QWERTY meets ABCDEF

Ask a fourteen year old (in Ireland anyway) what sort of typing gadget they use and the majority will say mobile phones. A system even more bizzare than QWERTY. It just might catch on. QWERTY meets ABCDEF is an ITWorld article I wrote on the subject.

Mitch Kapor, keynoting PyCon 2004

In D.C. next March.

Open Source Voting System?

I hold this truth to be self evident - an electronic voting system can only be taken seriously if it can be inspected for flaws. It cannot rely on secrecy of code for its features. There is no confort in security-through-obscurity in something as important as democracy. Its security comes from the fact that everyone knows how it works - like PKI. The only way to truly inspect software is to have access to the code? Anyway, this looks interesting - voting software with an open licence.

More hardware frolics

I've had my fair share of hardware problems these last couple of days. Latest casualty - my Nomad Jukebox 3. I cannot believe that it's 'rescue mode' is not in any of the documentation shipped with the device! Its working again now. If it were not for the Web, this puppy was heading back to the manufacturer in a box. Why have a rescue mode that you don't tell people about?

XML + Python = ?

An interesting thought experiment from Kimbro Starken.

What is 'on' your website?

Some more musings in an ITWorld article - Websites, databases and other illusions.. This time concerning the fact that there is no such thing as a website (really!) and how static things are often useful illusions fabricated from more dynamic substrates.

Programming polyglots unite

In praise of multilingualism is an ITWorld article I wrote to point out some of the significant benefits I see in a multilingual approach to software development. I'm using the word 'language' in the sense of computer languages.

Tangled up in blue

Just back from the first two week clean-break-from-computers I have taken in about a decade. All is fresh and exciting...and blue. A big ugly blue screen of death on my laptop. Optimistic of me to think it could run for two solid weeks just downloading e-mail once an hour obviously.
I reboot, thinks work for a while then a second BSOD. Ominous. As luck would have it, the redoubtable David Higgins has teed up a new portable for me in my absense. Oh happy collission of imperative and opportunity!