dwc

Boredom

I've been having issues getting motivated recently, both at work and at home. I'm just not getting things done. Boredom has been the only motivating factor recently. :-(

Anyway, I was apparently bored enough to do a little work on my Movable Type installation tonight. In the sidebar, you'll see I added the 10 most recent songs I've listened to (courtesy Audioscrobbler). The RSS feed prompted me to change my encoding to UTF-8, so stuff like Björk should appear correctly without escaping. (I think.)

Update: Apparently Movable Type doesn't properly encode the text of an entry when you publish it...interesting.

The Gainesville Sun

I (of course) missed the obvious: you can click the "Print This" button on a Gainesville Sun article, cancel the print window, and read the article without the annoying advertisement problem. I guess that's something...

How hard is it?

In preparing to vote in the upcoming primary election (by absentee ballot, whee), I'm trying to find information on the candidates. Making an informed decision shouldn't be so frustrating.

I don't get the Gainesville Sun delivered and I don't find the political advertisements sent by mail to be a very good resource. So, I tried the Gainesville Sun's Web site, gainesville.com. Their homepage is way too cluttered, and doesn't contain any links (that I could find) to election information. After searching a few times, getting errors saying my search returned too many results (...), I clicked on "News" and found "Elections" hidden near the top.

I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up. When I click on one of the available articles, the page renders okay except for a nice white block on top of the text. About 90% of each article is covered by this block, which presumably acts as a container for the advertisements. Thanks for testing your Web site in Mozilla, people. I guess that leaves me with viewing the source of each article I want to read.

Making an informed decision doesn't have to be easy (if you want it easy, you're of course free to abstain or to submit a blank ballot (that's freedom, I guess...)), but finding information shouldn't be so frustrating. At the very least, someone should offer a better collection of articles and interviews than the Gainesville Sun (preferably one that is compliant and accessible in all browsers). More importantly, this is one place where online voting could really shine.

I have a reasonable approximation of the convenience of online voting by doing absentee ballots - all I have to do is remember to call the elections office before the election. But online voting could bring us so much more: you're given a ballot, and each candidate's name is (*gasp*) a link to more information. Some of the information could be provided by the candidates themselves, but it would be much better if it were all provided by an impartial officer. You could even design a page that compares each candidate on n specific points. None of these ideas are novel, and I'm sure they've been implemented over and over, but why aren't we using them yet?

I guess I just haven't seen a decent, logical explanation of why online voting doesn't exist currently. Most, if not all, of the issues (e.g. anonymity and paper trail) have already been solved. Authentication (on a county, state, and national scale) is really the toughest issue. But everyone seems stuck on the other "problems", so no energy is spent investigating it.

Finally, I'd just like to say that I find the issue of online voting for UF Student Government very annoying. We have the authentication problem solved at UF with GatorLink. Where's the hangup?

(As a sidenote: I read the UF Student Goverment On-Line Voting Committee report recently. It was well written and very much in favor of online voting. Unfortunately, I can't find a link - but I think it falls under open records.)

Spooks!

As I mentioned previously, Spooks is one of my favorite shows. Smart spy drama + good writing + good cast + Keeley Hawes = fun. It fills the void that the third season of Alias left.

I've been a little annoyed that the BBC doesn't update the Spooks Web site more frequently. The news section has said the same thing for months now: that Series 3 is in production and will air in the fall, and that Series 2 will also be available on DVD in the fall.

Every so often I check Amazon UK, since I bought the Series 1 DVDs there. The DVDs are finally available for preorder, with a release date of September 20.

Side rant: Unlike FOX, the BBC manages to produce entertaining shows (e.g. Spooks and Coupling) without chickening out. I don't know who decides what shows end up on FOX, but they aren't doing their job very well.

Stupid Name Game

How hard is it to spell "Daniel"?

Samba Permissions

As I previously mentioned Mac OS X's implementation of Samba has been giving me a lot of trouble. I fixed one issue today, thanks to Google. On my Linux workstation, I was having issues with getting smbmount to set the file ownership according to the uid and gid parameters in /etc/fstab. The solution is to turn off the new UNIX extensions to the SMB/CIFS protocol on the Samba server. I'm guessing this is a bug in Samba, but I'm not sure.

That's one of the 30928423098423098 things I have to do right now.