Don't Back Down

Mark Minasi's latest newsletter talks about a nonillion (and a half) of possibilities if you have a 15-character passphrase of all lowercase letters. Mark has some good ideas, and this one isn't necessarily a bad one.

Read "A Nonillion is Big" »

This map graphically shows which counties voted for which candidates in the last two presidential elections. What I first found interesting was the amazing amount of red (Republican) counties. Looking at the comparison of square miles won in this election, Bush had a whopping 2.51 million. Meanwhile, Kerry had about .5 million. This number didn't really change much from 2000.

Read "Democratic Leanings" »

I mentioned previously that North Carolina had no-excuse early voting. Simply show up at one of the appointed locations, cast your vote, and you're done. The idea sounds pretty sweet. The problem is that we don't seem to be able to handle it.

You can't handle the votes! In Jacksonville, machines lost more than 4500 votes because the memory wasn't able to hold them. Apparently the machines were rated to hold 3005 votes (who came up with that number?), while the manufacturer allegedly told the county that they could handle more than triple that number. Votes over the limit were simply never saved, and cannot be recovered. Oops.

In Mecklenburg County, early voters encountered another problem. State law says that early votes cannot be counted until 2pm on election day. Presumably that way the early results aren't revealed. But it means there is a scramble to count votes, especially when the candidates are in a close race. In this case, three candidates are within 91 votes of each other, making it very tight. Yet some votes appear to have been double-tallied.

Maybe we ought to take a clue from Beverly and stick to filling in the little ovals. Apparently we just don't know how to work those newfangled machine-thingees.

Arvind has taken the dutchpink update to the Movable Type interface and built a hack that should make it easier to add other skins in the future. I haven't installed it, but it appears that you'll need PHP for the hack, and also need to make some updates to template files in order to use the hack. If skinning is your thing, and you don't like the default interface to MT, make sure you check it out.

With special thanks to Antonio from the Mozilla Portuguese Translation Project, there is now a Portuguese translation of the Bloglines Toolkit. Antonio tells me that he has tested this version in Mozilla and Firefox, under both Windows and Linux, and that it looks good.

This translation shares the same program code as the English version, and thus will have the same feature set at each version level. This includes the recently-added ability to auto-update the Toolkit when new versions are released. Please keep in mind, however, that this version will likely be slightly behind the English version simply because it also needs to be translated and tested by someone other than myself. Enjoy!

If there are any other folks out there who would like to translate the toolkit into another language, please let me know. I'll be happy to send you the files that need translating and repackage everything for you, as well as host the updated package.

Update: The Bloglines Toolkit is now available in a single package that contains all available translations! This means that there is no more need for a language-specific version!