATV with the letter. As you can tell from the movie – this all means a lot to me.

I did a little more research and sadly Polaris is just not interested in encouraging handicapped riders of ATV’s because of liability issues. I 100% understand their position – the whole ATV businees is horribly lawsuit prone – stupid people buy machines that are way too fast and floor it and aim at the nearest tree and then want to be paid off for their stupidity the rest of their life. Makes it all the much harder for the majority of ATV riders who are responsible.

Since the letter will never see the light of day, I figured I would blog it – It is a cute bit of writing.

October 16, 2005

Dear Escape Magazine,

My son Brent has Cerebral Palsey and has reduced ability in his legs. He walks with arm crutches. In February, Brent needed hip surgery. We decided that after he recovered from the surgery we would purchase him an ATV. The Polaris Predator 90 was the only choice because of its hand operated transmission. We purchased his new Predator in May and have been riding it all summer. By the end of summer, Brent and I were having so much fun that mom wanted her own, so we added a 2005 Phoenix to the family.

Riding his Polaris is about the only physical activity where Brent does not have to compromise because of his disability. Riding, leaning, and standing up on his Polaris is some of the best exercise that Brent can do. Riding his ATV has improved his strength, flexibility, and balance.

On his Polaris he can go as fast as he wants and do donuts like any other fourteen year old kid. Riding with Brent deep in a forest and chasing him power-sliding through sweep turns makes me think about “escape” in a whole new way.

I really would give my most heartfelt thanks to whomever inside of Polaris made the decision to build a hand-shifted 90 CC quad with reverse in 2005. For us the timing was perfect.

Charles Severance
Lansing, Michigan

——

You are welcome to edit my letter in any way you like. I know that it is too long for the format of the letters page. You are welcome to use the pictures in any way you like.

Brent’s Predator was purchased at Full Throttle MotorSports in Lansing, MI. They have been so wonderful to work with. The Phoenix 2005 was purchased on eBay from a really great guy – it was in wonderful shape and a great deal. It was originally purchased at Spicer’s Boat City in Houghton Michigan. I have added Full Throttle and Spicers to this message.

I have many other photos and video about Brent if you are interested (as you might expect) including what I call “donut practice”. Escape, Full Throttle and Spicers are welcome to use the pictures and letter in any way they like as well.

The basic steps to deploying a portlet in GridSphere by hand are the
following (which can also be a check list if things go wrong):
-1. Shutdown tomcat.
0. Edit Tomcat’s conf/tomcat-users.xml file and add the line
<user username=”gridsphere” password=”gridsphere” roles=”manager”/>
1. Make sure you have a portlet.xml file.
2. Modify your web.xml file to use GridSphere specific settings. The
Ant task should do this for you.
3. Make sure you have the file gridsphere-portlet.xml in your portlet’s
WEB-INF directory. You never need to actually edit this, so you can
copy from one portlet to another.
4. Make sure you have gridsphere-ui-tags.jar in your portlet’s
WEB-INF/lib directory.
5. Compile everything and create a war file. Your war file name is
important–it needs to match stuff in web.xml.
6. Copy this war file to tomcat’s webapps directory.
7. Create an empty file (using unix’s “touch” command) in tomcat’s
webapps/gridsphere/WEB-INF/CustomPortal/portlets directory. This should
have the same name as your war file. If your portlet is myjunk.war,
then “touch /path/to/tomcat/webapps/WEB-INF/CustomPortal/portlets/myjunk”.
8. Restart tomcat.

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Thanks to some timely help from Jim Martino of Johns-Hopkins providing a test uPortal instance – I kind of got after the Sakai JSR-168 portlets. I fixed some bugs and cleaned and tightened things up a lot.

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This is Gibberish

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Three things are messed up in pluto 1.1 right now
==== Bug in pageId lookup in trunk ======
======= Neither trunk nor beta1 will build unless maven.test.skip=true ========
===== The beta1 tag builds but will not pluto:install =======

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UsageSessionSerivce needs a new method that does not demand an Authorization not a httprequest as a parameter.
For now the code is living in SakaiPortalLogin.jws and SakaiLogin.jws so these can be used in older versions of Sakai.
Need to add the method the the BASE API, test it out, then commit it – then sometime later – likey *after* 2.3 – remove the code from the two web service calls.

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There is a bug (I think) in session handling in Pluto 1.1. Why would Pluto 1.1 keep a session across a Tomcat restart!
I think that this has to do with Tomcat’s session serialization across startups and Pluto’s blind dependence on Tomcat session for storing the Pluto session.
../work/Catalina/localhost/sakai-portlets/SESSIONS.ser
If I am crazy – just tell me so.

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