October 2006 Archives

Estonia had Internet-based electronic voting in 2005 municipal elections, and will have them again in spring 2007 in the national parliament elections. While various e-voting pilots have been carried out elsewhere especially on the local and municipal level, the national e-voting election is definitely a "world's first".

Right after the municipal e-voting, there was not really too much material available in English on what this is about and how everything works legally and technically. So just this week there was an e-voting conference organized by eGovernance Academy and I took another look at what's available online. It's great to see a lot has been reported, translated and put online after the municipal elections, reporting on specific experiences as well as the wider context. See below for references.

Here’s one more reason. Suppose I don’t like what I’m seeing on the current tab and want to close it. And just supposed I suffered from a temporary memory lapse and can’t recall the Ctrl-W shortcut, so I need to do it with the mouse.

In FF1.5, since there was one close button which closed the tab, and it was always at the right edge of the “tab bar”, I could just head over there with the cursor, click the button and be done with it.

In FF2, tabs have individual close buttons. So I need to locate the close button on the active tab. And since it’s highly unlikely I remember the exact position of my tab, I need to scan through ALL the tabs to locate the current one. Which is cognitively a demanding task, because contrast between the current and other tabs is not that great at all. So it becomes more difficult for me to close a tab in FF2.

Getting Real, the book by 37signals, is now available in HTML online for free. I like the whole approach, as I’ve just seen it works for me.

Two major browsers released their new versions almost concurrently. So I figured I’d give both a quick comparative run. Following is a random sampling of the new things that are most obvious, interesting or irritating to me.

Tabs

Before digging down to individual browsers, let’s take a comparative look at the tabs. FF2 is badly underperforming here, while IE has been playing some serious catch-up. Here are the screenshots of Google, Firefox and Microsoft pages.

To Firefox guys, here’s a question. What the hell were you thinking when doing that color scheme for the tabs? What was wrong with the old one? What the hell is that shading/chrome/metal effect doing there? I understand you’re trying to be cool, but on my display, it’s crap. More scientifically, “crap” means that especially on the non-active tabs, there is too little contrast between the text and the tab background, and the shading makes it even harder to read. So, sorry to say, tabs in FF2 are a step backwards from a geek user’s point of view. Come on, guys. Opera can do non-retarded tabs. Internet Explorer does it now. Firefox did also previously, so what gives you had to mess it up :(

I used to work with Martin-Éric at Privador a few years ago, and we both were interested in demoscene as well. So it’s cool to see his newest project, Linutop, being launched. See the intro video below. Among other things, he compares Linutop to Nabaztag — not regarding the features or shape but certainly regarding the open development model.

Sun puts a data center in a shipping container. This means you can just put it on the ground or in a building anywhere and get going. I like it. It’s not really “web 2.0” and doesn’t have any AJAX, but to me, it illustrates what innovation really means — taking known things and combining them in an unexpected way.

I have this thing with bombs.

Last year I was in London during the July bombings and was in a hotel pretty close to the scenes.

Now, an old WW2 bomb goes off on a German highway, killing a worker. An unfortunate accident.

And I was driving the same A3 to and from Frankfurt on the same day. From the west direction so I didn’t get to Aschaffenburg, but still. Small world. And insecure.

I was in Budapest a few times a couple of years ago. Too bad I didn’t have a camera back then. It’s gorgeous. They have a proper river running through the city, not like Paris ;)

One of my visits happened to be around the time when they were celebrating a national event. I can’t recall if it was the end of October and thus the same uprising whose 50 years we’re now commemorating, or if it was something else. There were thousands of people on Moszkva Ter outside the Mammut shopping center with flags and being very nationalistic and happy. Hungary is pretty nationalistic, in a good sense.

Sure, they got their trouble like all countries. At the date of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, they had to use teargas and watercannons against those who were demonstrating against the current government. And their inflation is soaring. But they’ll figure it all out, I’m sure.

(But if someone tells you that the Hungarian and Estonian languages are related, don’t believe it. It’s of course academically true, but in practical terms Hungarian feels more like Turkish.)

 Egészségünkre!

Just finished reading the book version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Even though the full book is available on the site for free, I never got around to reading it until I got the paper version. Can’t beat the paper for the flights where you run out of battery and it’s messy to fiddle around with a PC.

The book was really just an extended version of their 95 theses. Not too coherent writing, going over the same stuff over and over again. Perhaps the most valuable part were the real-life experiences and anecdotes.

I’m a strong believer in the whole Cluetrain and citizen media/empowerment thing. Thus I find it comfortable to work with people who have read at least the theses, if not the whole book, and subscribe to the whole notion to at least some extent, if not fully. The book was printed in December 1999, before the advent of this whole blogging and grassroots journalism/publishing thing. Yet it still is very timely today, if not even more so than before.

Having been grounded home with a nasty cold, I figured it was experiment time. So I did two experiments around Skype, first on remote access and then on TV. Both failed. Hey, gotta have those too, you can’t have everything working all the time out of the box.

So here’s my “business case”. I travel around and sometimes am away from home for a longer time, but would still like to keep in touch with the country, which in my case means watching local TV news and other broadcasts. And I got a Novac unit sent over to me straight from my Japanese buddies. So just set it up, throw in a remote control solution for the PC, and be done, yes? Well… no.

I’m a Chevrolet Corvette!

You’re a classic - powerful, athletic, and competitive. You’re all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.