The European Commission launched a new patent initiative that hasn’t received a universally warm welcome. I can hardly blame them, since I too remember how unscrupulous Commission was when pushing for software patents.

I wrote my thoughts on patents a while ago and they haven’t changed much since. But if we are going to have a patent system in Europe, and I honestly can’t see it going away anytime soon, then it’s probably better to have a common, unified one.

Which is what this initiative was supposed to be about and since they are asking for comments, it’s a great opportunity to present them your view. Don’t miss the deadline, which is 31 March 2006!

Update: It seems there are good reasons to be concerned.

Quite a lot has happened during time when I was away from this blog and I’ll probably talk about some of it in next few days, but I’d like to start with news from Google.

I wrote a badly written post when Google Talk was unveiled. What bothered me most was the fact that it didn’t communicate with anybody and was in fact another walled garden.

Well, they fixed it and Google Talk now actually talks to other jabber servers including ours.

There are some problems with presence notification, but it’s hard to say yet who’s fault it is and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was ours. Sad thing about jabber is that there are few if any open source server implementations that wouldn’t be just a notch above suck.

In short run this won’t change much. Most people will still be on competing services and it might be difficult to get them off. But as a newborn optimist I see a promise of an open, working IM, where you’re not tied to wishes and development of one company even when that company is mine. And that can only be good.

Have you ever encountered a problem with XMLHttpRequest (XHR), where its handler couldn’t read request status or the status was set to 0?

Well, I did, a few days ago.

It took me a while to find the cause of this problem and in my case it was form submission. It’s stupid to use AJAX to submit a form, but nevertheless it’s what I’m doing for dubious reasons that I’ll probably be ashamed of in a few months or years. And it used to work fine, until I changed submit buttons from type=”button” to type=”image” .

First type needs javascript to do anything worthwhile, while second type submits form when pressed, which I somehow missed. So, when I thought I was sending only a normal XHR request, I was actually also submitting my form which lead to described strange behavior.

I have no idea why, since XHR state change handler shouldn’t be triggered by other requests, but it was and it was fixed by simply canceling form submission in image button onclick handler.

If you ever encounter this problem, check your forms and their submit buttons. It’s very likely that solution is hiding there.