Vote "counting"

While you may (or may not) be still celebrating the election results I suggest that you go check out the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy while it is still available on Google Video. Surprisingly HBO has not yet asked Google to take down the video on their site, perhaps that is intentional as they realize it will get a wider audience that way, as it so rightly should.

This is a clear demonstration of what happens when you try to create security by secrecy - the truth will out. As the documentary says, if a bank behaved this way there would be a federal investigation the very next day. Unfortunately since its only "democracy" we're concerned about (you know that thing we paid $300 billion to not bring to Iraq) nobody in power seems to give a damn - or seemed to until today. Nancy Pelosi - maybe you'd like to add an investigation of vote fraud, Diebold and a whole host of other voting issues into your first 100 hours wish list?

Update (11/10/06): Sorry, this video is no longer on Google, I guess HBO made them take it down.

Bookmarks revisited

A month or two ago I started using del.icio.us for "tagging" web pages instead of regular bookmarks. I was able to import all my Firefox bookmarks and no longer had the problem of having a different set of bookmarks on each PC I use (which includes some Linux boxes running Firefox). This was working well for me - I admit I was late to this way of organizing things - and the extra flexibility of tags and accessing my repository of useful websites and pages from everywhere was just what I needed.

However this week I discovered that del.icio.us (hint, you can go to plain old delicious.com instead) had a new and improved Firefox extension that completely replaces the bookmark functionality in the browser. Now the bookmarks menu item refers to my del.icio.us bookmarks, and a sidebar lets me search them by tag and browse by tag. Suddenly I'm feeling like I'll never use plain old bookmarks again and the new extension has quickly been installed on all my web browsers. One of the nicest things about the new extension is you can also select a bunch of tags (or tag combinations) to be listed in the old Firefox bookmarks toolbar.

BSD is Dying

The video BSD is Dying is uber-geeky however as someone who gets most of the jokes I really enjoyed it, and even learned a thing or to about the history of BSD - an OS I first encountered yoinks ago (lets say 20 years or so). The final slide is priceless.

Here is the original description from Google Video:

A tongue-in-cheek look at the history and future of the BSD movement. Modeled after the presentation styles of Lessig and Hardt, the talk ... all » provides a light-hearted introspection of the leaders, technologies, and community that forges ahead despite having been left for dead some 15 years past.

This presentation was given by Jason Dixon at the NYC BSD Conference at Columbia University on October 28, 2006