[nzlug] NZOSS Patent Analysis Project - could use a hand here...

[Simon Bridge]

I have been plowing away on these patents and have pretty much completed
four out of six, one is in draft and the last is in limbo.

I could use a leg-up on the two outstanding, as they involve subjects
well out of my field.

1. Animation Software - particularly the kind that create small
animations that annoy^H^H^H^H^Henhance web pages.

The patent describes creating an animation by specifying an initial
frame, moving a slider to a later time, drawing a new frame (seems the
older frame is duplicated and changes made to it) and so on... the
application fills in the missing frames to make the animation.

This appears to me to be the normal way that applications create
animations - but I need a clear example.

For eg. The GIMP can create gif animations - you use the layers dialog
to organise your key frames (which you can create by duplicating the
initial layer then making changes with the normal tools). The animations
dialog handles things like how many frames to insert between the ones
you drew.

So far so similar - but I don't seem to specify a time (either with a
slider or entering in a field). In the final gif dialog, I can set the
delay for each frame but that's it. (Unless I missed something).

So if I want the 1st and recond frames to have 6 intervening frames,
then the 3rd, 4th, and 5th frame only 3 before each, that gets tricky.

Looking for a program which handles this.

2. The hardware verification stage of a "high assurance boot" process...
it is easy to find examples using digital signiture, hashes, keys etc to
verify the boot sector or the filesystem... what about the "machine
state" (goodness knows what you'd use to specify a machine state, that's
not part of the patent) immediately prior to loading the OS?

I can probably end up finding these - but it looks (from searches to
date) like I'd need to learn a lot more about the two areas to track
down the information. I'm not sure I really want to learn that much
about animation tools, but thu secure boot thing looks quite
interesting ;)

Aside: some of the patents refer to xmlss (ms excell xml-spreadsheet
format). How does this format fare in relation to OOXML? Presumably it
will end up obsolete?

The remaining four just need dates... which I'll find later next week.
And I had visions that my contribution to this project would be the last
to be fulfilled.