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Dan Gilmore has
commented on Dennis Kucinich's criticisms of voting
machine manufacturer Diebold.
Voting transparancy seems to be a big issue with Kucinich. It's great that someone is talking about this.
People look at the Florida 2000 situation and think technology is the answer. And certainly technology can help. A touch screen can be a more accessible mechanism for chosing from a menu of choices than a punch ballot in small print.
But there is a big difference between clarity in voting, and confidence in voting. You may be more sure you chose who you meant to choose, but how certain are you that your choice was properly counted?
I think our first steps towards introducing more technology into voting should be to address clarity for the user.
But for voter confidence we should still have physical tokens generated by the voting process. These tokens should be able to be examined by the voter at the poll. And of course they should be countable and recountable by hand and by machine.
Check out these recent entries in my Apache log files:
217.73.164.106 - - [18/Nov/2003:00:30:21 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 7555 "http://www.kwlablog.com/" "MSIE 6.0"
217.73.164.106 - - [18/Nov/2003:18:50:45 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 7555 "http://www.jennifersblog.com/" "MSIE 6.0"
Domain Name: kwlablog.com |
Domain Name: jennifersblog.com |
I've found some blog entries on the referrer spamming I mention in the previous
floppaganda
post. You can find some good discussion at
net warriors.org blog.
Check out these blog entries in particular:
More Referrer Spamming,
Referrer SPAM updates,
Referrer Spamming, wrap up.
I've expanded the discussion of ad blocking css on the home page, and tweaked the look of the entire site slightly. Next up is a Python starter project to do some simple Apache log file analysis.
I now have instructions for using my ad blocking userContents.css with the Safari web browser from Apple. Find the updated instructions here.
So much for lying in a beanbag wearing tighty whities and weilding a remote. I've decided to join the world of the employed once more. A9 looks like a great opportunity to learn a whole pile of new things and try to solve some fun problems. A9 is Amazon's search technology arm, spun off into a subsidiary down here in Palo Alto. There have been a few articles in the press already, even though A9 isn't really started yet.
What's new: Now RFC 822 compliant date formatting is the default. You can
go back to the old MoveableType style dating by setting:
my = 0;
Also perldoc style documentation has been added.
Known Issues: Plugins that provide their own entries
routine and do not return the
story files in the %files
hash will cause lastbuilddate to find
no date. In this circumstance lastbuilddate will not emit a
Download
lastbuilddate here.
One Monday, San Jose Judge Leslie Nichols
rejected the suit brought by Elaine Evans against the
San Jose Redevelopment
Agency (SJRA) in an attempt to stop it's
Strong Neighborhoods
Initiative (SNI) activities. I
attended the first half of the arguments in Superior Court on Monday
morning. The heart of the case was whether Evans had properly
sought to bring her concerns to the redevelopment board. In the
end the city prevailed on that point, but not before I heard a few
interesting bits along the way, including:
I continue to twiddle the look of floppaganda. It looks best on mozilla due to the
use of rounded borders (which is a mozilla-only css feature), and it looks best on mac
due to use of Marker Felt
and American Typewriter
fonts.
I'm investigating adding writeback and trackback features... stay tuned.
The latest blocks more ad images and also fixes the false positive on netflix's rental page. Go here for the latest.
I just landed some changes to the cocoa test app project that allow it to build and run again. You can find it in mozilla/embedding/tests/cocoaEmbed. Directions for building a cocoa version of the mozilla, and the cocoaEmbed test app, can be found here. I will write up my own additional directions shortly (the mozilla directions are slightly stale).
Remember the early screensavers that just drew random rects? Bring back those epileptic fits today, using nothing more than javascript, dom, and css! Note that this may only work in Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird, Camino...) Go here for demonstration...
Inspired by (and shamelessly stealing from) Asa's great looking weblog, I've updated the look&feel of floppaganda.
lastbuilddate is a blosxom plugin that adds a <lastBuildDate> value to your rss feed. Download lastbuilddate here.
I've made a small update to my Ad Blocking css here. Now some MSN ads should be blocked as well. You may want to also check out a couple of other sites (blizzle and gozer) that have much larger blocking lists. I have not incorporated their additions so far because I want to limit my list to what I regularly use. That way I know from experience that there aren't too many false positives.
Blosxom 2.0 just came out. So I'm making a plugin out of my lastBuildDate rss modification to blosxom. Stay tuned...
Here is a tcsh script for building mozilla and saving all the build
output to a file. In this script "~/mozroot" should be replaced
by the path to you mozilla root, and "~/mozroot/buildlog.txt" should be
replaced by the filename for your build log.
#! /bin/tcsh
echo "starting build" > ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
date >> ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
cd ~/mozroot
cvs co mozilla/client.mk >>& ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
cd mozilla
make -w -f client.mk >>& ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
echo "finished build" >> ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
date >> ~/mozroot/buildlog.txt
Why tcsh? Well, it's the default on macosx and most folks
building mozilla probably have some build cruft in their .tcshrc,
like:
source /sw/bin/init.csh
setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
You can use the above script along with Cronnix to set up an
automated daily build on your mac.
I just successfully tackled my very first Perl project: modifying blosxom so
that it reports a lastBuildDate in it's rss feed.
Now folks getting my
feed can automate notifications of new content. After some
code cleanup I will share the implementation on my website.
I must say, Perl has quite the learning curve.
Kenneth Starr simply cannot resist slinging legal mud at whoever
threatens his idea of American Corporate Dominion Under God. Now
he has inserted
himself into the Supreme Court case of Newdow vs. The Pledge of
Allegiance, and his contribution is that Newdow is a bad dad, and
doesn't have standing to litigate. Apparently Linda Tripp has not
recorded any confessions of anyone going down on Newdow yet,
though. Give her time.
Left out of all this is the real issue: what it the real constitutional
meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments when applied to state
funded education? This was tackled succinctly by the 9th Circuit
Court in it's decision.
Scan down to section D: Establishment Clause, for the real
meat. It's a straightforward application of the Lemon test, which
has served the court well in these issues when it has the nerve to use
it.
Building mozilla/embedding/browser/cocoa/src/NSBrowserView.pbproj, I hit a couple of errors. A couple of the files were stale. I've checked in new versions of CHClickListener.mm and SaveHeaderSniffer.mm to fix build problems.
While job hunting I'm starting up a little project to keep me busy:
making a Cocoa version of Mozilla Composer. First step is
to see if the old cocoa
embedding sample still builds and works...
This is the weblog of Joe Francis, aka
floppymoose. I just recently returned from a lovely vacation in
Hawaii. In some kind of karmic equalization process, 10 days of
Hawaiian bliss was balanced by the discovery, on my return, that my
badge no longer opened the building at Netscape's Mountain View campus
where I work. I mean worked. I am part of the flotsam
scattered by the ejection
of all things mozilla from AOL.
So now I'm seeking a software engineering position. If you have
one, give it to me. Now.
Not yet convinced? Perhaps some details of
my prior experience is in order.
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