haroldp

Sometimes I catch myself trying to figure out the "smiley" in regular expressions, the same way I sometimes try to decode a personalized license plate, only to realize it is just a California plate.

\$([^;]+);

Raise one for the good Doctor.

- H

AudioScribbler.com is pretty cool. First useful community site on the internet, ehem:

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/haroldp/

Is everyone already doing this?

- H

There is a lot of noise floating around the net about the trustworthiness of electronic voting. I seem to get about 5 links a day to stories about voting irregularities around the country. Some are dubious. Some are tinfoil-hat nutjobs. Some are very disturbing. Computer security experts tend to be very skeptical of electronic voting. A lot of them are demanding paper trails accompany e-votes. A lot of them demand that the the software that runs these machines should be open source, and available for peer review. I think all of that is reasonable, but still misses the point. Those measures can make elections harder to rig, but not impossible. Maybe still not even all THAT hard. Elections on paper ballots can be rigged too, after all.

In my opinion, the ONLY way elections can be trusted is by closing the loop, and allowing voters to verify their vote after the count. I would like to see a system where electronic voting machines issue receipts with a large, anonymous, random key. After the election, voters could consult the election results for their precinct, and verify that the vote matching their key in fact has their voting preferences in it.

The only major security risk I can think of in such a system would be issuing duplicate keys to duplicate voters. Say you and I voted for all of the same people. A compromised machine could issue us receipts with duplicate keys, and just record one vote. This is easily fixed. After the votes have been counted, I go to the GOP web site and look up my vote using my key. If it is recorded correctly, I click on the "confirm" button there. To be safe, I do this all again on the DNC web site. Later, when you check your vote, with your duplicate key, you see that someone else already confirmed it. You alert election officials to the problem.

I can not think of a way to rig such an election. Can you? Is this just naive? I would love to hear comments.

- H

I got a $50 gift cert to amazon from my mother-in-law for my birthday. I ordered:

"Brave New World," Aldous Huxley. I'm sort of embarassed I hadn't already read this.

"Factotum," Charles Bukowski. I'm out of fresh Buk again.

"Ask the Dust," John Fante. This guy is supposed to be Bukowski's main inspiration.

"Choo Choo Boogaloo," Buckwheat Zydeco. It's amazing how many cool musicians have kids albums. Thought Annabel and I might enjoy this.

Don't make a big deal about it.