I hate the tv

I admit that it took me a while to get around to using RSS. I never saw the point until I tried it, at which point I realized it’s purpose: It provides a uniform interface for many heterogenious websites. I don’t have to browse the front page of all sorts of sites, with RSS I can just see the headlines (and my choice of either the full article or summary) and tell them to open in my browser.

I’ve been using Thunderbird to check my multiple mail accounts for years and I’m very happy with it. I keep most of my mail archived so its a slightly big task. I saw that it handled RSS accounts and I used it as my first real feed reader.

Unfortunately the way I had it configured it slowed my thunderbird down tremendously, and I chose to drop it. My thunderbird on XP memory usage dropped from ~110 MB to ~50. Now I’m giving FeedReader and RSS Bandit a try. They are also open-source projects. I’ll try to post back with my opinions on it after a decent trial period.
I guess I just want my RSS seperate from my mail for speed. The two tasks are too seperate and in my opinion thunderbird shouldn’t do all of them. I’d like to see mozilla spin off a seperate RSS reader application with the some of the same features as thunderbird.

In a related story, Ion Sancho, the Florida Elections Supervisor who witnesssed the Harri Hurtsi Hack has been threatened with a lawsuit for not meeting the county deadline for getting new voting machines.

“Florida’s secretary of state’s office disparaged Sancho’s finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections.”

I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

UPDATE: Click here to write the state officials in Florida to protest the treatment of Ion Sancho.

Susan Pynchon, a member of Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, has a very powerful piece on CounterPunch.org, where she describes witnessing the Harri Hursti Hack, when he proved to Ion Sancho (The Leon County Supervisor of Elections) that the Diebold machines in use could be hacked.
A snippet:

“It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as “conspiracy theorists” and “technophobes” when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.”

The piece goes through the whole process in detail. The voting system must be open sourced and verified by the security community before it can be used. It is also probable that a paper ballot will always be needed as a check mechanism.

According to this and this, pretty soon developers with the need for hardcore specialized processing power will be able to get a Xilinx Virtex FPGA as a co-processor on an AMD Opteron system. This may be an interesting option for infrastructure folks as it would allow for reconfigurability at the same time as non-laughable throughput.

Broadbandreports / dslreports has a nice utility for scanning your IP address to check for open ports on your computer. Open TCP or UDP ports can be used by an evildoer to crash your machine, propagate a virus, guess your password and log in, etc.

A basic firewall, such as the ones built into practically all routers and OSes today, will fix most of these problems. This test is good to run if you don’t know much about networking or if you, like me, have to do a lot of configuration edits on the router and are not sure if the thing is still secure or not.

So the US Army is deploying some of these in Iraq:

no…..wait…these….

No…thats still not it…

These!

See more here. I’ve always been bothered by the idea of working on weapons for one reason or another.

The Nokia 770 is a very exciting product to me. It brings mobility and wireless connectivity together with an open source operating system.

I’m very happy to see that DougT over at Mozilla has gotten Minimo, the cut-down version of a Mozilla browser (presumably firefox), running on the 770. See here, its a beautiful thing:

So Digital Kitchen is pumping out fresh new ads for Microsoft’s Origami handtop. I assume that since they’re vying to get themselves into both the booming PDA space and the hyper-$1000 dollar loseable keyboardless gadget space.

Someone really should edit this video to make it more accurately represent a microsoft experience….just throw about 2 annoying seconds of lag after everything a user trys to do. THAT would be truth in advertizing

Congratulations to the Students at Mount Saint Vincent University, who have got software by Turnitin banned because it allegedly brought about punishment which was too severe, automatically presumed guilt and created a climate of fear.

They also aired fears that the PATRIOT act provisions would cause the papers to be subject to searches under the Patriot Act and students were worried about intellectual property right issues.

As a fan of re-use and collaboration and thereby libraries and open source software, I think it’s easy for professors and administrators to put too much faith in computerized cheating detection. Determining when someone’s use of other material is inappropriate or against the rules is very difficult and should be left to humans with reasoning skills.

While I was a student at UF, the professors in the CISE department would say they ran all of our programs through MOSS and they regularly caught people cheating. Perhaps this type of thing will spread.