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There are a number of us who listen to Harris Miller, President, Information Technology Assocation of America tell the Congress that "425,000 job will remain unfilled during 2001." I (and many others on /.) wrote Mr. Miller asking him to convey our desire to take a shot at some of those 425,000 jobs.

I sent that letter on 2 April. I have yet to hear from Mr. Miller, the ITAA, any of the 2,500 member companies, or any headhunter about any of those 425,000 job positions.

How about you, Mr. Anonymous Coward? Do you really want to find qualified people? If so, drop a line -- I don't hide behind an AC name. In fact, to make it easy, here is my e-mail address in easily-clickable form.

When was the last time Intel hired a technical person in the over-40 age group? When was the last time you did?

First off, I write for a living, mostly non-fiction for magazines and the odd book now and then. I started as a reviewer in 1984. I started off as an embedded-systems programmer, and still write benchmarks and other programs for reviewing purposes...and to have fun.

The golden rule of journalism: Keep business out of editorial--there should be a high wall between your reporters and your advertising salesmen.

According to the Dallas Observer, CueCat partner Dallas TV station WFAA didn't observe that rule when extolling the virtues of the CueCat during an advertising spree during the editorial portion of three nightly newscasts. The Dallas Morning News, another CueCat partner, reportedly did a story that wasn't as balanced as it should be, either. And now Wired has weighed in editorially with a story that was missing more than it said -- another CueCat partner speaking editorially.

Now I don't see WFAA-TV, and I don't read any Dallas newspaper if I can help it.

I expect better of Wired, which is one reason I have offered to write a rebuttal article for that magazine, one that covers the story from the view of the hackers that Digital Convergence seems to so love now. Just because it would be a rebuttal article doesn't mean that I can dispense with fairness and balance -- but the story will cover all aspects, not just those aspects that puts Digital Convergence in the best light.

If you want to see that story written, let Wired know about it. My credentials: hardware reviewer since 1984 for the likes of InfoWorld, Byte, Federal Computer Week, The Net, and other publications. Perhaps my best qualification can be found on this page that describes how I tried to let Digital Convergence provide input to an article I did for Planet IT.

More importantly, I have no ties to Digital Convergence, Inc. other than an interest in their product. After all, like many other people who have commented, I have heard nothing from them when I requested licensing materials a month ago, when the CEO ran the last letter on Slash-dot.

Ever since the cease-and-desist letters came out, I've been working on aspects of the CueCat. That effort spawned a section of my Web site that worked to expose all aspects of the red-nosed pussy. On my pages, you will find the anatomy of the proprietary cue, a complete description of the output of the CueCat and how one would discover the base-64+XOR algorithm without disassembling or decompiling a single instruction of executable code. I've also put together a capabilities list of what the 'Cat can do (and that list is expanding as people report additional capabilities). I even publish a rationale for why I did all that work.

The only reason I'm slowing down is that I've done about all I can do. That included publishing source code to an interpreter that runs as a console app in both Linux and Windows.

Now, where do I draw the line? I draw the line at providing code without license that would infringe patents 5,933,829, 5,978,773, and 6,108,656...held by NeoMedia Technologies Inc. I stop at interpreting the barcode on stdout in order to bring the CueCat to the same level of functionality as other barcode readers.

Now, I'm looking at PaperClick...

Ever since the cease-and-desist letters came out, I've been working on aspects of the CueCat. That effort spawned a section of my Web site that worked to expose all aspects of the red-nosed pussy. On my pages, you will find the anatomy of the proprietary cue, a complete description of the output of the CueCat and how one would discover the base-64+XOR algorithm without disassembling or decompiling a single instruction of executable code. I've also put together a capabilities list of what the 'Cat can do (and that list is expanding as people report additional capabilities). I even publish a rationale for why I did all that work.

The only reason I'm slowing down is that I've done about all I can do. That included publishing source code to an interpreter that runs as a console app in both Linux and Windows.

Now, where do I draw the line? I draw the line at providing code without license that would infringe patents 5,933,829, 5,978,773, and 6,108,656...held by NeoMedia Technologies Inc. I stop at interpreting the barcode on stdout in order to bring the CueCat to the same level of functionality as other barcode readers.

Now, I'm looking at PaperClick...

You may want to update your Perl script to take into account some recent discoveries about modifications to the 'Cat.

Specifically, you may want to insert the minor tweak that lets the code handle those 'Cats that return command and slash.

Nope, they developed it on their own based on Code 128 (an existing, widely popular barcode symbology)
For more information on it, see: http://www.fluent-access.co m/wtpapers/cuecat/index.html

To be honest, the book format was a mistake -- the Linux code is moving altogether too fast for a book to be useful when published. It was what Coriolis offered, though, and I did it.

The job of code documentation done right is not an easy nor quick one, and as a coder myself I can understand why people hate the job.

That said, my co-author and I will be starting over with 2.4.0 (as soon as I get permission to republish the code from Linus) and do it on the Web...but not for free. To do it right, I also need to develop a revenue model that makes the project pay for itself...and I don't think a book publisher will be willing to do that.