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October 20, 2004
SQL-Server / FRX Report Developer
I know a company in Utah looking for a SQL-Server / FRX report developer. If you're interested let me know
08:27 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Testimony to the Government Operations Committee
I testified this afternoon before the Joint Committee on Government Operations in the Utah Legislature on voting equipment selection. Here is a written copy of my testimony. I felt comfortable with my testimony and the committee seems favorably inclined toward voter verified, unalterable audit trails. What happens next, however, is anyone's guess. There's apparently going to be a public bake-off of voting equipment from vendors who responded to the RFP at the South Town Expo center on December 10th.
07:59 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Neal Stephenson Interview
If you're a Neal Stephenson fan, which I am, then you'll enjoy his interview on Slashdot. If you read Slashdot, you'll enjoy it even more, or at least spend less time getting yourself oriented. I was especially interested in Stephenson's take on the bifurcation of writers because I think there's a similar parallel between people who write code for a patron (i.e. university professors) and those who write code for popular attention (which is a form of compensation and includes people who create open source code, etc.). These two worlds rarely meet and consequently have usually not heard of each other. What's interesting to me is that this bifurcation is relatively recent since people who write code for attention were almost all inside Universities just a decade ago. Now you go to OSCON and almost none of them are. A large part of the reason for that is the "critical review" system that academics are required to play.
11:43 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Some New Mac Utilities
I've run across a few neat little utilities for OS X that I've used for a while and like and one that didn't work out as well.
GMailStatus is a little utility that puts a count of messages in your GMail inbox on the status bar. If you use GMail, its nice to be able to see new mail without popping out to the Web. One thing I've noticed is that it tends to use a lot of memory, which I don't understand. There may be a memory leak in the thing somewhere.
From time to time, I'll plug something into my Firewire or USB port and not be able to see whether the system recognized it or not. Or my network cable comes loose and I lose connectivity. Granted Software's Peripheral Vision is a little utility that flashes the name of devices as their plugged in or out of the computer. I haven't used it, but there is also a way to launch scripts on these actions as well. This is handy enough that it ought to just be built into the OS.
I also tried a plug-in for Apple's mail client, Mail.app, called Mail.appetizer that flashes a summary of newly arriving mail on the screen over the top of other windows. I tried it for a few days and then disabled it. I was reading mail twice and I don't even like reading most of it once! The problem is that I like to delete some mail and send some to junk and Mail.appetizer doesn't support the latter.
10:06 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Extending Bluetooth's Range
My first introduction to computers was in the pages of Popular Electronics magazine. In 1975 there was an article about the MITS Altair computer with a whopping 256 bytes of memory (and no, I didn't forget the K or M) that I must have read 1000 times trying to decipher the details. A year later, I had the opportunity to build a MITS Altair computer for the College of Mines at the University of Idaho. I loved that computer--front panel switches and all. I don't think Popular Electronics is still published, but its sister publication, Popular Science is still kicking and even online. Its good to see that they're still in the business of publishing fun little hacks, like this article on extending the range of Bluetooth by adding an antenna.