Oblomovka

2003-09-19»

You may have heard this before, but it’ll be worth telling you again. If you’re a member of the IEEE, please consider getting in touch with that organisation. Ask for closer scrutiny be paid to their voting machine working group – P1583 and SCC38. Standards committees, even in the best-run organisation, are prone to capture by either special interests or just their own ideas of efficiency. But a standard on voting machine cannot fall victim to that. It needs to be open – to be beyond doubt, and to allow dispassionate security analysis by third-parties. This isn’t the next form of C++ templates – this is the touchstone for the corruptability of our politics.

The EFF has a page with all the details. I can’t pretend to have any inside track on what’s going on here. But I do know that a little fresh air and sunshine can do nothing but help. There’s no rush to voting machines. There’s a great deal of danger in it. And a lot of very interested parties.

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2003-09-17»

He’s published a short extract of his book. How do they let things like this out of Southend?

“It is a small, handwritten volume reputedly bound in the skin of the extra-terrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t some nancy-boy novelist who wrote sensitive books about aliens sticking things up his rectum, you know. On the seventh night he got right up and killed the little bastard with one punch.”

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2003-09-07»

A while back I mentioned Planet Parent, a column about being a mum that my friend Juliet writes. It is very funny and moving, like Bridget Jones only with more piss and shit and sick and (I can vouch) true and not, in fact, annoying. This one is a good place to start.

Unfortunately, it is hosted on Tigerchild, a site that has been gifted with the worst user-interface ever. There’s even a note on their frontpage at the moment saying that their frontpage is broken. “Please only use the Tigerchild navigation provided within the site, not the Back and Forward browser buttons”, it adds in a tiny, not quite centered font. Oh bugger off.

Anyway, I had far too much to do this weekend and was ill so I wrote an RSS feed for Planet Parent instead of doing what I was supposed to do or getting better. Subscribe, and mail me when it breaks.

(Or fix it yourself. I nicked Bill Humphries neat hack of running Webpages through tidy and then using XSLT to turn them into RSS. Here is the XSLT stylesheet I wrote for it.)

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So it looks like I successfully hassled Bill Thompson into having his own blog so he can debate a little more clearly what his opinion pieces mean, what his responses are to other people’s objections, and why he thinks what he does. I’m not entirely sure that’s what I wanted (God knows some of the most unresponsive blinkered things I read are on blogs), but hey. It’s got a referrer system, so at least he’ll see where he’s being talked about.

I am first and foremost a journalist. An imperfect one (which of us isn’t) but I have an editor and a set of professional responsibilities. That, I believe, makes a difference. Using blogging technology to give people a voice is fine, but don’t confuse it with what is happening in online journalism.

And it worries me that the BBC may be listening to the zealots again when it comes to blogging, just as they did with so many other here today gone tomorrow net technologies – remember channels? remember push technology?”

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