No baby yet. Our due date is Dec. 2nd, so it could be any time now.
Tuesday, 25 November, 2003. 09:21:45 PM
Here's part of a comment I made on Slashdot outlining what I think would be a good voting system:
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All that I would add is that with a computer in the mix, it offers the opportunity for a cross-check to be performed. Have the computer also tally votes in a database, besides the ballots in the box. The ballots could be printed in both English text and optical scan text.
At the end of the night, run the ballots through an optical scanner, and have the voting machines come up with a separate tally. If they are off by more than 0.1%, it would trigger an audit for any monkeybusiness.
The audit would have the paper receipts to tally, PLUS the database would have to be reconciled with the paper receipts. Here's a scheme: The paper receipts would have a unique number on them, printed by the computer. That number, combined with the votes on the card, would be run through an MD5 hash, and that hash would be the key for that vote/card in the database. The reconciliation would be a physical marking of each database record that is found by looking up the hash of the number and the votes. Any votes left over in the database, or not found when looked up by the hash, would represent fraud or some serious error. The number that is printed on the card would not be stored in the database, obviously.
It would be the first system analogous to double entry accounting to ever exist.
It's pretty tight security-wise, doesn't rely on a trusted voting computer (since during the audit the MD5's would be computed independently), and more importantly, doesn't rely on any funky paper with two parts and graphical encoding.
Tuesday, 25 November, 2003. 05:55:30 PM
More photos of the bathroom, dogs, and a neighborhood deer are up.
Wednesday, 19 November, 2003. 03:33:19 PM
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
Tuesday, 18 November, 2003. 12:03:23 PM
Tuesday, 18 November, 2003. 11:03:58 AM
The big hill on 2222 East of 620 is named "Tumbleweed Hill".
Thursday, 13 November, 2003. 07:02:32 PM
From an article in LA Weekly:
GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.
But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism the only form of government suitable for such a people.
This ties in with what I have been thinking about people who don't vote. Those who don't participate accept the default, which is despotism. And further, failure to vote is actually a positive indication of their opinion of democracy. Everyone claims to love democracy, but because much less than half of us vote, it's clear that the majority of Americans don't really give a rat's ass about it.
Thursday, 13 November, 2003. 12:18:19 AM
Photos of the treadmill and Alex in October (family password required) are up too.
Thursday, 13 November, 2003. 12:14:07 AM
Finally, photos of the bathroom demolition and plumbing installation are up.
Tuesday, 11 November, 2003. 11:21:53 AM
I'm up in McKinney Texas until Friday working on a project.
Monday, 10 November, 2003. 11:01:33 PM
I think this quote mocks the ignorance, narrowmindedness and bigotry of some Episcopalian congregations quite well:
"The actions taken by the New Hampshire Episcopalians are an affront to Christians everywhere. I am just thankful that the church's founder, Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon, his wife Anne Boleyn, his wife Jane Seymour, his wife Anne of Cleves, his wife Katherine Howard, and his wife Catherine Parr are no longer here to suffer through this assault on traditional Christian marriage."
Monday, 10 November, 2003. 05:40:21 PM
The network switcher program for my laptop is done.
Monday, 10 November, 2003. 05:02:33 PM
This weekend I spent a bunch of time getting the plumbing changed on our shower. The new hardware didn't fit because it is larger than the old hardware, so I had to cut the studs and re-do the framing inside the wall to make it fit. Everything is connected now, no leaks. The tar paper is also up, and it's ready to receive the cement board.
Thursday, 06 November, 2003. 04:20:32 PM
Now I have XFree86 configured on the T30. The secret to getting direct rendering working is to load the agpgart module before the radeon module and setting a 16 bit color depth.
Thursday, 06 November, 2003. 02:54:34 PM
I got X installed and working on my T30. The trick to it is to get the XFree86 4.3.0 packages that were backported to Debian Woody.
Wednesday, 05 November, 2003. 04:58:27 PM
Slashdot has an article about yet more problems with computerized voting machines during yesterday's elections.
Wednesday, 05 November, 2003. 01:39:45 PM
I got my new laptop. It's a Thinkpad T30 - 2.4GHz Pentium IV, 60G hard disk, 1G memory. The Windows XP install has been backed up, and Linux is going on it tonight.
Tuesday, 04 November, 2003. 01:21:44 AM
A good term for the use of proprietary software that I've been meaning to write down is sharecropping. When a programmer learns proprietary software and invests the time and money to internalize the use of closed source software, that programmer is really a share cropper. He's tilling land that he doesn't own, participating in an unequal relationship with a powerful owner of intellectual property.
Monday, 03 November, 2003. 03:51:46 PM
According to an article on Salon, the Bush administration is ramping up the draft board system. This notice seems to indicate that there's some truth to this. We don't have much time to waste. Because of a oversight, about half of the population isn't even registered for Selective Service. In the event that the draft is reinstated, it's important that we send our daughters off to war along with the boys. Anything less would be illegal discrimination, and a moral injustice.
Monday, 03 November, 2003. 01:03:35 PM
The astroturf detector project is too hard to complete easily. The problem is that the semantic information on web pages is too sparse, and what is there varies too much. It'd be possible to build it with a system of hinting that the page navigator could use, but the task of building hints would take a lot of time, and would be brittle.
Monday, 03 November, 2003. 11:18:41 AM
Alex and I are now sharing a room for our offices. Baby is getting the room that used to be my office. Since I had to shut down my server to move it, I also upgraded the power supply to an Antec quiet power supply. It's quiet, but the two hard disks in the machine still make a lot of noise. I need to look at ways to silence those. They are screwed right into the case, so the vibrations from the drives are transmitted directly. Some rubber washers would help a little, but there might be something better than that. This website is also now running on Apache.
Sunday, 02 November, 2003. 12:52:55 PM
After months of bitching about Diebold in the alternative press, and on the websites of people who know about computer system security, CNN has finaly picked up the story.