September 23, 2005

NSA granted internet location-tracking patent

the NSA was granted patent #6,947,978 on Sept. 20, 2005. this geo-location patent, invented by stephen huffman and michael reifer, with the NSA as it's assignee differs pretty significantly from other geo-location patents by Digital Envoy and Quova/Microsoft in that it relies on measuring the latency between a bunch of different internet locations to build a "network latency topology map." in theory, an internet address at an unknown location could be identified by measuring how long it takes computers at known location to connect to the unknown one. i'm really not sure how it will stack up against the more "normal" technologies but at least i can say it's a different approach. cnet has an article on this.

and if you care, you can see one of the more "traditional" technologies in action as a CFC here.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 8:20 PM 0 comments

September 08, 2005

help localize cfreport builder

dean harmon, who looks after cfreport, has reported on his blog that you can easily localize cf report builder into your own language. the language files (located under the cf report builder install dir in the Languages dir) are sort of simple key/value pairs with the values being utf-8 encoded. the key/value pairs are delimited using "tab-equal sign-tab" for instance
dragAndDrop[tab]=[tab]drag and drop
while that style's not my cup of tea (i would of course have used java style rb files) but at least you can localize report builder. shows some pretty good foresight.

so you folks that spell color with a "u", here's your chance to right that terrible wrong.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 7:44 PM 0 comments