We currently use ancient (in android time) weblog and anti-spam software. While it used to work superbly, changes our host has made, that I will not attempt to explain except to say we now have hanging MySQL queries, are causing problems for folks trying to comment.

So, be advised that our websites will be non-operational at times, but that these glitches will hopefully be temporary.

Update (of same day): The upgrades went a lot smoother on this weblog than I expected. Now I have to watch how it reacts in actual operation. This weblog is the test box.

Update (Saturday, March 21 2009): Made it through the night without any apparent issues requiring manual maintenance! This is a tentative, “Yay!” Even if the current solution is not as good as the old one (it may be better), our need to make the change seems somewhat forced by realities of our current host’s and the recently-increased existence of the hanging queries that manifested as several different interactivity problems.

Can local school districts and kids or their parents save money? “OpenSource, Linux, belongs in schools. Ring their ears and wake them up!”

Thanks all you great programmers!

“The Commerce Department’s Internet buildout grants carry several conditions, including a contentious requirement that Internet networks built with the government grants be open to all devices like cell phones and laptops, regardless of the manufacturer or provider.

CTIA, an association of wireless companies, sent a letter to committee leaders Wednesday asking that the “vague, undefined, and unnecessary ‘open access’ obligation” be removed. CTIA said carriers will be reluctant to apply for the grants if they are uncertain of their open access obligations.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D., Calif.), an ardent proponent of an open Internet principle called “net neutrality,” brushed aside the carriers’ concerns. “These are public dollars. Networks built with this funding should be open,” Ms. Eshoo said.

While the above grants are said only for underserved areas, one has to wonder if areas already served by a few big providers couldn’t use a little more competition.

We know the huge telecom ISPs don’t seem to care nearly as much about service as profit. Today’s example is from an article titled Cox . . .  BitTorrent Users with More Slowdowns:

“In February, Cox will trial a brand new throttling scheme that aims to slow down so-called “non-time sensitive” traffic when the network is congested. This includes all P2P, FTP and Usenet traffic. Although Cox announced the trials – which will start in Kansas and Arkansas – on its website, details are scarce.
. . . 
Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, is also concerned with Cox’s new plans. He said in a response to the news, “The lesson we learned from the Comcast case is that we must be skeptical of any practice that comes between users and the Internet.” Indeed, network neutrality is at stake – again.

While I don’t generally use bittorrent, I do use FTP quite a bit when working on the websites, and I used to love Usenet, particularly the astrology channels, some 15 years or so back. Unfortunately, the astrology Usenet groups seemed to get taken over by activity which, for me at least, was distracting, though I know I’ve read recently that some still love Usenet, and if true, why should they be “slowed down”?

On the momentary topic of “slow downs”, recently I did some maintenance work for an old friend that required room & board (to keep commuting costs down) for a few weeks. This was in a BIG Southern California city, one with well-developed broadband markets! I took my laptop, as the residence had cable-delivered Internet and a router. Wow, what a slow down it was that occurred in the evenings, slow downs on webpage requests, and this was so-called premium Internet service! Very irritating. I was able to fix the issue on my computer by wiring around some of their systems, but how many of their customers just figure that’s the way it is and nothing can be done about it? Much better if people watch TV in the evenings is possibly the big-company “incentive” of intertwined interests we’re talking about here.

Could local public school districts provide Internet service to their surrounding communities at a competitive cost to that of the current broadband ISPs with sufficient incentives provided by the Federal government to do so? It seems the path of local school as ISP has been done in the past (link dated 1999) with dial-up Internet service:

“Although the Williamsville Community Unit School District already received Internet access courtesy of the state, reselling this access was not an option, explains Marty Benner, a board member in the district. Instead, the district installed a leased satellite system to acquire additional Internet access that could be resold. After an initial investment of $33,000, the district began selling the Internet access to the community last April. “That’s really why we did it,” Benner says. “It was not meant as a money-maker, but rather as a service to the community.”

As long as our government continues to grant corporate welfare to the largest telecom providers (privatize profits and socialize risks), it seems the likely answer is that local schools could not offer the service competitively. Can public schools receive federal government grants so they can be just as competitive in the ISP arena? If so, this might be something that schools could do to help fund their goals of educating the local community’s children, without needing to take more money from those of us without children, instead we could choose to purchase Internet access from the them.

I’d bet a lot of folks would LOVE to get high-speed broadband from the local schools, but it would have to be competitive price wise with current cable and DSL providers in order for this model to be successful. You can bet the corporatist would fight this one: ahem, only going for “underserved” areas, such as that reported by the WSJ’s article linked above. The more corporate welfare telecoms can get, the less competitive local ISPs, such as schools, could be.

Can you imagine the economic stimulus for local communities if tax monies taken by the federal government were given back to local communities as services for the commons?

It is undoubtedly true that the schools of the future will be much different from the recent past and presumably current model of Absolute Authoritarianism or Prussian methods.

Is this white paper a glance at the future of the new schools of the 21st century?

“As important as it is for physical structures to be adaptable, “it is even more important that class time be elastic. Instead of assigning a certain amount of time for teaching one subject per day, teachers need the flexibility of bigger and more adjustable time slots to truly impact learning,” said Charles Fadel, global lead for education for Cisco Systems. “There must be a renewed focus on increasing the quality of teaching by [giving] teachers more time and opportunities to plan, collaborate, and work with advanced technology systems.”

Local public schools as broadband ISPs, perhaps wireless to the local surrounding community, could be an incremental step in that direction, though it would have to be applied not only to undeveloped and underserved areas, but also to already developed broadband markets.

What better way to learn computers is there than to have students help maintain the technology infrastructure alongside true computer engineers and professional teachers?

PowerMenu adds a right click menu to each window’s title bar, adding the following features:
Priority
Transparency
Always on Top
Minimize to Tray.

Under Win98, the Transparency control is not supported.

While the Stay on Top feature was what I was looking for, I was surprised to also find a solution to an organization issue that has bothered me for some years: the inability to reorganize the order of the items in the task bar. When Firefox 2.0 added the ability to move the sequential ordering of tabs, it was a real breakthrough for users who wished to organize their browser’s windows.

With PowerMenu, by minimizing the various program windows to the tray, then strategically clicking on them in the order you wish them to reappear in the task bar, one is able to reorder task bar items!

This is definitely one of the handier utilities for Windows that I’ve seen: PowerMenu by Thong Nguyen.

This post shows how to have more than one Post Preview section on the Write Post page in 2+ versions. It involves slightly altering the /wp-admin/post.php file with a small portion of ever-so-slightly altered code that was originally included in the same file from the earlier 1.5.2 versions. If you decide to try this, any WordPress upgrade you perform will overwrite these changes, and the programmers occasionally make changes to this file (version 2.0.5 to 2.1.2 had changes), so saving it from version to version is not a very good idea. You’ll also want to make sure you save a backup copy of the original file so you can easily undo these changes.

These instructions are specific to WordPress 2.1.2. This has also been tested to work in WordPress 2.0.5. Portions of this may seem redundant with the last post, which was specific for 1.5+, other portions will not, but it’s probably a good idea to read Improved Proofreading In Wordpress anyway, as that’s the post where I explain why this is a valuable technique.

Let’s get on with it.

Download post.php from your /wp-admin/ directory, and open the file in a text editor. After line number 69’s (explicitly specific to v2.1.2) close php, which reads as:

?>

Or right at the beginning of line 70, or the two lines that read as:

<div id='preview' class='wrap'> <h2 id="preview-post"><?php _e('Post Preview (updated when post is saved)'); ?></h2>

add two or three carriage returns (hit enter a few times). Please note the ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ characters above are encoded, so you generally can’t copy them into search and expect to find the matching text.

Next, copy all the code in the text file named post.php212.modifications.txt and paste it into the blank line or lines you just added to the post.php open in your text editor. Save the file, then upload it to the /wp-admin/ directory of your weblog. This code is from the relevant section from WordPress 1.5.2’s post.php, except for a couple of small changes.

Because ‘post.php212.modifications.txt’ includes two nearly but not precisely identical sections, the changes to the CSS are slightly different than in my previous post.

Next, download wp-admin.css, located in the /wp-admin/ directory, then open it in a text editor. Find the line that reads as:

p, li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; }

Delete the “p” so it reads as:

li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; }

Find the line that reads, “textarea, input, select” (should be next). Skip to the bottom of that section, after the closing “}”, and add a few carriage returns or blank lines.

Copy the following:

/*alteration*/ .storycontentmonospace { font-family: “Courier New”, Courier, monospace; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: .1em; line-height: 2.1em; } /*alteration*/ .storycontentsansserif { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: .07em; line-height: 2.0em; }

and paste it into the blank lines you just added. Save that file, and upload it back to your /wp-admin/ weblog directory.

That’s it. It is useful to remember that the font families listed in the CSS, as well as the order they appear in and whether your machine has them, control which one displays on your workstation. If you don’t have the first one listed on your local machine, it looks for the next one listed until it finds a matching font. Consequently, you may need to either download fonts onto your machine, or change the first font listed (with respect to the added CSS commands) to a complete set (regular, bold, italic regular, and italic bold) that you do have.

Regarding the additions you just made to post.php (the single cut and paste described above), note there are two sections added plus the default iframe section. This allows you to have a total of three (3) Post Preview sections displayed in your Write Post page, each one of which will have a different font for proofreading. This may be overkill for you. If so, you can delete all or either of those two added sections.

As a final note, the WP 2.1.2 modified Post Preview display shows the ‘read more’ tag, as well as the ‘code’ tag, which didn’t appear in earlier 1.5.2+ versions. I don’t know why this is, I’m not particularly familiar with the ‘under the hood’ changes to the 2.0+ series codebase.

Therefore, I wanted WordPress to show me the post text in several different fonts on the Write Post page as a proofreading aid. The following How To applies to WordPress 1.5.2. This will not work in the newer 2+ series because the Write Post page, specifically post.php, has been completely reworked in the newer version. It is possible to recode post.php to do this (I’ve tested it in 2.0.5); however, that goes beyond the scope of this post which is limited to a simple CSS formatting change.

This was first implemented as a project on another 1.5.2 blog that I participate in as co-administrator, and it seemed like it had been quite awhile since I had posted anything here, so I thought why not share the template modification. The WordPress 1.5.2 Write Post page in the administration area offers the ability to see the written post in two separate fonts, yet the default CSS is not set up to show more than one font. In both the textarea box where a post is written, and in the Post Preview area where the whole text is visible after a save, the default font is Georgia. Additionally, the title in Post Preview is an active hyperlink that applies the blog’s template regardless of whether the post is a draft, published, or private post. So, because of the three separate areas where the draft can be viewed, the blogger or writer has the ability to have three separate fonts for quick proofreading without needing to do anything more than write, save, read, click again, and read again — this last proofread uses the font assigned to the blog template.

I decided I wanted the Post Preview area to show in Courier with increased whitespace and letter spacing, both for readability. Courier, an old-fashioned font that came with many typewriters in the pre-computer era, has the proofreading advantage of being non-proportional or monospaced. So I went into the wp-admin directory, downloaded wp-admin.css (note that this is not the themes or templates directory), then opened it in a text editor. I looked (or searched) for “textarea”, it was around line 145. Beneath it I added: .storycontent { font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: .1em; line-height: 2.1em; }

Your eyes may not require as large a font as 14px, if so reduce it to a smaller number such as 10, or 12, or some other choice. Play around with the letter-spacing and line-height as well if you wish.

However, this was not the only change I needed to make. The line-height command was being overwritten by, or conflicted with, another section a few lines above that read as: p, li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; } I deleted the “p” so it reads as: li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; } So far I have noted no undesired effects from deleting the p, though there are likely other ways of approaching this conflict, possibly including deleting the whole command or changing the sequential ordering (but I haven’t tested these latter ideas, it works well enough for me as explained). I saved this file and uploaded it back to its original location. It’s always a good idea to save the original, unaltered file somewhere.

Now, the Post Preview section reads in Courier New with the individual characters slightly spread out on each line, as well as each line appearing to be double spaced. Since the template on this blog uses the proportional Verdana or sans-serif font family as it’s main display font, and since the textarea box where a post is written is assigned Georgia or serif font family, I can quickly proofread a post in three distinctly different fonts including a non-proportional one before pressing the final “publish” post button.

As a warning, Courier New, a True Type font, also comes in italic and bold font versions. If your workstation only has Courier, your italics will possibly be simulated, and quite unclear, or they won’t show that formatting at all. If that’s the case and you use italics and or bold in your posts, you may wish to choose another non-proportional or monospaced font set that you know you have on your system.

On Nov 7, 2006, upon arrival at the polling place with completed sample ballot in hand, unfamiliar voting machines were visible from the doorway. I asked the poll workers if paper ballots were available. They were! They asked me if I would like one. No, I decided, I wanted to experience the computerized system first hand.

Most elections I’ve participated in over the years have used the punch card machine, the one made infamous by the hanging chads of the presidential contest of 2000 between Bush and Gore. Since that time, our district of San Diego County has sometimes used a paper ballot and pen that was optically scanned as a last step before the voter left the polling location. This time, and for the first time, our district used DRE machines made by Diebold.

I don’t intend to vote using one again.

The process of entering one’s sample ballot selections into the machine was easy and straightforward enough, but auditing ones results was a study of frustration. While I didn’t think to measure the total time used to vote, I estimate it took at least four times longer than any other method I’ve used in the past, and most of this extra time is spent to insure the machine has recorded and will cast the vote as intended.

Double checking never seemed an issue with the punch card machines after the pin had been pressed into the correct hole, though evidently chads not fully punched are an issue. The other system, a paper ballot and pen, can be doubled checked when it’s initially filled out while the sample ballot is open to the contest page in question.

Here are some things I noticed as problems when using the Diebold DRE with a voter verified paper trail:

The initial vote screens seemed to match up with the pages of the sample ballot until about page six, where one contest from the sample ballot appeared on another page of the DRE device. This problem seemed somewhat minor, but it does seem somewhat confusing and perhaps slightly time consuming.

Once all votes had been cast, the computer built a summary page view. This was arranged into three columns. The voter must go back to page one of the sample ballot unless they have all the contest choices memorized. Another flaw is that all candidates’ full names were not always visible in the summary view, in some cases only their first names were presented. One must scroll downward to complete column one’s sequence, then one must scroll up to find the top of column two, followed by scroll downs to complete column two, then a scroll up to the top of column three, followed by scroll downs to complete the summary audit. The arrangement didn’t match the sample ballot at all, and it seems fewer scrolls could have easily been designed by sequencing the contest data in rows instead of columns.

One time I accidentally touched the summary screen while using my fingers to help track a particular line while my eyes darted between the screen and sample ballot. The machine decided to take me back to the initial vote casting screen that correlated to that contest, presumably so I could change it. I had to press the summary button again, and the machine’s screen said something to the effect of “building summary file”. Whoops.

I asked a poll worker if that meant I had to go back and double check the answers I’d already checked, and he said no (all the poll workers were different this year, and predominately of the younger, computer-literate generation) This advice I promptly judged as naive or computer illiterate at best, and likely coached at worst. The computer was clear, it had built a new summary file, so I needed to start back at the beginning of column one of the summary view and page back in my sample ballot again, unless I was willing to gamble that the computer hadn’t made any errors.

I can only imagine how much time voting might have taken had there been errors that needed correcting. The summary view was user unfriendly. There was something wrong with the scrolling, so after the device had completed the scroll, finding the next line to focus upon was an issue.

When the summary self-audit was completed, there was a paper printout that I could not touch but could see through a small glass window. This printout appeared to be thermal paper with dark print. I can’t tell you how stupid I think that decision was, if the paper was in fact thermal paper, given that the voter-verified printout is intended as a permanent record of each voter’s intent. There have been years when I’ve had receipts printed on thermal paper that I’ve had to discard from my end-of-year accounting because I could not read them, as time and or heat had rendered the print unreadable on darkened paper. All some election fraud perpetrator would need to do is leave the paper ballots in a warm enough location, such as a closed vehicle parked in the sun light on a warm day, or perhaps stored inside a non-climate controlled facility, and the thermal paper record’s usefulness is likely destroyed.

The printout was much shorter than the summary screen, two lines for each contest. Many of the lines were self-explanatory, unfortunately, the judicial section was not. Our election had about fifteen choices for judicial positions. On the paper printout, every line that titled twelve of those contests appeared precisely the same, they all read “Associate justice court of AP…”, that line was followed by another line indicating the yes or no vote: No candidate name appeared in any of this judicial sequence. The only way I was able to discern what candidate those lines correlated to was to count the lines and assume the ordering was the same as that presented in the sample ballot. Great, I need to assume something for a self-audit? To make matters worse, all fifteen contests did not appear at once under the limited glass size. The first presented readout needed to be accepted somewhere in the middle of the fifteen choices, afterward the next page printed and scrolled. The scroll itself caused issues with this counting to determine the contest, several of the bottom lines of the previous printout remained at the top of the glass screen. If I had not been watching very closely during the scroll itself, this would have caused me to get lost in the counted sequence that I correlated to the sample ballot ordering.

Is this judicial obfuscation deliberate? How can this possibly provide a paper trail of the voter’s intent if the name of the candidate isn’t printed on the paper trail?

The only good thing I can say is I did not experience any problems with the machine changing my vote, or making the voting for any of the candidates I intended to vote for hard to select, so far as I could tell, and as has been reported in the news at times.

In past years, once contest choices had been decided and the sample ballot marked, I remember spending no more than 2-5 minutes zipping through all the choices on the ballot at the polling place, though standing in line and waiting for a voting booth added to that time. I conservatively estimate that I spent at least 20 minutes actually voting on this DRE device. Since the process of voting on these machines takes about four times longer due to all the self-auditing and matching up of different presentational formats (that I truly felt needed to be checked), it’s no surprise that some voting districts that use these machines are reported as having long lines. The reported move by some other districts towards voting super centers in favor of the familiar neighborhood polling places will only exacerbate this problem. The mixing of formats in the summary view and separate printout view lead to a definite lack-of-clarity: another term for that could be obfuscation, certainly the failure to provide any of the candidates’ names on the judicial section of the paper trail is some type of obfuscation.

The process of filling out the ballot has been rendered much more difficult and complicated with this particular machine than it used to be with other ballot types.

Prior to this experience, I was open to the idea of electronic voting on a DRE machine so long as it had an unalterable paper record of the vote cast, this is seen in a willingness to try the system once our polling place offered it. Now that I’ve seen and experienced its implementation first hand, the thermal alterable paper that also fails to show my complete intent, the formatting confusion between the initial vote screens versus summary view versus the paper printout, even the polling place worker who claimed that I didn’t need to re-check when the machine built a new summary file, never again will I choose to vote with such a machine.

Of all the types of voting systems I’ve experienced, paper and pen seems the clearest, simplest, and fastest. Why make voting apparatus more complicated than it needs to be?

Randy Wooten, a mayoral candidate in Arkansas found out that his vote for himself wasn’t counted, official results showed him with a vote count of zero. Reports seem to indicate the voting machine was not from Diebold.

I have never once observed or experienced the actual counting of the votes. Counting the votes openly seems even more important than the type of voting system used, and how the votes are counted in machines using proprietary code owned by private corporations can never be known by the majority of citizens.

It seems to me that we need not only paper ballots and pens, but local hand counting by citizen volunteers at the polling locations and observable by concerned voters, with results posted immediately, publicly, and openly.

Until then we can kiss our democratic republic farewell. I was wrong to ever believe that computerized voting could be a good thing.

The punch card systems were counted by computers, except when they needed close examination. Paper ballots marked by pens and followed by optical scanning are essentially computers counting the vote, but once again the ballots might be counted by hand if there’s suspicion surrounding the results. DRE and their complicated system is perhaps the epitome of computerized vote aggregating, if equipped with one, their paper trail also can be recounted if necessary, but then there’s the little problem I noted above of the paper trail not always including all candidates’ names, and a potential temporal record issue if thermal paper was used. Lawyers seeking access to these paper records for purposes of recount have reportedly been experiencing cooperation difficulties.

For my entire life computers have been involved in counting votes. The computers apparently run proprietary, private code under the control of a few corporations, therefore it is not surprising that over the longer term such a ‘democracy’ has found itself living as a corporatist system.

Recently I looked around for a newer feedreader for Win98SE, either one that runs under Firefox as an extension, or as a standalone program similar to FeedReader, and had some success. After finding some that didn’t work quite in the desired way, and others that had promise but unfortunately were still quite buggy, what I eventually settled upon was BottomFeeder, a standalone cross-platform Atom and RSS reader. It appears open-source and released under an Artistic License.

From the BottomFeeder front page:

“BottomFeeder runs on Linux x86, (also FreeBSD), PowerPC Linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP/CE 4), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X (PPC), AIX, SGI Irix, HP-UX, and Solaris (SPARC and x86).”

I have no intention of critiquing the program, as they all seem to have shortcomings and strengths of one kind or another; in the case of BottomFeeder, its feature set is impressive. This may imply it isn’t the simplest feed reader out there. I’m currently watching just under 100 feeds and have noted no big issues, but then I’m a simplistic user with basic needs who has always been attracted to the usefulness of powerware.

While it’s not perfect, you might like it — try BottomFeeder.

I don’t see any information regarding a particular operating system required, presumably this device would work for networked computers of different OSs because it seems independent of them. The company’s PDF brochure doesn’t seem to make or infer any similar OS dependency claims. Whether it does or not is something to check out before a purchase.

Linuxdevices.com says the pro model will cost about $220, and the site selling the product claims it will be available by the upcoming winter holidays.

I wonder if the firewall can be secured from the Yoggie Management Server, a separate device marketed to corporate IT departments. The brochure claims “proprietary patent-pending developments”.