the joy of voting

posted by jack at 03:37 CET in / politics

I found an interesting article about the problems with the touch-screen voting terminals that are starting to be used all over America.

Most of the problems boil down to the fact that these are closed systems whose workings are impossible for any outsider to examine or verify. There's literally no way to know if the machines are recording votes accurately, or whether through error or mischief they are recording and reporting incorrect results. It seems to me that the easiest, best solution (as proposed in the article) is that after entering everything, the machine should print out a paper ballot for the voter to verify, and those ballots should then be saved in case a recount is required. Presumably the paper copy and the electronic copy would be tagged identically so that given a paper ballot, you could find the electronic ballot and see if it matches what was printed.

I am The Doctor

posted by jack at 16:17 CET in / humor

My friend James clued me in on the existence of a fine TV and radio program from the BBC called Dead Ringers. It's a prank call show, but what separates this from the Jerky Boys or Crank Yankers is that the pranskters are talented impressionists.

One of the most heavily-used characters for these prank calls is "The Doctor", an actor who does a mighty fine Dr Who (as portrayed by Tom Baker) impression, confusing his hapless victims with bewildering talk of Daleks, alternate timestreams, time travel, and past and future selves.

(For those of you whose Dr Who knowledge stops at the "you mean the guy with the long scarf and the puffy hair?" level, it is that very same Doctor [who was played by actor Tom Baker] who is being sent up in these sketches).

Anyway, there are a few RealAudio clips from Dead Ringers linked from the offical Dr Who site, and a few mp3 files of the same available on the p2p networks (a fine use for Poisoned). What I haven't yet found anywhere are clips from the TV series. Apparently the aforementioned prankster actually walks about in full TomBakerDrWho regalia, leading to further hilarity. Hoo!

i am nutholio

posted by jack at 14:08 CET in / compute / blogging

As of today, this blog is now being brought to you through the power of nuthole.com. Now instead of that crazy-long address you used to have to type in order to reach this fine place, you can just type "www.nuthole.com", or heck, in most modern browsers you can probably just type "nuthole" and you'll be on your way.

If you're reading this, you're certainly already aware of this. I just thought it might be worth noting for posterity's sake.

The origins of the nuthole.com domain are far too boring to recount here. At any rate, the actual meaning of the very word "nuthole" is currently open to debate and discussion. While the Urban Dictionary defines nuthole as "Persons of uncoolness, one who is one can short of a six pack, involoved in rather ridiculous acts" (which may or may not apply here), another witness noted that nuthole.com sounds like the name of a gay dating service (which this site is not). Other theories are welcome at nuthole@rebisoft.com.

dyslexicalism

posted by jack at 10:30 CET in / politics

Earlier I wrote a few words about the Bush Dyslexicon I was reading. Well, I've now finished it. Toward the end, things started to get repetitive; I felt quite certain that the author was re-using some of the Bushisms he was quoting, and overall it just seemed to be getting overly long. After reading Bush's various malapropisms one after another after another, eventually you get the point. Fortunately, the Afterword wraps things up nicely, tying together all the points made throughout the book.

So now I'm on to bigger, fresher fish to fry: namely, Al Franken's wonderful Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Anyone who's been paying any attention to political books these days will already have heard about this book and probably formed an opinion based on which wing of the Plutocratic Party they belong to, but for the undecided amongst you: You Must Buy This Book. Besides exposing the deceitful tactics of the rabid right who (unfortunately) set the tone of discourse in American media, it's also pretty damn funny.

poisoned

posted by jack at 09:09 CET in / compute

For the past half-year or so, I've been using Acquisition, a Macintosh client for the gnutella network. It's got some really nice features, integrates well with iTunes, and feels like a proper Mac OS X application.

But Acquisition has its problems: For one thing it's crippleware, and the accursed warning panel that pops up now and then is bothersome. Acquisition also makes use of the Limewire engine for connecting to the gnutella network; While this makes life easier for Acquisition's developer, it's obnoxious for those of us who want decent performance on our machines; Limewire is notoriously resource-hungry, and will happily consume all the RAM and CPU you can throw its way.

So imagine my happiness when I stumbled across Poisoned, an open-source p2p client that addresses all of the problems I've had with Acquisition, and is nearly as full-featured. It connects to the gnutella, FastTrack, and OpenFT networks, and it seems like support for the OpenNap network is coming as well. Instead of the hungry Limewire core, it uses the open source "giftd", which connects to the aforementioned networks through a plugin system. It is missing some of Acquisition's neatest new features like the nice organization of search results, but is roughly equivalent with where Acquisition was 6 months ago in terms of nifty GUI features. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Terminated

posted by jack at 14:29 CET in / politics

<insert obligatory Terminator joke here>

OK, so Arnold Schwartzenegger is going to be the governor of California. Here's a guy who has no particular experience to make him suitable for the job, and whose ideas regarding public policy don't seem very well thought-out. He doesn't appear fully comfortable with the English language, he seems to have some unsavory personality glitches, and doesn't want to talk much about his wild partying in the 70's. Hmm, does this remind you of anyone else?

Chalk up one more point for Form in the battle between Form and Substance.

flashes of inspiration

posted by jack at 10:48 CET in / thinking

Yesterday I wrote that I figured out how to connect my Palm to my phone with Bluetooth and how great and nerdy that is.

What I didn't mention was that I had tried to do the same thing a month ago, and was totally and utterly stumped. Using the same pieces of hardware and software, doing nearly the same steps, I was totally stumped, and came to the mistaken conclusion that the software on the Palm just didn't work with my carrier.

Maybe the documentation was poor. Maybe I was just having an off day. Whatever. Somehow a few words from a colleague and a little bit of googling yesterday, and suddenly I had solved the problem which I had previously thought to be intractable!

i love the bluetooth

posted by jack at 13:21 CET in / compute

For a few months, I've been using a phone with built-in Bluetooth, which lets me wirelessly synchronize contacts with my computer. About a month ago I acquired a Palm Tungsten T, which also includes Bluetooth, but I haven't used the bluetooth there to any extent until today. Suddenly, inspired by a coworker's easy success connecting to the internet with his new Tungsten T2 and a Bluetooth phone, I figured out how to do this as well. It rocks! Anywhere I go, I can have access the internet (albeit slowly) with a proper web browser on the Palm (instead of the lowly WAP browser on my phone.

It's nerdalicious!