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July 21, 2004
Chris Warner and Amber Alerts
Chris Warner, who I've written about before with respect to Earths911.org has launched a new project for doing Amber Alerts. He launched it at this month's meeting of the National Governor Association. I saw it (and Chris) on ABC's Good Morning America yesterday. This is a very important and interesting project. The potential goes well beyond Amber Alerts to all kinds of alerting from government. I put together a presentation on the use of event notificationin Homeland Security over a year ago. Earth911.org's stock in trade has been connecting local government providers of information with local people who need that information using a nationally-based information platform. This new project capitalizes on that perfectly.
01:31 PM | Recommend This | Print This
TA Needed for CS462
I'm looking for a TA for CS462 for the Fall. I prefer students who've had the class for obvious reasons, but familiarity with Linux is key. The class will be run on a UML environment and I need someone to sort that out starting sooner rather than later, so if you're available this Summer for a few weeks, that would be helpful too.
09:18 AM | Recommend This | Print This
RSS Growing Pains
Both Nathan Stocks and Wade Billings took time to send me a link to Chad Dickerson's article on RSS growing pains. Chad's point: RSS as currently architected doesn't scale. RSS scalability has a few things going for it, most notably it's built on to of the Web which has shown to be hugely scalable. The problem has more to do with client implementations that don't always issue conditional GET requests or respect the resulting 304 Not Modified responses. Also, as Chad points out, many clients are set by default to check for changes at the top of the hour rather than spreading the requests out. The more basic problem is that RSS is built on a polling paradigm where clients continually poll the server to get changes. None of these problems are unsolvable and frankly, its nice to have scalability problems. It's a sign of success.
07:27 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Responding to Utah's eVoting RFP
I joined with some other people to draft a response (PDF) to Utah's eVoting RFP. There are a number of problems with the RFP, including the fact that it does not require a voter verifiable paper audit trail and does not allow sufficient time for the State and others to adequately review vendor proposals. The response was the subject of a short article in the Salt Lake Tribune this morning. If after reading the response, you feel like you agree and support it, send me an email with your full name, address and other contact information and I'll see that you're included in a letter to the committee from others who agree with the response.