Team Member Blog
BarCampMadison2 will be held on July 26 and 27 at the Extra Bold Portfolio School downtown. Registration will be available very soon [1]. We still need help getting things together, so check out the website and the notes from our last meeting [2]. Attendance for the BarCamp will be limited, so register as early as possible. As always, BarCampMadison2 is open to the public and free, but be prepared to share your knowledge!
[1] – http://barcampmadison2.org
[2] –http://barcamp.org/BarCampMadison2-2008-07-13-Planning-Meeting
Filed in: Team Member Blog barcampmadison2
Electronic Voting rears its ugly head yet again.
From just that one sentence it should be relatively easy to tell where I stand on the issue. Technology does a lot of great things for us, but sometimes technology is completely unnecessary. Electronic voting seems to suffer from the elephant gun syndrome. Although it would be easier to collect and tabulate votes for an election electronically, using paper and pencil is a tried and true mechanism for correctly identifying and counting votes.
I know that I wouldn’t want my vote to be counted by a machine that is built by a company like Diebold.
Bruce Schneier has a blog post [1] that points to another blog entry [2] written by a guy named Dan Wallach who is an associate professor in the Comp. Sci. department at Rice University. His specialty is electronic voting security. He’s been called on numerous times to testify in front of the Texas House Committee on Elections about the topic.
It seems that the various companies that build electronic voting machines are bending over backward (think crazy Matrix bullet time Neo moves) to twist the results of some studies that have been done on the security of these voting machines to convince states that the machines are safe to use. It’s not exactly easy to corrupt or change results on these machines, but it’s not impossible. Downright scary is what I think. Voters that have to use these machines to vote cannot be assured that their votes will be tabulated correctly. Municipalities cannot necessarily detect that the results are corrupt according to Mr. Wallach.
Voting is too important a thing to be left entrusted to companies developing these machines behind closed doors. Mr. Schneier is consistent in saying that security by obscurity just doesn’t work. I’m still not sure I’d want to use any electronic voting machine even if it’s completely open source and been vetted by numerous third parties. Pen and paper any day for me. I won’t mind if it takes a week to figure out who won a particular election as long as I know that all the votes have been counted correctly.
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, if you work with computers and technology on a daily basis, this should scare you. It’s necessary to get people talking about the issues with their governmental representatives to ensure that everyone’s vote will count.
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/dan_wallach_on.html
[2]http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1304
Filed in: Team Member Blog electronic voting, security
One of my favorite authors is Cory Doctorow. He writes some great science fiction that is both relevant and contemporary. Cory is somewhat unique in that while he publishes his books in dead tree format through major book publishers, he still gives away the text of his works and podcasts his works in audio form all under a Creative Commons license. A few years back he worked for the EFF and he still lectures and writes about electronic freedoms.
His newest novel was just released at the beginning of the month. It is a young adult novel titled “Little Brother”. It’s a story about a high school hacker who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was accused of being a terrorist. The novel recounts how he fights back against the Department of Homeland Security for taking away freedoms. Cory put up a website for the book [1] that contains news about the book, his tour schedule, links to download the text of the book, and even a place to submit remixes of the book. One of my favorite tie-ins is an RSS feed written by the main character from the book at the website Instructables [2]. It’s a bunch of how-tos for various things from the book like how to screen print t-shirts and how to avoid digital camera noise signatures. Fun stuff.
[1] – Little Brother Website
[2] –w1n5t0n’s Instructables feed
Filed in: Team Member Blog little brother, instructables, cory doctorow, sci-fi
I briefly spoke with a colleague of mine today and he was checking his messages on his new work cellphone. It was one of those new-fangled Blackberry devices. He was telling me about some of the things it can do. In jest, I pulled out my year-and-a-half old flip phone. No camera, no keyboard, I don’t even know how to download a ringtone for it. I just want my phone to be a phone. That’s probably too much to ask as the cellphone industry is going further and further towards creating devices that can do everything. I already have devices that can do the other things: a digital camera and a laptop. I like having the ability to leave things home when I don’t want to be bothered. I just don’t feel the need to be constantly connected.
There was a time when I’d get excited about the newest techno-gadget on the market. Miniaturization and packing in features are keys to getting people excited about products (my cellphone runs my website, has an 8MP camera, and does my laundry… it’s the size of a credit card!). But, nowadays, I’d rather have simplicity. I like my iPod because it plays music really well (though I can’t stand iTunes, fortunately I can use gtkpod) not because it can also bake bread.
I like to extend the thoughts of simplicity to my programming. It’s sometimes cool to come up with the entire kitchen along with the sink in a couple of lines of code, but I’ve found that it’s better to just keep it simple and clean. It usually works out better if the code is easy to understand even if it takes 20 lines to create that kitchen sink.
But then again… sometimes IT IS cool to throw in that kitchen with 2 extra lines of elegant code.
Filed in: Team Member Blog simplicity
I haven’t posted anything for quite awhile, but rest assured that even though I haven’t posted anything I have been busy writing. I’ve been working on a couple of longer articles plus a number of shorter posts. I’m also working on a new presentation which I hope is ready in some form for BarCampMadison2. On the topic of BarCampMadison2, there will be another planning meeting on Saturday, March 29 at 1pm at Escape Coffee House, so if you’re still interested in helping out please show up to the meeting. We’re still working on trying to find a venue to hold the BarCamp. Because of this we do not have an official date to hold the BarCamp. The website is up and functional at http://barcampmadison2.org.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
Every day at around 11:30 the developers in my area are faced with the most difficult question of the morning: where to go to lunch? To help move things along, I decided to create an IRC Bot for our developer channel. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel. After 30 seconds of Googling, I found a very capable framework: http://www.jibble.org/pircbot.php. Just extend the PircBot class, and in minutes you’ll have a functional IRC Bot!
import org.jibble.pircbot.PircBot;
public class LunchBot extends PircBot {
public static String[] lunchSpots = {
"Copp’s",
"Chipotle",
"Chin’s",
"Quizno’s",
"Casa Bianca”,
"Panera",
"Cousin’s",
"Milio’s",
"Subway",
"Boston’s",
"JT Whitney’s”,
"Takara",
"Laredo’s",
"Quaker Steak & Lube”,
"TGI Fridays”,
"PF Chang’s”,
"the Hubbard Ave Diner”,
"McDonald’s",
"the West Towne Mall Food Court”,
"the first floor”,
"the fridge in the break room and steal a brownbag”
};
public LunchBot() {
super();
setName("LunchBot");
}
public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login, String hostname, String message) {
if (message.equalsIgnoreCase("lunch")) {
sendMessage(channel, sender + “: you should go to “ + lunchSpots[(int) (Math.random()*lunchSpots.length)] );
}
}
}
If anyone types “lunch” in our channel, they’ll get a random item from the list. It took more time to think of the lunch options than it did to do the research and coding!
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I have to admit that I’m more than a little excited about the current news revolving around large solid state drives. With BitMicro prepping a 832GB solid state drive following Sony’s first NAND based laptop and rumors of a harddiskless portable from Apple being announced at the Macworld expo, it appears that the death of computers with moving parts may be on the horizon. These drives have higher transfer rates, lower power consumption and higher reliability; this would be a positive move on all fronts. I also believe it will open the door for more interesting and creative hardware design, which is always a plus as long as hardware makers remember to be sure their creations are practical. It’s amazing how often they miss that piece of the puzzle.
On a semi-related note, some are claiming that the HD format war is over, and Sony has won with Blu-ray. After getting a taste of Netflix.com’s Watch Instantly feature, it’s obvious that physical discs are becoming less relevant. The current music market is a great example of this, as I can’t even buy physical copies of many of the albums I’m interested in. Will the true HD format war simply use proprietary codecs with a client/server model? I would love to be a part of a team that designs and builds a system of that magnitude!
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I recently had a few minutes to write myself a program to convert a directory of FLAC files to MP3 format. Read the article to see how I did it.
Filed in: Team Member Blog ruby, flactomp3
