Inside View

Towards transparent electronic voting

KILKENNY -- Major concerns about the electronic voting mechanisms continue to be expressed in Ireland. Some of the concerns echo comments made on other continents. I believe more consultation should be done before electronic counting mechanisms eliminate the transparency needed by tallymen in Irish elections. The software used to record votes needs to be opened at the source code level for several reasons: (1) to ascertain whether passwords are embedded in source code, (2) to evaluate the level of encryption in the system, (3) to analyse reasons for denying printouts of ballots cast being made for individual voters.

Antoin O Lachtnain raises additional issues concerning layouts of ballots, tallying methods and polling stations. All deserve to be part of an informed national debate because the envisioned system does not inspire confidence.

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There have been several calls to vet voting machines by Irish software developers. These calls need to be followed up by informed debate.

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Wired News and Open -- "More calls to vet voting machines"
Antoin O Lachtnain -- "Electronic voting: putting voters first"
Sent as mail2blog by Nokia 9210i O2 TypePad connection at the Kilkenny Train Station.
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Developing applications for Smart Devices

BAWNTAMEENA E1 -- The .Net compact framework will supposedly bring "write once, run on multiple (MS) devices" capability to Pocket PC devices. It works like a browsecap file which has the abilities (such as screen size and colours) of most devices in it and the .Net Mobile Controls "automagically" display the best content layout for the device.

Visual Studio .Net 1.1 upgrade has default support for the mobile controls and a pocket PC device emulator. This is supposed to help ASP.Net developers to start becoming smart device developers for applications that run through a browser when connected and applications that are installed and run locally on the actual device.

Nokia uses the Symbian OS and Java. At a recent Nokia Developer Conference in Dublinl, I learned that development consists of selecting a specific "profile" for a specific device and then deploy to that device only.

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Craig McFadyen on Open
Visual Studio and DevX articles
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Sent as mail2blog by Nokia9210i O2 service.

Irish Microcontent

BEN HAMMERSLEY saved his best column of the year for the warmest day of 2003, reporting on the writers and artists who are earning money in the form of Internet micropayments.

It's a theme I first explored for those on Arthouse courses back in 1996. Weekly visitors still find my online course notes about the topic. Hammersley provides a listing of simple yet effective ways of making small bits for bytes of content. I'm thinking about a few ideas for Irish microcontent that he didn't mention and I wonder if he dismissed them after discovering they're not viable.

In true "trackback" fashion, I will bring my online notes into this TypePad space and watch the discussion ensue. I've got a busload of students interested in this topic. They want wages as much as they want to earn degrees.

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Ben Hammersley -- "Making the web pay" in The Guardian, 7 August 2003
Sent mail2blog on Nokia 9210i O2 connection from Kilkenny, Ireland using genuine Irish pixels.

journal

The Pain of Spam

KILKENNY -- I watched some French tourists grimace when seeing a loud of spam saturate their e-mail accouns while they were paying to go online at a Kilkenny cybercafe. It's high time for the Irish Minister of Communications to take a leading role in the EU that results in him aggressively trampling spam.

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Underway in Ireland -- "Getting serious about spam"
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15,000 Hits a Month

BACK WHEN "HITS" were a thing, I ran around Temple Bar on the heels of a special letter of introduction from the Temple Bar Properties Marketing Manager (see below).