The patents site is going pretty well, and surprise surprise it is starting to develop some of the features of the TCMT. So, time to capture some thoughts 1) All presentations should be forms. It should be possible to edit everything immediately. 2) Extensive use of breadcrumbs please. 3) Could have a clever context sensitive behaviour: First view of a record type presents the results of a search based upon the last thing that was looked at. For example when slewing to a browse patents view if the client last looked at an organisation then the list of patents presented to view should be the search results on patents for that organisation. 4) A single unified search. 5) Objects should have optional tabs. Objects should have an options tab from which the optional tabs are selected. In this way objects can start simple but collect extra information if required. More to come.

Patent portfolio app in Django

Database and development server now running.

Django continues to be a real pleasure to work with. By habit I'm a bodger when it comes to web apps - I feel that it's more important to get something working quickly than get it 100% right. But with Django the underlying framework seems to really help, gently drawing the development to be correct first time. An example is the way it simply assumes that you want to use referential integrity, as if why wouldn't you?, and then just simply sets it all up in the background for you. Well the usual reason why I haven't in the past is that I don't have the hours to learn how to set it up correctly, so having it done for me is exactly what I need. Did I mention that you can vary the schema without dumping the whole database?

Anyway, the next step is to provide some nice views of the patents in my database. Some ideas that I'd like to get into this are:
1) A patent should have a visual representation. Django's ImageFile Class seems to make this a pretty simple.
2) A patent view should show cases that are referenced and cases that refer.
3) A patent view should be editable. - how about drag and drop to link cases?

Ho hum, first lets go and make a nice simple css for the app and views.

And I've just discovered Scrapy which looks to be exactly what I need to raid Uspto and Google patents for my source data.

Situation report

Status: Holiday

Location: Somewhere in Yorkshire

Bandwidth: Good

Having setup a fairly shiny VPN into my home network I've now settled on a new programming project.

I've been looking at Django for a while and it looks very nice. It looks to have all the features needed to build the technology company management tool that has always eluded me. The first version was in PHP, the second in Zope and this ha recently been replaced by Deltek (which is IMHO utterly unusable). However, the task of writing another version of the technology company management tool is not to be undertaken lightly. Hence, for now I need something more manageable.

So I plan to write a Django app hosted on a server inside the VPN. The app could be a dry run for the management tool. Its purpose will be to manage a patent portfolio. I have no idea what it will be called.

Here's what it should be able to do:

1) Provide local and persistent storage for a collection of patents

2) Make a lightweight but obvious distinction between core and related patents

3) Provide nice ways to browse the citation relationships between the patents

4) Provide means to group and separate the commercial interests of the patent holders

5) Have nice GUI widgets akin to tag clouds and mappings

6) Be capable of scraping data from google patents

7) Be capable of scraping data from espacenet

Maybe we should make this a time bounded exercise. How about 3 months?

Ab Intro

(A fairly standard over philosophised, self indulgent and pretty boring justification for starting a blog).

It seems that age and memory are inversely related. This is unfortunate. To have a sense of self requires that we know who we are, and to know who we are we must be able to remember.

I recall a JG Ballard short story, but sadly not its title, in which the protagonist stumbles across a hospital full of old people plugged into dream machines. Horrified that these people have become beguiled and trapped by the machines he rouses one of the patients. What he does not expect is the indignation of the patient that he is trying to save for for him there is no reality but the dream.

I am now more sure than ever that our future lies in our cyber selves. Our online presences will become the only part of us with reliable memories and hence will be our only true realities.

Hence I will start down the road to cyberspace.