Category: technology

Categories
National politics technology

Open Congress

It becomes more and more clear each day how powerful the internet can be as a tool to improve our political process by enabling citizens to be informed. A great example of that is OpenCongress.org. The purpose of the site is to provide information on bills and members of congress. It only took me about two minutes to find 9 feeds on the site that any serious political blogger should have (of course the 9 feeds vary depending on where you live). For each member of the House or the Senate there are feeds for every roll-call vote (voice votes can”t be accurately tracked), for blog entries related to that person, and for news stories related to that person. The nine feeds are those three feeds for each of your senators and your representative. Everyone who is serious about politics should be aware of the members of congress who they have the chance to elect. For the Utah 2nd Congressional District those feeds are:

I have long admired the way Misty Fowler has widgets showing the recent votes of her representative and senators in her sidebar. I don’t know if I will display this kind of thing in my sidebar, but I will definitely be following them in my feed reader. Now I wish I had a site like OpenCongress at the state level.

Categories
culture technology

Open Up on Blogger

This is an open suggestion to Bloggers who use Blogger – specifically those who are restrictive on allowing comments.

Once upon a time there were three options for who could comment (assuming that you allowed comments on the blog in the first place). The options were Anyone, Registered Users, and Members of the Blog. I can understand the drawbacks of allowing anyone to comment but not everyone uses blogger – that makes for less than ideal choices to be made.

Recently there has been a new option added. Registered users used to mean people with blogger accounts but that has become “Users with Google Accounts.” The new “Registered Users” option allows people to use WordPress, TypePad, AIM/AOL, or LiveJournal identities to make comments. This is nice because users like me are no longer forced to use a defunct identity to comment. Please consider using the new “Registered Users” option if you currently only allow Users with Google Accounts.

Categories
life meta technology

Unseen Rhythm

For some time I have been wishing that my posts from my earlier blogs could be included in my archives here. There were some specific posts that I felt should be included so that I could refer back to them as appropriate. I finally went and added those old posts on Monday from archives I saved before I pulled my blog. I had been forced to pull it because of excessive spam which brought the server to its knees (which is obviously unacceptable on a shared server). Thankfully WordPress is not as vulnerable to the spam attacks I suffered back then with b2Evolution (and I would not be surprised to learn that my new host – HostMonster – has better defenses than my old host).

Yesterday I found one final post that was not included in the other archives. This was the last post on my old site and it explained why I was pulling the blog. What I found very interesting is that the date on that final post was December 17, 2005 – exactly 2 years prior to the day I restored those old posts.

I wonder if there’s something about December 17th that I should be wary of. 😉

Categories
technology

Winning the Oil Endgame

Is there anyone who would not want to see our nation profitably end its dependence on foreign oil? I doubt that there is anyone like that (not counting the Saudis of course). If you are anything like me that idea – profitably ending our dependence – sounds like a fairytale but that is exactly what Winning the Oil Endgame is about. According to the book it is not only possible, but even relatively simple.

I learned about this through the video by one of the authors of the book (posted below) and my only two questions are – will we really do it? and is there a catch (such as did they account for the oil necessary to make the carbon-fiber materials referenced in this talk)?

Categories
culture National politics State technology

The Government Hammer

My father-in-law is known for saying, “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Thomas Sowell talks about political crises created by Political “Solutions.”

Government laws and policies, especially the Community Reinvestment Act, pressured lenders to invest in people and places where they would not invest otherwise. Government also created the temporarily very low interest rates that made the mortgages seem affordable for the moment. . .

As for the flames sweeping across southern California, tragic as that is, this has happened time and again before — in the very same places in the very same time of year, just like hurricanes.

Why would people risk building million-dollar homes in the known paths of wildfires? For the same reason that people choose to live in the known paths of hurricanes. Because the government — that is, the taxpayers — will get stuck with a lot of the costs of dealing with those dangers and the costs of rebuilding.

Why is there such a huge amount of inflammable vegetation over such a wide area that fires can reach unstoppable proportions by the time they get to places where people live? Because “open space” has become a political sacred cow beyond rational discussion. . .

In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.

As for water shortages . . . The federal government’s water projects supply much of the water used in California that enables agriculture to flourish in what would otherwise be a desert.

We have created a culture where government is the solution to every every social “problem” (many time government is used to address preferences like open space which are not actually problems) just as technology is the solution to every technical problem. Lawmakers don’t intend to create crises, but crisis is the natural result when government gets involved in things that it was not designed to address (things like the cost of water or the price of home loans). In other words, if you have a hammer everything may look like a nail, but no matter how skillfully you hammer on a screw it won’t work like a screw – you need a screw driver to succeed with screws.

Categories
life Local politics technology

Open Invitation

As I was researching the candidates for Lehi City Council this year I found a site that had information on most of the candidates. The site was run by one of the candidates and some of the other candidates chose not to participate because of that. I thought it would be beneficial to create a site that would provide a neutral place to learn show candidate profiles (provided by the candidates) and links to their websites. This would help prevent the mental runaround:

“Was it yes2george.com or vote4george.com or am I mixing up the sites for George Perkins and Mike George? Nevermind, I’ll stick with the flyers.

I have created a basic website but I’d like to know how much interest there is for this. If you are a candidate, or know one, who would be interested in having a profile on such a site let me know in the comments. I would also be interested to know if other people would want this as a resource for information. What I do with this will depend on the level of interest generated. (I do not expect enough interest to try charging for the service – ever)

Categories
meta technology

Archive Menu

I have created a new theme for my site (more like what I was unable to create before) which should render correctly in any browser. I know that the old theme was quirky in Internet Explorer. As part of creating this new theme I had to make a new plugin for WordPress. It’s called Archive Menu and it displays the archives as a two layer list of years and months. I took most of the code from Compact Archive by Rob Marsh (http://rmarsh.com/plugins/compact-archives/). I loved that plugin in my last theme, but it displayed in a very abbreviated format which would not work for the menu I was trying to create. This plugin displays the menus more like the standard monthly archive function of WordPress broken up in to years.

Once I have fully polished my theme I will release the code I used to implement the Archive Menu but I want to make the plugin available before then. Download the plugin here.

Categories
life technology

Deseret News Has RSS

I went to look at a story in the Deseret News today and found that their site was rather unresponsive. I cam back after a couple of hours to look again and found that the site had been completely redesigned since I last looked. From a features and layout perspective it looks similar to the new York Times, although the style is still quite different (less polished). As I looked around the new site I found that they now offer RSS feeds.

I think that every news site should be offering RSS feeds. There’s no reason that people should be required to come to the site to find out if there is new content, or what that content is. The day’s of “bookmark this” and “make us your home page” are ancient history on the internet because anybody who really wants to be informed is going to be looking at multiple sources of news and information these days. If I have to visit your site to find out what you’ve got you can expect me to look elsewhere for my news.

This is not really a plug for the Deseret News. Mostly I am just excited by this because I remember looking at a variety of newspaper sites a while back for my RSS reader and there were hardly any local (read state of Utah) news organizations that had RSS feeds available. I’d still like to find something with news centered in Lehi, but at least I have one more option than before in the state.

Categories
culture technology

Lehi News Organization

One primary concern for a Lehi news organization would be cost. Especially the upfront cost. Getting a website would be financially painless, but getting paid reporters or printing with any regularity would become cost prohibitive very quickly without a revenue stream. Without a very compelling argument I would not want to take money from the city to run the organization. It should be privately funded and run from neutral sources of revenue. Advertising on the site should be able to pay the modest costs of running the site, but I would be wary of expecting it to pay for much else (at least until I saw actual revenue coming from that advertising). Ideally the cost of printing would be such that a modest price for the printed version of the paper would cover the costs of printing and print distributions thus allowing people to access the news for free from the site if they did not want, or could not afford, to pay for the printed version.

For the reporting, I wonder if it would be possible to get by with less than 5 paid employees. One would serve as editor and head of the paper, perhaps three would be paid reporters, who would be expected to extensively use bloggers and comments from readers as sources of information to drive their reporting, leaving one employee to manage any other administrative functions. I wonder if there would be any possibility of collaboration with the high school or with university students interested in reporting as a way to add some unpaid staff to the press corps.

The initial move in starting such an organization would be to find out how much interest there is. Are residents interested in having a Lehi-centric source of news? Are there bloggers who are interested in their community (as opposed to some other special interest they might blog about) who would be willing to contribute and work with reporters? Are there others who are not current bloggers but who are interested in contributing to an ongoing discussion of local news items? Would the city council and local businesses be interested enough to provide information relative to whatever discussions are current?

Anyone from Lehi or surrounding areas is welcome to answer.

If you are not near Lehi I would still like to hear your thoughts on this – would this interest you in your location? Does the idea seem sound?

Categories
technology

Windows Genuine Safari

Apple ported their browser, Safari, to Windows and released a public beta this week. Having heard great things about Safari from a web-standards perspective I got it and had a look. Aside from the standards compliance it was just a browser – nice, but nothing compelling about it. Then this afternoon a window popped up on my screen:

Safari - Genuine Windows Software

Less than one week and Safari has its first security patch (it was cracked within hours) – I thought to myself “It’s genuine Windows software.”