Krugman mentioned it and metafilter linked to it. You too should take a few minutes to read about why you shouldn't necessarily trust touch-screen voting.

The key is for these machines to leave some kind of paper trail. I'm not a big fan of printing out receipts for the voters, but an internal audit tape seems like a really good idea. ATMs have been using them for years -- that's why you'll hear the clatter of a printer when you withdraw money even if you've asked not to be given a receipt. The machine is making a hard-copy of your transaction. And that's exactly what needs to happen with these fancy new touch-screen voting machines.

One of the main benefits of these new machines is faster vote tabulation, but for the first few elections I want someone to be comparing the audit record to the electronically reported results. I may sound a bit like a troglodyte when I say something like that, but I earnestly believe in real-world testing -- its the only way we'll find out whether these machines work as advertised.

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 27 July 2004 at 10:25 PM

Amazon.com recommendations are the silliest things. All their recommendations seem to fall into two categories. In the first category, they like to recommend things to you that you already own. "Oh look, you bought a Leatherman. Based on this purchase, we think you should buy this other Leatherman." Call that the too similar category. At the other extreme is the not similar enough category. In this category fall things like recommending Barbie dolls based on your purchase of a graphing calculator. Well today I saw a recommendation that fell into the latter category. At least they were recommending a book based on a book purchase, but I really don't see how The Physics of Information Technology has anything to do with Bill Clinton's autobiography:

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 13 July 2004 at 3:41 PM

And for those of you who weren't worried about the Bush Administration before...

...now they want the power to postpone elections.

Now, I could be wrong, but don't this sound a lot like a third-world coup d'etat?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 12 July 2004 at 4:25 PM

Early tomorrow morning I'll be flying up to Indianapolis to attend a wedding. The wedding is actually in Kokomo, an hour north of Indy and it seems that I'll be shuttling back and forth between Indy, West Lafayette, and Kokomo over the course of the weekend, but you probably aren't that interested in these details. Anyway, I won't be online until at least Saturday and perhaps not until Sunday, so have a great weekend.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2004 at 10:52 PM

The NY Times is currently running an article on the typeface used on the cornerstone of the building being erected at ground zero. I find it hard to believe that the font choice for this cornerstone is really of much interest to the majority or even a sizable minority of the Times' readers. However, I suspect it is of considerable interest to those who work in print publications like, for example, the NY Times. So what do you think, is this a useful article that fits well into the NY Region section of the Times or a bit of harmless reportorial bias slipping into the world of story selection?

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 8 July 2004 at 9:19 AM

Aaron has posted (scroll down to the entry from 2004-05-31/Mon) about working at NASA, but he hasn't given us any details about his work. I suspect that this is because he is involved, as other college students working at NASA have been in the past, in stealing moon rocks (and the 600-lbs safe that they're stored in). [Use bugmenot to get a login/password for the LA Times.]

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 July 2004 at 4:17 PM

I've been neglecting this site as of late, so let's see if I can complete a post in the nine minutes it will take my build to complete. First, since I haven't mentioned it since mid-May, the move to the new apartment went fairly well. Moving is a big pain though, and I think I'll pay someone to do it for me next time. The new apartment is very nice and it's great to have a little breathing room. My complaints center on my so-so bathroom and the ickyness of the building's basement/garage. Also, the electrical service is more than a bit spotty (although I understand that today's outage is weather related).

At work things are going pretty well. The application that my team has been working on for nearly a year is mostly complete. We're doing some sweeps to clean up the code, but development is 95% complete. But I don't really do development anymore. Or I haven't done much recently. Instead, I'm trying to get our application certified as "highly available," which means it needs to survive network outages, site failures, db issues, and a host of other things. This is mostly accomplished through redundancy in hardware, but in the course of testing all of these failure scenarios we've exposed a number of interesting issues with our application. If you're interested I can tell you all about how getting a SecureRandom number generates about forty calls to System.gc(), which is a slow, arduous process in the AIX world.

But enough about work. I'm flying to northern Indiana for a wedding this weekend, which should be a lot of fun. I'm one of the ushers, so I need to be up there on Friday for the rehearsal dinner. I should be back on Sunday.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 July 2004 at 3:47 PM