I got a surprise on Saturday. I opened my mailbox and discovered a letter from a patent certificate company congratulating me on my latest patent. What? I submitted that puppy four years ago! Man! that's a long time to wait. What's the patent on? It protects the idea I developed for aggregating devices to find a common cause for hardware problems. It's the method I implemented in the Solaris Crash Analysis Tool's dev busy command and I documented in this article. The patent is available for review on Free Patents Online.
Now to bug the powers that be at Sun for my certificate and $$$ reward 