Tech

I'm hearing reports that the Diebold voting machines apparently used the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The reason this matters is DES was cracked in 1997 and it was publicly demonstrated how to crack it in 1999. Do you know anyone who can look at the source code? If these reports are true then NO ELECTION THAT USED Diebold equipment should be considered valid.

I don't have time tonight to point out the countless half-truths that Cheney said in the VP debate, but I have to point out two glaring errors.

Darth Cheney sort of forgot about the meeting where he sat next Edwards for several hours.

Also, In one of the best geek moves that I have seen in a while, the domain name of factcheck.com went from being a cybersquatter site to be a redirect to georgesoros.com which has "Why we must not re-elect President Bush" on the top of the page. I find it more then a little funny that Darth Cheney directed a few million people to a webpage that is strongly against Bush.

I have been working a lot with various CMS (content management systems) over the last few weeks and I think Drupal is going to be the system I’ll end up using. I’m leaning towards using Civicspace, which is a version of Drupal that appears to be customized quite nicely in the direction that I was wanting to do to Drupal anyway. The only holes that I have found in the functionality of Civicspace is:

* The "Browse event types" module only lists the first 6 event categories.
* RSS feed currently only works of stuff on the front page, or at least that is all I have managed to get working yet.
* How to have the start time show up in the abbr. versions of the event lists.
* Figure out how to deal with daylight savings time.

This fall I'll be taking two courses, both very GIS centric. The Monday night course on GIS Scripting is basically how to use python for geoprocess scripting in ArcGIS 9.0. The GPS for Mapping is rather self explanatory and in theory the course shouldn’t be that much of a stretch in that I took a GPS course this summer.

The server that biohabit lives on had a meltdown and it took a long time put the pieces back together. Getting MT back up and running was also a bit of adventure and I"m planning on switching to something other then MT in the new few days.