Patents by Inventor Blaine S. Dennis

Blaine S. Dennis has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 6453383
    Abstract: Methods and systems are provided for manipulating data in segmented environments such as an instance of a NetWare file system. Unlike the conventional approach that relies on FDISK and the install.nlm and nwconfig.nlm utilities in NetWare, the invention does not destroy user data on the disk after the data is copied to tape or other intermediate storage. Segment-related features such as limits on the number of segments; various configurations of segments, volumes and partitions among drives; and data mirroring, are handled by the invention during “in place” manipulations. Segments, volumes, partitions, and segment clusters or blocks may each be resized. Segments may be merged. Volumes may be consolidated on a single drive. Other manipulations and various combinations of manipulations are also provided.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 13, 1999
    Date of Patent: September 17, 2002
    Assignee: PowerQuest Corporation
    Inventors: Theron M. Stoddard, Blaine S. Dennis, Robert S. Raymond
  • Patent number: 6108697
    Abstract: Methods, systems, articles of manufacture, and signal formats are provided for transferring disk images from a transmitting computer to one or more downloading computers. The transfer is done in a manner that allows a technician to start the download to one computer while preparing a second computer for downloading or shutting down a third computer after it has finished downloading the disk image. The computers need not wait for the beginning of a data stream but can instead join the download at specified points within the data stream. This reduces the time spent waiting to begin the download, particularly when the disk image being transferred is large. Compression and connection selection may be performed in response to changes in network performance. Image file packing and error management techniques may also be used, as well as on-the-fly file system instance manipulations.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 2, 1998
    Date of Patent: August 22, 2000
    Assignee: PowerQuest Corporation
    Inventors: Robert S Raymond, Blaine S Dennis, Eric J Ruff
  • Patent number: 5717912
    Abstract: A computer system and method for document indexing and data retrieval. A full text index is created in two phases. In the first phase, a word list symbol table, an alphabetically ordered list, and a non-repeating word number stream are constructed from the source text. In the second phase, a word number access array and in-memory full text index are constructed and then index data is merged into the final index.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 18, 1996
    Date of Patent: February 10, 1998
    Assignee: Novell, Inc.
    Inventors: Ronald P. Millett, Robin P. Tuck, Blaine S. Dennis, David O. Robertson
  • Patent number: 5701459
    Abstract: A computer system and method for document indexing and data retrieval. A full text index is created in two phases. In the first phase, a word list symbol table, an alphabetically ordered list, and a non-repeating word number stream are constructed from the source text. In the second phase, a word number access array and in-memory full text index are constructed and then index data is merged into the final index.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 1, 1996
    Date of Patent: December 23, 1997
    Assignee: Novell, Inc.
    Inventors: Ronald P. Millett, Robin P. Tuck, Blaine S. Dennis, David O. Robertson