All my blog posts and articles
A friend of mine pointed out that for some reason when he ordered is (wonderful) iPhone 3GS, the Apple Store charged the wrong amount for sales tax. In Massachusetts, we are lucky enough to pay 5% sales tax.[Actually this is going up in a few days to 6.25%.](http://www.boston.com/news/local/br...
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This is just a little funny. I use Bank of America, and lately whenever I go onto the web site, they are pushing me to try their “IRA Calculator” which is supposed, I think, to tell me how much I should be saving. ### Look at the screen capture… ### Bank of America’s advice: NaN
Check this excerpt from a post by David Weinberger called Transparency is the new objectivity from Joho the Blog: > “A friend a...
Read more →There aren’t many good options for Music notation software. Sibelius is in my opinion the best, which as this software goes is not saying all that much. For it’s functionality it’s quite good, as a piece of elegant and usable software, it gets a “B” a...
Read more →Check out this interesting case study of how one awful memory leak was tracked down and killed: **“It’s every developer’s worse nightmare. You’ve bet the farm on a development framework, spent thousands of person-hours dev...
Read more →Check this post Food for thought from Paul Krugman: > According to a new site called Mediaite, Mark Bittman of the Times is the 8th most influential columnist in America, ahead of Arianna Huffington. It’s also noteworthy that Glenn Greenwald of Salon is #10. On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens is #5. Why would God allow that? And the less said about #1, the better … (from: Food for thought) Is he being modest by not titling his post, "I am #1" or is this a clever way of leading all of us to go look at the list and seeing that he’s "#1" without needing to say it?
Check out “More Focus on Computers in the Air France Crash”.
Not that I care about Paprazzi countermeasures, but this is just c-l-e-v-e-r! Check this post Anti-paprazzi clutch bag gives pushy shutterbugs a taste of their own medicine from [Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine](h...
Read more →Pandora is one of my favorite music sites. It’s a quick way to get an infinite play list built around a song that you give it to start with. I’ve become a fan of several artists that I heard on Pandora for the first time. I hear that th...
Read more →Ok so I’ve had the new iPhone for a little while now. This is my first ever iPhone and I have some questions. Maybe you can help me? - iPhone knows how to announce the album name and artist (using the voice recognition “what song is that” command.) Then why can’t I enable it to automatically announce each and every song? - Why is it so dang hard to convert a DVD I own to iPhone format? I tried a bunch of ‘solutions’ using software I already have, as well as 2 or 3 utilities I downloaded. None finished successfully. All took forever. Isn’t there an easy way? Any experts out there who want to comment? Technorati Tags: iphone
Leaving aside what exactly an Electronic Voting Machine is, the New York Times weighed in with this editorial the other day: > “Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and...
Read more →A recent post talked about creating a “Domain Specific Language” for image processing of ballots. I’ve made a lot of progress on that project and wanted to give an update. One [commenter (my pal Aleks) said to ‘watch out for RMagick as it has major memo...
Read more →With what’s going on in Iran right now, many commentators are wondering whether the elections were fair. That is to say, do the reported results correspond to reality, to how people actually voted? > “In Washington...
Read more →I was shown a promising new site called TheRentables, for people (I know at least 3) who are looking to rent an apartment. They say: “The Rentables takes a fundamentally different approach to rental property listings to deliver the most relevant, accurate and...
Read more →My post about Barack Obama’s election was getting a bit long, so I thought I’d break it up and get some more blog miles out of the story. 
First of all, check o...
TIVO keeps on getting cooler and cooler: > “Netflix said it will begin testing a service Thursday that lets users with TiVo’s latest DVR models access movies and television shows from an online library of 12,000 Netflix titles. ...
Read more →As you know from a previous post, I’ve been working on a “domain specific language” for election ballot processing. In my search for information I got a pointer to a book called: [Ruby Best Practices](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596523009?ie=UTF8&tag=blogbridge-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creati...
Read more →An amusing article in Newsweek about Peter Arnell, self-styled renaissance man, inventor of the “Peapod“, a “a mix of Darth Vader, a bullet train, and a Citroën deux chevaux”: > “[snip…] With no air conditio...
Read more →I found this article to be a good primer on what’s going on with open government data. Remixing Government Data: Through mashups and Web apps, third parties are making innovative use of agencies’ information… This is part of the impetus and inspiration for two projects I am working on, “Decentralized Data Discovery” and “Government SDK“. 
I have been working quite a lot on Election Reform over the last few weeks, at least from the technology side. To be honest there is just so much I could be blogging about in this narrow specialized space that my cup overfloweth, but also it ...
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