Yesterday I attended the first day of Acts_as_Conference and I have to say it was awesome. This is my first time to attend a tech conference (2003's CES doesn't count) and I'm looking forward to attending more. The conference is Ruby-on-Rails -focused with lots of training sessions on various aspects of web development - the first day had several interesting ones and the second day looks to be even better.

IBM, holder of the world's largest quantity of patents, has just published a book on datamining. Good stuff, or so you'd think. Except that anyone who reads the book opens themselves up to patent violation because the book covers technologies that IBM has patented along with sample source-code on how to implement the concepts. Uh, sorry, but that's just evil.