One of the wonderful things about the Internet is how you can easily link to other documents that are relevant to whatever topic you’re preaching about. However, one of the most reprehensible things is the process of hot linking to images served off other people’s sites. Such was the case with Gene Expression while it seems to be a moderately interesting weblog, and I’m kinda happy he linked to me, it was done completely the wrong way.
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The Sacramento Bee has a good opinon article written by a county clerk/recorder and UC-Davis Law School faculty member that explain some of the big programs behind the Help America Vote Act and why all these touch screen devices are bad news. It catalogs the big three e-voting companies and how none of them deserve your trust. I highly recommend it.
I’ve been having a good time taking advantage of the Transformiix XSLT processing engine that is part of the newer versions of Mozilla. However, I think I finally ran into something that it breaks on. Here’s what’s going on. I’m dynamically generating some graphics and need to output an imagemap with them. The initial plan was to plunk the imagemap that I generate from neato or dot as a chunk of CDATA.
I remember seeing swing when it came out six years ago and thinking about how very cool it looked. But after six years with almost no UI update it was starting to get a little stale. Then I was reading the Open Source Desktop Technology Roadmap and noted what was just a little footnote at the bottom. Apparently Java 1.4.2 supports a GTK look and feel for swing. This is nice for me as I already know how to do Swing and don’t want to have to learn SWT.
I just stubled across a neat enhancement for Firebird. Edit CSS allows you to edit the CSS of a web page on the fly. It’s great for when you want to see either how a web page did something or you want to change something in your web page. If I still did full time web development this would be my new best friend. You can find more information at http://editcss.
First up in session was Ravi Pappu from ThingMagic talking about security and privacy in the EPC network. The first that needs to be made is that the EPC network is going to be some SCARY SHIT. I don’t mean to swear, but if Christian fundamentalists thought the UPC was the mark of the beast then EPC is the antichrist. Essentially everything is linked through this global network to track down EXACTLY what product a particular EPC code relates to.
This blog entry is a work in progress. Please give me feedback.
November 15th, 2003 marked the first RFID Privacy workshop. It was held at the MIT Media Lab and organized by Simson Garfinkel (Ph.D. student and author of Database Nation). Initial impressions were that it was larger than we expected, and it appears larger than the organizers expected too. The room for the very important events of breakfast and lunch could hardly contain the people.
I got back from Boston around 6pm tonight. Took a nap and then caught up on what MythTV got in my absence. For some reason the encoder doesn’t seem to be encoding at the proper bit rate anymore. It means I loose half the space, which is a lot when you’ve got a small hard disk.
Anyway, the conference was great. I learned a lot of interesting stuff and met some cool people.
I’m in Boston for the next few days at the RFID Privacy Conference. I’ve never been to Boston before, this should be a bit of an adventure.
As never seems to fail, I broke down and started to play video games again. This time I was feeling a little retro, so out came dosbox and some old school games that I actually own: