Tuesday, 31 August, 2004. 09:58:38 PM

I've written about voting systems before, and how they are insecure in general, and a tempting way for a person or group to rig an election. The breaking news right now is that an actual feature has been demonstrated in Diebold voting machines going back several years, whereby a two digit code is entered, causing it to maintain two separate sets of books. The vote tabulations in the second set of books can be changed at will. After the machine is switched into cheat mode, it reports votes from the second accounting area, without giving any kind of indication at all that it is reading from the second set of books. The tabulation of votes in the second set of books can be altered in just seconds and is completely undetectable. Of course, it's much easier to manipulate a single machine rather than hundreds of thousands of individual voting machines. Diebold makes this easy, because all of the voting results are rolled up into a single machine, called the central tabulator. That central tabulator has the same kind of double book accounting scheme that the voting machines have.

It makes you wonder what Diebold might have in mind, particularly since the company has given $411,320 in contributions to Republican candidates. /n

Friday, 27 August, 2004. 11:12:12 AM

Thursday, 26 August, 2004. 09:16:21 AM

I'm working on an article about the Edmund Scientific Astroscan, and why after nearly 30 years of production it's still a terrific telescope for a beginning astronomer. /n

Tuesday, 24 August, 2004. 10:43:22 AM

I finished the article on Felon and Immigrant voting last night, and it's located here. /n

Sunday, 22 August, 2004. 10:04:37 PM

New photos are in the August 2004 directory. Subjects are Kristiana, dogs, and our new Audi. /n

Sunday, 22 August, 2004. 09:03:46 AM

Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" was stolen from a museum in Oslo, Norway. /n

Friday, 20 August, 2004. 03:55:07 PM

Harsh Reality of IT Project Life Cycle
# Phase 1: Uncritical acceptance.
# Phase 2: Wild enthusiasm.
# Phase 3: Dejected disillusionment.
# Phase 4: Total confusion.
# Phase 5: Search for the guilty.
# Phase 6: Punishment of the innocent.
# Phase 7: Promotion of nonparticipants.
/n

Friday, 20 August, 2004. 02:09:31 PM

TEXT: Easel Displays for Home and Office
URL: http://www.xylemdesign.com
Optional description: A bunch of apparently clueless morons who claim to offer a very broad selection of display, artist and decorative easels as well as other stands available online. As far as I know, they are not involved in terrorist activities, but my contact with them is extemely limited. I could very well be mistaken about that. They spammed me wanting exchange links. Well, here's their link.
/n

Wednesday, 18 August, 2004. 10:47:43 PM

It seems that everyone in the world is starting to link to this very interesting piece by Philip E. Agre. What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? I'm still thinking it over, and I may read it a couple more times. The scope of the article is very broad, but wasn't nearly long enough to include all the details. So, the article requires a lot of thought before any particular conclusions can be drawn about it. I'll probably write something more about it later. In the meantime, I am working on a short article about felon and immigrant voter rights, just for fun. I might be done with it this weekend. /n

Monday, 16 August, 2004. 01:50:49 PM

Wired magazine is no longer capitalizing the first letter in the word 'internet". Also 'Web' will become 'web' and 'Net' will become 'net'. The reason that it was capitalized is that an internet is a network of networks, and the Internet was the name of the network created when all of the smaller internets were connected. The word Internet was something like a proper name, and was accordingly captialized. Wired magazine is dropping the capital letter because their interpretation is that it signified some kind of special importance, due to some trait of hubris in the engineers that developed the Internet, and that a lower-case letter places the Internet into its rightful perspective.

The usage of the capital 'I' seems to be similar to the usage of the capital 'G' on the name of the Christian god. A god could mean any diety that was ever imagined, but God (at least in Christian societies) can only refer to one entity.

Author Joseph Turow argues that the capital letter should be dropped because the term has become a common noun. He disliked the capitalized term, because it seemed to be akin to a brand-name, like Kleenex. Since the Internet isn't owned by anyone, it shouldn't look like it's someone's brand.

I like the idea of dropping the capital letter 'I' from the word, because it takes an extra keystroke to form the capital letter. I could decrease the time it takes me to type the word by, perhaps, a fifth of a second. /n

Friday, 13 August, 2004. 02:44:15 PM

Alex's parents are vacationing with friends in Florida right now, in Clearwater. For a while it looked like Hurricane Charley was going to make landfall near there, but it's finally coming ashore right now about 100 miles to the south. They could get brief gusts of wind up to 80 MPH, but it's probably going to be just a very bad thunderstorm for them. They might have even left town to avoid the weather. /n

Monday, 09 August, 2004. 02:35:03 PM

Alex just called to tell me that Kristiana pulled herself up to a standing position from a sitting position. /n

Sunday, 08 August, 2004. 08:42:26 PM

Kristiana is finally crawling on the floor. She's not very fast yet, but if she sees something she wants, she can move towards it. /n

Sunday, 08 August, 2004. 07:49:17 PM

This was a busy weekend. On Saturday, Alex and I bought an Audi A6 station wagon. Then I drove to Harlingen TX in my del Sol to visit my friend Joe and sell my car to him. I had my telescope with me, and it turned out to be a clear night, though there was a lot of water vapor in the air. This morning we hung out for a while, and I caught a plane back to Austin. I'm going to miss that del Sol. /n

Thursday, 05 August, 2004. 11:52:15 AM

I sent this message to the webmaster for the Mercury Messenger spacecraft home page:

Hi, Congratulations on the successful beginning to the Mercury exploration mission!

I have a request. Could some images of the position of the spacecraft in the solar system be added to the Messenger web site? The site for the Cassini mission has them, and they were very informative to refer to during the long trip to Saturn. A similar page for Messenger would be really nice.

Thanks.
/n

Tuesday, 03 August, 2004. 09:07:41 AM

The Messenger spacecraft launched last night at 2:15AM, headed for Mercury. It arrives in 2011. /n