Yes, I got notified that yet another patent which I contributed to almost ten years ago was awarded. This one has todo with visualization of network health information, that came out of a system I built while in AWS. (Patent 12,335,117 B2) I really wish I could say how many that is, but I honestly have never kept an accurate list. Searching the Patent office is challenging, but I think it is my 10th…
Someone asked me about my blog in the last month and I was surprised to learn that it had been years since I posted something new. That is how life is sometimes I guess, I should probably write up some of the efforts building my shop on Lopez. I am getting to the point where things are actually going to be interesting now.
But the point of this post is to say that I have been awarded yet another patient. It was filed in 2023, but the original application (the part I was involved in, before the lawyers take over) goes back to 2015 I think. It has todo with detecting networking events within the AWS virtual network and mapping it to specific accounts that are impacted. I am happy to say, it is still a real product avaliable today in the AWS console.
Patient Title: Network Health Data Aggregation Service
It has been months since I was awarded a patient, so I was happy to get the note another was awarded this week. (I say this very tongue in cheek, since I am always surprised) This one goes back about six years ago, when I was building a new way to route Amazon retail website customer requests to the correct backend fleet. I think this was four teams ago in my Amazon timeline, which has gotten pretty long in my 15 year tenure.
Patient title: Group-Based Treatment of Network Addresses
I’m getting teased at work for having so many patents right now, another one was awarded this week.
Amazon has this thing where when you submit a patient application and it is filed (so all the internal reviews are complete), you get a clear puzzle piece. Then down the road if the patient office accepts and issues the patient, you get a second puzzle piece with the patient number on it and this one is blue.
I finally got my first blue puzzle piece a couple years ago, I just got another one at the end of 2020. Given that I’m still working from home, I didn’t ‘pickup’ the blue puzzle piece until a couple weeks ago. (I had to go into the office to get something from my desk) But I did take a couple minutes to add the new piece to my ‘puzzle wall’. I know people that have so many of these that it fills their office windows.
I also just got e-mail this morning that another one of the batch I submitted several years ago was issued.
It is odd how the process works, the two patients which were issued back in July 2019 were apart five which were filed at the same time. You tend to file them in batches when they all come out of a new project development. I got notified another from that batch just got issued, 18 months later….
Patient 3: Visualization of Network Health Information
The next time I stop by the office (which I’ve seen twice in the last ten months), I’ll grab a picture of the cool blue puzzle pieces awards you get at Amazon when a patient is award. You get a clear puzzle piece when filing a patient.
So I started writing this post months ago, for some reason never published it and have since had a second patent issued. What is odd/weird, the second patent was ‘filed’ at least a year before the first. I know a lot of people feel patents are out dated and this is doubly true for software patents, but the 10 year old in me reading books about Thomas Edison still feels it is cool.
Thanks to the suggestions on wetnet.net, this website is now TLS enabled. Compared to the normal process of getting certificates (which has always been a multi-step process and rarely can be done in less than a couple days), using LetsEncrypt was quick and simple. At least for the apache based system here. The big test will be in 90 days to see if the auto-update works like it is suppose to.
The next step is to figure out how to enable TSL for node-js on the DSTAR host. That is going to require more effort, no automated instructions or installation scripts.
Several weeks ago a hot water line busted in the ceiling above my office/radio shack. While I caught it quickly enough to prevent any serious equipment damage, I pretty much ripped out about a 1/3 of the ceiling finding the leak and creating enough room to fix it. I called in the pro’s to re-do the dry wall on the ceiling and decided since I had already emptied the room, I might as well replace the carpet as well. So this weekend I have been ‘completely’ emptying the room and prepping the ceiling to paint it tomorrow.
This has of course meant the relocation of everything in my office to the family room. And a massive clean out has take place over the last two weeks as this process has occurred. Today I finally got down to emptying the closet and I have found some really interesting items.
Most of the stuff went straight into the garage, I think there has been at least three garage bags take out so far. I kept the USB modem and the SupraFaxModems for sentimental reason. I am now going through the ZIP drives before tossing them. I was amazed that my Windows 7 netbook was able to enumerate the drive and read all the ZIP disks so far. To me that is actually even amazing than the ZIP drive actually working, even though it is a prototype and has been sitting on a shelf for decades. Most of the disks have been blank, so I am thinking this isn’t the first time I have gone through them. Actually all but one of the disks has been blank.
