The Bangus Ultimatum

Don’t look now, but Hilary Rosen, CEO of RIAA, has learned to love Lawrence Lessig and the idea of Creative Commons.

Here’s something I cobbled up for Crim Proc last semester: an attempt to chart the Revised Rules of Criminal Procedure (based on Prof. Te’s outline and class discussions). It was not a course requirement, but I wanted to visualize the process in its entirety. I enjoyed this particular project, and I’m willing to keep working on it based on feedback. I know of no other parallel effort working at the same level of detail. Come to think of it, advanced visualization, long a mainstay in science and engineering, is woefully absent in law, where masses of interrelated, sometimes overlapping statutes, decisions and rules need to be mapped out as a whole. Perhaps graphical representations are considered juvenile in a stodgy tradition built on words. I’ll have none of that. As a programmer, I’ve long relied on visualization to make sense of complex systems (check out this UNIX timeline, and this concept map of Java technologies). What I like about visualization is that It forces you to think about relationships and interactions that words may (accidentally or intentionally) hide.

The current version is rough and incomplete, plus the semantics of the modelling language are inconsistent. I had to do everything in a hurry, using only Word (which, not surprisingly, began to buckle and choke once the diagram started growing in complexity). I’m thinking of a formal visual language like UML, coupled with a real diagramming software like Visio, should address these issues. But first I need to get this one out, lazy web style, and hope that feedback will trickle in to guide me.

Here’s something I missed during the finals period: Kodak wins a patent claim over Sun, and they settle for a cool $92 million. I can’t believe someone could actually make a case that “a method by which a program can ‘ask for help’ from another application to carry out certain computer-oriented functions” is property. The legal system—including judges, juries, and lawyers— can be terribly inept with technology issues. And software patents suck.

Now excuse me as I register my patent for the hyperlink.

And I must sleep the sleep of the just. This site may be down for a while for a server transfer and a port to Wordpress (yay!). Stuff will continue to happen in my personal blog.