Voting

As a citizen I have done my duty. I encourage you if you haven't already voted today and are registered, to do so as well.

Remember the number to call if you face any voting irregularities is 1-866-OUR-VOTE. My polling place was fairly empty and relaxed. I was in and out in about 5 minutes.

Note: I didn't vote for all of the local positions, but I did vote for the County Sheriff. How great would it be to live in a county where the sheriff's name is Rob Crooks. I'm not making this up folks.

Electioneering

I just got back from spending some time listening to Congressmen Berry and Clyburn, house majority whip, stump for Obama and Jane Dyer, candidate for the Third Congressional District which includes Clemson. I managed to ask the first question after they were speaking which was:

"Senator Obama and the DNC have made a historic move against the corrupting influence of money by refusing to take donations from PAC's and lobbyists, will you all stand with them in your own campaigns and push for the DCCC to do so as well?"

Congressman Clyburn fielded it, saying that he would not agree to unilateral disarmament and reminded everyone that the Supreme Court already ruled against a law that banned money from those groups indicating that money == speech. Congressman Berry made a similar point and said he wished the law had stuck.

Afterward, I handed Congressman Berry, one of Congressman Clyburn's aides and Miss Dyer links to Change Congress and encouraged them to fill out where they stand.

No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, please remember to vote next Tuesday!

Vrrrroooom

I passed my motorcycle driving test yesterday. w007!

Signingparty - Update

Thanks to a suggestion from commenter Ondra on the LaTeX and some additional spare time I wiped the TODO's from my little program.

signingparty.c

It's been requested to include this in seahorse-plugins, so it will probably make its way there in time for 2.26.

Update: I forgot to mention that a new compile line was needed to add the auto-launching:
gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall


Back from Chicago

I'm back from the URSI GA in Chicago and back in the office. While I was in Chicago, I wrote a little program to auto-generate a bingo board in LaTeX for a little game I dreamt up. While that program will probably not see the light of day, it inspired me to write something else.

I've been frustrated with the user un-friendliness of existing scripts to generate a sheet suitable for use at a key signing party. This frustration led me to write a program that uses libcryptui to select keys for the sheet and inserts them into a table in LaTeX. It's now at a usable point so I thought I would make it available:

signingparty.c

Compile with: gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall


An example of the output is party.tex

And the processed PDF party.pdf

Obligatory Screenshot:


TODO:
* Strip comments from display names (what's in parenthesis normally)
* Fix table grid lines (Help from a LaTeX guru would be appreciated)
* Auto-process LaTeX to PDF (via Rubber)

Marathon Training

My friend Matt and I are training to row a marathon and just completed week 1. Only 15 more weeks till race day. WoOoOoOo! I did about 23 miles of running this week and our plan has us getting up to rowing(x1)/running(x1)/cycling(x4) a total of 51 miles in our peak milage week. I'm very glad there's a plan to get from here to there.

Fair Tax

I just finished reading The Fair Tax Book today. I had heard about the fair tax before and have visited the website but I still learned a lot.

For those that don't know, the Fair Tax is a law in congress, HR 25 and S 1025, that aims to eliminate all personal income, estate, FICA, medicare and corporate taxes, abolish the IRS and replace them with an inclusive national sales tax of 23%. This means that if you buy a $100 item, the retailer keeps $77 and sends $23 upstream to the federal government. Because the taxes and cost of compliance with federal tax laws are already embedded in the cost of every item you buy (estimated to be around 23%) prices for the consumer are expected to remain the same or slightly decrease. Imagine the ability to take home all of your pay every two weeks and only pay tax when you choose to spend it.

Some of you may be wondering about those with little to no income, but not to worry the plan takes care of that by "prebating" every head of household in the US with the amount of sales tax on a twelfth of the inflation adjusted poverty level for the size of their family. This means that the poor's tax burden is removed entirely and still receive goods and services from the federal government.

I'm on board, but a ground swell of support is required to convince congress that this is a desired course of action. I encourage you to investigate the plan and then contact your friendly neighborhood congress critter with your opinion.

I consider this to be compatible with the Change Congress movement as the simplification of the tax law to a point where there are no loop holes or exceptions for anyone will lead to a congress more beholden to their constituents.

xkcd T-Shirt idea

The 17th frame of today's xkcd is crying out to be made into a t-shirt. Photo shop merge portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Barack Obama's face with the dialogue from that frame.

If you make it, let me know and I'll send you a shipping address and my t-shirt size. ;)

I would also take one of the frame that says "I LOVE CRYPTOGRAPHY".

Fitness

I'm with Eric on this one. I know plenty of scientists and engineers that run, bike, climb and participate in other sports. Although for athletic people I don't put much stock in BMI. For instance, mine is 24.8 and 25 is considered over weight. For athletes, percent body fat is a much more accurate albeit more difficult to measure indicator of fitness level.

Seahorse libgnome/ui Free

With the help of patches from Saleem Abdulrasool (compnerd) I have spent the afternoon eliminating libgnome/ui from seahorse and seahorse-plugins (bug #524018).

The port of seahorse to gio is already complete and the port of seahorse-plugins should happen fairly soon (A big thanks to Saleem for volunteering to look at this too).

There's also a icon refresh underway that will hopefully bear fruit so stay tuned to unstable!

Omelet in a Mug

I got home from morning practice and wanted a fully cooked breakfast without the fully cooked hassle. I decided, drawing inspiration from Lunch in a Box, to try cooking eggs in a coffee mug.

I started with two eggs and scrambled them in situ. Then I added a handful of frozen cubed potatoes, some minced sharp cheddar cheese, a spoonful of salsa and stirred. I nuked it all for 2 minutes on high and voila, Omelet in a Mug.

*WARNING* Watch your mug carefully during the last 30s so that the cheese doesn't boil over the top of your mug.

Vrooooom

I spent my off weekend from crew related activities to learn how to ride a motorcycle. It's been on my todo list for a almost a year, but the timing was always off. I decided to take the Beginning Motorcycle class offered by SC Rider Ed at Greenville Tech, one of the local community colleges.

The course consisted of 3 sessions on Fri, Sat and Sun and was taught by Eric Diehl. There was some classroom work on Friday night followed by riding practice on Sat and Sunday. The class provided motorcycles in the form of Honda Rebels.

I would recommend taking a safety class from the American Motorcyclist Association to anyone looking to start riding. There's so much info to cover, a friend or relative might leave something out. Before this weekend, I had never ridden a motorcycle or operated a manual vehicle and I was able to have fun and succeed at the exercises practiced. Eric did a great job of emphasizing the fundamentals and I now feel confident I want to get a bike.

Slogan for the Democratic Party

In a response to Nat

"Freedom, Peace and Choice make America Great. Democratic Party."

Of course, this only works because the "conservatives" have leaned toward becoming fascist, war hawks. It's interesting that a true conservative would espose two out of three of the above on the basis of personal liberties and responsibility.

GNOME SoC 2008

GNOME is joining Google for the fourth annual Summer of Code program. We need your ideas and expertise as mentors to make this our best year yet and bring more awesome Free Software into existence. This year, we would like to see projects about the integration between various
GNOME modules. Other types of projects are of course also welcome, like new programs, bling, etc.

As long as there are mentors available, we are also taking SoC proposals for GNOME related technologies and projects such as GStreamer, Avahi, Beagle, Bluez and Telepathy so don't feel left out if your favorite project isn't part of GNOME or just isn't yet. We will also be collaborating with KDE to mentor freedesktop.org related projects.

Please submit your ideas and volunteer to mentor on our wiki at http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas. Ideas that are posted will be triaged by the GNOME SoC Admins based on mentor support and feasibility.

Note that the student submission deadline is March 31st so get your great ideas up so students will have plenty of time to help our favorite desktop keep rocking!

-- GNOME Summer of Code Admins

Lessig '08

What do we want?

Change!

When do we want it?

Now!

I've been following Larry Lessig's path from free culture pioneer to corruption crime fighter and I agree with him that he cannot make the changes in our culture he wants to see until the culture of corruption has been addressed. To this end I have decided to support his possible run for congress in the CA-12 and have done so financially. It's time to put our money where our mouths are and make the change happen!

If you want change,

If you want hope,

Support Lessig for Congress.

N810

This post is written from my new N810. Thanks Nokia and Maemo for making the discount program happen. I'll be installing Ubuntu over my venerable Slack+DLG install to get the development environment working properly. DLG, I love the work you've done but need to be able to use the documentation without having to blaze a new path. Keep up the good work!