Sub Ubi

In case the situation isn’t clear:

1. NJ county buys electronic voting machines.
2. Princeton prof offers to help independently verify the vote from said machines.
3. Maker of machines threatens to sue if independent verification occurs.

Would anyone like to tell me when corporate interests trumped democracy? How is this different than some goon with a baseball bat standing at the voting station telling me “Don’t worry… we’ll make sure your vote gets counted.”

Closed, unverified electronic voting machines are a threat to democracy.

From the Star-Ledger:

Union County has backed off a plan to let a Princeton University computer scientist examine voting machines where errors occurred in the presidential primary tallies, after the manufacturer of the machines threatened to sue, officials said today.

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

This is only valid for TortoiseSVN 1.4.1. Anything else, and your milage may vary.

1. Create a folder on the desktop (proj). This will be where your repository is stored. You may want to create some other, more permanent place for such things.

   

2. Inside that directory, right-click, and select Create Repository Here from the TortoiseSVN drop-down menu.

   

3. You’ll be given the option of creating a Native Filesystem (FSFS) or Berkeley database (DBD) repository. FSFS is the new default for Subversion, and is much preferred. To backup up your repository, you just have to back up the folder you created it in.

   

4. That’s it! Now, let’s do an initial checkout of your new, empty repository. First, create a folder (checkout).

   

5. In that folder, right-click, and do an SVN Checkout.

   

6. The URL of your repository is the full path to wherever you created your repos. In this case, it is the proj folder on your Desktop.

   

7. After you enter that information, you should be able to hit OK, and your repository will be checked out.

   

A Subversion repository does not always need to be stored on a remote server. You can have a repository right in your filesystem, and use it just like you would any other. Later, if you decide you want to put it on the WWW, you can, by any number of means.

Just remember, though, if you have a repository living in your filesystem, it is only as safe as your backup strategy. (Granted, that’s true of SVN repositories living on remote servers, too.)

I decided that I should get a Roomba to experiment with.

The Roomba is a floor vacuuming robot; it is capable of detecting walls (with bumpers), stairs (by detecting when its wheels “drop out”), how dirty the floor under it is (with magic), and a bunch of other bits. What interests me most is the serial port on the back of the robot—you can plug in a PC or other device and control the Roomba yourself.

When controlling the Roomba, you can read from the sensors and direct it using your own control code. I’m pretty psyched about this—it’s a quick-and-dirty platform for experimenting with robotic control. By purchasing a refurb unit, using a coupon code for 20% off on robots, and using Google Checkout, I managed to get the bot for $78. I haven’t decided if I’m going to bounce it against my hardware budget or not.

Carrie said I can leave it at home when I’m not experimenting with it…

Mac OSX drops little fumets all over every drive it touches. These annoying little files are fine in some contexts, but they clutter up the iLiad something fierce.

Scrub-a-dub is a little PLT Scheme application that I built to take care of these .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._ files. Point scrub-a-dub at a drive, tell it to “Scrub!”, and it will delete all of those irritating files. Of course, it might delete a bunch of other files, too… I’m not making any promises. It should work on Intel Macs under Rosetta; if you try it, and it works, please let me know. If it nukes everything on your machine, please note that I lied about all of my contact information on this site.

Additionally, I don’t know how to auto-detect the media type I’m dealing with—at the moment, I cannot tell the difference between a compact flash card and a hard drive. Therefore, it is conceivably possible to remove these special OSX files from an external hard drive, which might be a Bad Thing. However, like all software, it’s user beware. Who knows… there might be other unimagined evil that scrub-a-dub is capable of, but it works for me.

And it works for Oliver over at iLiadfan, so that makes two people whose computers haven’t been destroyed by scrub-a-dub.

(As a side note: if you want to prevent the creation of these files on networked volumes, check out this hint. It doesn’t help you with USB sticks and compact flash cards, however.)

It is frustrating watching all the Lego Mindstorms Developer Program weblogs. Many of them appear to be people who were randomly chosen to be in the program, and are now (apparently) maintaining weblogs about the robots they’re building.

So, I’ve realized that I could, after all, put my weblog to good use: I could write about some of the things I know, and are appropriate to the blog’s title. One is how students engage in the act of programming—I’ve written very little about my dissertation work over the past few years, and I might as well start serializing my research, results, and ideas out into this space. Certainly, it is a rare and hardy soul who would want to read my dissertation.

Likewise, I have spent years teaching with the LEGO Mindstorms in the classroom. I designed and taught my own course in the CS department at Indiana University Bloomington, and have continued using LEGO in my workings with students at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. I’ve even helped write a massively concurrent runtime for the LEGO Mindstorms, and have been a judge at two First LEGO League competitions now, but never mind that we weren’t selected to be part of the developer program. I’m not bitter. Much.

…

So. Purpose. Direction. These are good things. And it will help keep me from blathering on about things that don’t matter in this space. Like, um, Peeps. Erhm… yeah.

(Actually, Peep research seems pretty important. But I’ll let that go for now.)

we are the pirates we don’t do anything
we just stay at home, and lie around
and if you ask us, to do anything
we’ll just tell you, we don’t do anything

Somewhere out there is a band called “Reliant K”. They wrote a song called “We are the pirates who don’t do anything.” That, I think, is excellent. The lyrics are quite good.

Huh. A bit of searching yields that they are a Christian rock band from Canton, Ohio. Who knew that Christians could be pirates? Granted, my office-mate Christian occasionally dresses up like a pirate, and even talked like one at a conference. So, it just goes to show, you cannot judge Christians or pirates, even when they are one and the same.

In a slightly different vein, I liked this description of software developers as either Assholes or Morons. Flying in the face of our vaguely Christian theme this morning, it seems like there are no Angels in the software development world. It seems like software developers and pirates need to go on an adventure together.

Update: See next post for corrections.

… OK, I was one of nine authors, but that’s still a trick. Writing a book with 9 people—and still liking them when you’re done—is no small feat.

The text is already available on Amazon; it is titled “Studying Programming”, and because publishing houses don’t seem to like groups of people to be authors (for various legal reasons), Sally Fincher is the lead author on the text. It is fairly unique as a text: we’ve attempted to tackle the question of how a student should go about learning to program. This means we’ve tackled issues like how to utilize resources (textbooks, teachers, peers), how to go about tackling syntax and semantic errors in a program, the use of editors, and so on. In short, we’ve hit all the things that we’ve observed students struggling with, and not having any resources for getting started.

We all were primary authors on two chapters, and secondary on two. This means that many people took part in writing all of the text. I was the primary author of chapter 8 (”Writing Bigger Programs”) and chapter 11 (”Writing Your nth Program”), and added segments on Scheme and occam to the 16th chapter, titled “How Languages Differ” (I think it used to be “Here be Dragons”). Of course, almost everyone ended up touching every chapter in some way—for example, Colin worked through the Scheme example and contributed greatly to the quality of the text in that section, and the chapters saw many hands as we all proofed and revised each-other’s work. Really, it was a fun and challenging process.

I think the book is a fine piece of work, and fills a void in the world of texts available for novices learning to program. I believe it could be an excellent compliment to, say, Objects First With Java by Barnes and Kolling, or How to Design Programs, by Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi.

Oh, and last, but not least—my most excellent housemate Ed provided illustrations for one of the chapters. Sadly, we failed to acknowledge his efforts in the text (not for want of trying—there’s a number of things that didn’t happen, despite repeated attempts on our part to make it happen). So, thank you Ed.

Now, everyone go order the book.

Selenium is a unit test framework for web-based applications. Open source.

VMWare Server is now free. I need to read up on it to understand why this is better, worse, or the same as VMWare Player. Either way, it follows from what Christian and I were saying yesterday about VMWare. Having recently put together a virtual machine for deployment to our students (more coming on the Transterpreter weblog shortly), it’s clear that VMWare is trying to establish a broader market share now. The reason isn’t 100% obvious, but they’re making the right moves.

We now have a convergence of all major and boutique PC manufacturers on one platform (Intel/x86). More importantly, Intel is incorporating support for multiple operating systems into their processors. This virtualization support means, in the crudest possible terms, that the days of dual-booting a machine are over. Once support is baked into (say) OSX and Linux, it will be possible to run these two operating systems on the same machine, side-by-side, and simply flip back and forth between them. Likewise with Windows.

This kind of support for virtualization on the end-user’s desktop spells death for VMWare. However, if you make the tools to play a virtual machine free, and charge $180 for the ability to create virtual machines, you’re on the road to establishing a broader user base. They might be a little too late, I’m not sure—but think about how ubiquitous Flash is. Macromedia has never charged for the player, just for the content creation tools.

Over at Brick Labs we have an article about operating systems for robotics; I’m curious what the competition looks like. In the same (robotic) breath, I’m curious about this project taking place in London regarding environmental sensing and “feral robotics”.

In vaguely related news, I liked the description of an attempt by a new Erlang programmer to tackle the three-body problem. I enjoy “peering into” people’s thought processes on problems like this.

Finally, there’s some discussion at LtU regarding Guido’s thoughts on language design. Also something to take a quick look at.

I just saw Jon’s post regarding managing Wordpress installations with Subversion.

Aaah.

Makes excellent sense. Perhaps everything here will move from MT to WP sometime in the future? Who knows…

I wrote “On Languages and Models” some time ago; the timestamp on the file is May 11, 2005.

It was surprising to find it by way of a Google search. I don’t know how it was exposed to the world, but it was. C’est la vie.

There are a few ideas and things I want to hold on to there—perhaps I’ll just repost it at some point as a weblog post.