Category: Austin

The Web catalog is currently on-line:
Sunday 10:30 a.m.-12 midnight
Monday-Friday 6 a.m.-12 midnight
Saturday 6 a.m.-9 p.m.
The Web catalog is not available on Library holidays.
Do they have little sql elves to fetch the book references from the database? Does the web server belong to a union?
Or do they take the system down every night while data entry clerks in Bangalore add new novels and take away obsolete collections of magazines.

Last Friday, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines in the State of California.
As Kim Vetter reported in Wired Magazine,

Counties will not be able to purchase any new e-voting machines unless the machines can produce a voter-verified paper trail that voters can use to authenticate that their vote was recorded accurately. This pushes up a previous deadline Shelley put forth in December when he mandated that all new voting machines purchased after June 2005 would have to produce a paper trail.

The last straw was the dodgy activity by Diebold (which serves El Paso County among others). In Kim Vetter’s words at Wired, “Diebold Election Systems made last-minute, untested changes to a device used with its AccuVote-TS and TSx voting machines. As a result of glitches, hundreds of polling places failed to open on time, disenfranchising voters who couldn’t cast ballots.” Secretary of State Shelley is referring Diebold to the Attorney General for the unauthorized upgrades.
The California decision was made after years of work by activists including Kim Alexander at Calvoter, and David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, founder of Verified Voting educating state officials about the risks of non-verified voting.
We have a ways to go here in Texas. County and state officials are learning about voting system security. At a public hearing of the House Elections Committee, a county clerk testifed about the popularity of the Diebold system among voters. None of the state or county election administrators seemed concerned about the studies in the last year showing serious security flaws in these systems.
When presented with reports about evoting problems in other states, chairwoman Mary Denny declared that these stories were not relevant, because they did not happen in Texas. Imagine if Firestone tires self-destructed in California, and Texas officials said that the evidence wouldn’t be relevant unless the tires exploded here in Texas.
This means we have more education to do here. But the trend nationwide is in the right direction.

Little house-holdy things. Just solved a couple of lightbulb problems.
The reason the light fixture in the guest bath wouldn’t take a new bulb was because the lightbulb had exploded, leaving the metal screw bottom in the socket. Unscrewed it, and put in the new lightbulb.
Three of the 50-watt halogen bulbs in the closed-in front porch unscrewed reasonably easily, using some attention to the angle to unscrew them from the recessed tracklight fixture while standing on a stepladder. The fourth (which was the first one I tried last time), unscrewed with some attention, using the geometry from the first three.

Took about 25 minutes and focused attention. Glad to have that kind of time on weekends again.
Anybody know what kind of coating goes on to these halogen things, and what health problems are caused by little flakes of coating falling off?

I made a last-minute decision to contribute to an IRA last night. At 7pm, I headed out for the first time to Austin’s main post office. It’s in a suburban office park off 290 on CrossPark Drive. Three or four postal employees stood in the grassy median strip of the office park drive near a few industrial size postal bins, in the balmy, still-light daylight savings pre-sunset, and took envelopes as cars made a slow u-turn around the median strip.
No traffic, no parking, no lines. Wonder if it was that mellow at a quarter to midnight?

People who are using IRC at sxsw might want to contribute, here
Freenode is a non-profit that provides free internet relay chat to free/open source projects. Freenode godfather lilo is letting us use freenode at sxsw even though sxsw is a commercial project.
It would be cool to repay his generosity by contributing.
(I have no affiliation with freenode other than as a user)

South by Southwest has a blogger-friendly program and a blogger-hostile venue. There’s a great local and out of town blog crew are here, but they won’t let us plug in or take pictures.
Cory Doctorow says:
* Contact the Austin Convention and Visitor’s bureau and tell them that the no-power rule makes Austin hostile to visitors. Email: visitorcenter@austintexas.org. Phone (800)926-2282.
* If you’re on a panel, give the audience permission to take photos and video.
It was announced this morning — we can now plug in. woo-hoo!

So glad to see that Ron Wilson, the chief Democratic party turncoat in the Texas Redistricting battle, was voted out after 27 years in the Texas legislature. Wilson was outvoted by Alma Allen, a member of the State Board of Education.
Wilson was the arch-villain in the EFF-Austin and ACLU-TX Cyberliberties battle against the SDMCA, the bill sponsored by the Motion Picture Association that gave internet service and content providers broad control over what users can do with their net connection.
When we went to his office to try and talk about the bill, Wilson’s staff sent us directly to the MPAA lobbyists, do not pass go. No, they did not want to hear citizen concerns about the bill, yes you need to talk to the MPAA lobbyist in DC.
At least Wilson was consistent in his ethical stance. He was one of the leaders of an unsuccessful attempt to block an ethics reform bill last session with campaign disclosure and anti-conflict of interest provisions.
So glad voters noticed and sent Wilson home.

here

fabulous map showing campaign contributions to legislators.

Last week Wednesday, I was on an evoting panel at Rice University headlined by Professor David Dill. Dill spoke articulately about the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail his presentation is here.
After the meeting, several people talked to me about taking party platform resolutions asking the party to support a paper trail. One participant lives in a Houston-area county that’s considering buying voting machines to replace a paper system. I recommended against it, since a paper system is safer until the electronic systems have a voter-verifiable paper trail.
The drive out to Houston was pretty — through rural areas and little Texas towns. The drive back between 10pm and 1am was very very very long.