Hacking the vote.

Boing Boing has a great blurb on using the absentee ballot as a way of avoiding the flaw-riddled fiasco that masquerades as electronic voting in far too many American jurisdictions. Is it possible that we could have a system of collecting votes that is based on the laughable principle of security through obscurity? Not just possible, pervasive.

I happen to be going on a business trip which will keep me out of state on Election Day, so I voted by absentee ballot this very evening, as luck would have it. I note that the Code of Virginia, §24.2-700 states, in part, that any registered voter who meets the following qualification may vote by absentee ballot in any election in which they are qualified to vote:

Any person who, in the regular and orderly course of his business, profession, or occupation, will be at his place of work and commuting to and from his home to his place of work for eleven or more hours of the thirteen that the polls are open (6:00 AM to 7:00 PM).

(For many Virginia voters who commute to Washington, and work a standard day of 8.5-9 hours, this is a trivially low qualification, given the state of Beltway traffic.) I also note that rescheduling one’s work away from one day and into another is a perfectly reasonable, regular, and orderly conduct of business in which we all engage daily. The absentee ballot application merely requires that you certify that you “will be working and commuting on election day from ___AM until ___PM,” and that you indicate your place of employment. (Of course you must also certify that you will not vote in any other place in that election, duh.)

Therefore, if you’re a Virginia voter whose district is plagued by the new wave of proprietary, unaudited, and unauditable electronic voting terminals, I recommend you consider voting as an absentee.

You still have time to request an absentee ballot.

Everything news is old again.

For a while I’ve been doing the Fedora Weekly News Out Loud podcast in English, spurred on by the inimitable Messrs. Chung and Canniot. But when FWN came back on line last week, I felt my momentum had ebbed, and I didn’t cover either issue 61 or 62 (yet). This was due to spending extra cycles on the FC6 release (docs side of the house, natch), which left me a little short on time and energy.

But even before that happened, I had been having some misgivings about simply reading the news aloud. Was this really me helping the community, or just a vanity project? (No slight intended to anyone, I’m selfishly only talking about me here.) After all, we already have the excellent (if somewhat sporadic) Fedora Reloaded.

I showed that I now knew how to record and publish a podcast, but wouldn’t a screenreader accomplish the same thing, more or less — albeit without the music backing track and gunpoint participation of my lovely wife? When I went to archive.org to find out download statistics, their summary screen showed a measly 1-3 downloads per episode. Hardly worth the time I was expending on the project, unless their stats are not showing the true audience. So what would give this work an ROI?

I decided that I didn’t want to re-aggregate blogs and other published stories, which is much more effectively handled by the Fedora News site. I would rather do something a little more off-the-cuff, even if it ends up being less polished, less about me practicing my elocution and more talking about all the cool stuff taking place around Fedora.

I’d like to create a worthwhile Fedora-oriented podcast for the community — but what else, if anything, does the community want to hear?

Nutty, but not in the good way.

In response to my friends at Reasonable Nuts: What I don’t understand is how anyone can claim this is some kind of unsung victory. The budget deficit is just the amount that the government overspent this year. The fact that it fell does not mean we are somehow magically paying off the enormous $8+ TRILLION national debt — or even doing a good job paying down just the interest thereon. All that has happened is the government has overspent a little less than in the previous year(s). Congress and the President have slowed the rate at which they are furiously digging a financial hole for the nation. Uh, hurray?

So your spouse comes to you and says, “Hey honey, you remember how last year I charged up about $3,000 on the credit card after we cleaned out all the accounts paying off the end of year Christmas bills? Well, the good news is that this year, I only charged up another $2,500 after the accounts were empty! That should really help get our $90,000 credit card debt under control!” First you haul out the harsh language. Then you cut up the cards. Then you accompany your spouse to a credit counseling service, or maybe Spenders Anonymous or some such thing.

When we look at people running a household — which also has a budget, income, spending, borrowing, etc. — and we see someone living beyond their means, we see this kind of rationalization, we would rightly call it “pathological.” It’s no less damaging to fall into such slippery thinking when it comes to our irresponsible government spenders.

I mean, sure, every little bit counts, but like “The Wolf” says to Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction, “Let’s not start sucking each other’s ***** quite yet, gentlemen.”

Dive into travel.

(Cached on disk since Tuesday evening, just got online to post it tonight.)

It’s been an extraordinarily long time, relatively speaking, since I last posted, but I swear, Dear Reader, that it’s only because I was trapped under something heavy, called WORKLOAD. It’s a heartless monster that spirits you away from loved ones and eats your time. And in large part it keeps a cadre of flying monkey minions called OBSESSIONS that keep you under its heel.

Fedora

To wit, I’ve been spending copious amounts of my unpaid waking time working on the release notes for Fedora Core 6. Although we had to drop a few beats due to lack of attention from their assigned writers, the majority of the beats are even juicier and full of excellent content than for Core 5 — and from what I hear from my secret whisperers from far-flung corridors of commerce and the halls of power, those were a paragon of potency.

(Did I mention I’m on a plane? I think the lack of fresh oxygen may be causing lapses of alliteration.)

Anyway, my Python learning came grealy in handy because I was able to write a cool little script using urllib and httplib to pull our old beat content, log in to a special updated MoinMoin wiki instance set up for us by Mike “Marvelous” McGrath, post the content, and retrieve shiny new DocBook conversions for editing. This will likely cut a good deal of time out of future release notes work.

As a side note, though, the posted speed limit on the newer MoinMoin, while great for preventing vandalism by miscreants, is a big problem when you’re trying to do mass imports like this. I built some time delay into my script as a result, but it’s a shame to have to wait minutes for conversions that should take only seconds. I’ll probably ask someone to look into adapting the “governor” to remove this issue. On the other hand, I’m learning Python — maybe I’ll figure it out myself! (Yeah. In my spare time.)

I also spent a lot more time than is healthy squeezing Make-fu from my brain (akin to taking the proverbial blood from a stone), to help with the packaging of fedora-release-notes. I still have to finish the last bit, which is to get nice .desktop files by pulling appropriate information from the translated XML files.

Speaking of translation, our translators KICK ASS, and if you meet one of them, buy that person a $BEVERAGE immediately. Or a case. After a managerial foul-up, we were fortunately able to get them more time to translate the release notes, which are hefty in size and maddeningly fluid in content. As a result, we’ve already got several fully complete translations rolled in to CVS, and more to come before Thursday’s deadline.

Home and Hearth

In family news, thanks to the careful attention of her kindergarten teacher, Evie started a new class today. Once a week, she’ll be joining the first-graders to do reading and spelling there, since she’s shown a real aptitude. Her most recent conquests include a book about volcanos and earthquakes and one about dinosaurs. There’s something just inherently heart-warming about hearing your five-year-old properly pronounce and understand words like “coprolite.”

Now that my kids have become such crazy characters, though, it’s much harder to leave them than it used to be. (When it was time to leave home this morning for a short stint at the office and a drive to the airport, Ethan hugged me hard and said, “Daddy, I’ll miss you SO much.” And my wife looked at me with a mischievous glint in her eye and said, “Man, they really know how to stick it in and break it off, don’t they?”