Get Involved: TrustTheVote.org
Government is something we often consider something we really can't get involved in as average citizens outside of public office. But with the recent grass roots campaign that President Obama orchestrated, it goes to show that we as citizens do have the ability to affect influence in government. One of the major steps in creating a more open government is establishing a standardized set of guidelines and rules for digital voting in our country.
Recently at the OSU Open Source Lab, we've been in talking with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) with hopes that we can help host some of their sites and infrastructure. What and who exactly are they? They're a non-partisan and non-profit organization based in Silicon Valley that strives to try and fix many of the issues that we face today in digital voting. They have three primary goals.
- Resolving the root causes for the problems that exist in voting technology today,
- Developing guidelines for assessing, testing, and verifying whether an existing or new digital voting device, system, or service is truly high assurance and high veracity, and
- Defining, designing, and building a reference implementation of an open source high assurance digital voting system and service.
Excited? Interested in learning more? Live in the Portland, Oregon area? You're in luck! The OSL and Portland Open Source Entrepreneurs (POSSE) is hosting an event at Cubespace this Wednesday from 6-8PM with a presentation by the OSDV founders. Their presentation will:
- Introduce the project, its motivation, founding, and development efforts to date
- Walk through the TrustTheVote technology road map and review major projects underway
- Discuss development philosophies and approaches including experience-driven design and test-driven agile development
- Review opportunities for systems architects, software developers, SDQA/test specialists, and user experience designers
- Cover plans to expand the volunteer developer teams, future opportunities for senior members of technical staff, and opportunities for you to get involved
Get Involved! See you there!
The EeePC netbooks are awesome!
As some of you may have noticed, I usually carry around a tiny little black laptop when I'm at Beer and Blog or at a coffee shop. Since people ask about it so much, I decided to write a few blog posts about it with this being the first.
What is it? Its an EeePC 1000 from ASUS (the same guys that make motherboards). Its a new type of laptop that is generally referred to as a netbook mainly because it lacks some of the features that a normal laptop has such as a cdrom, being heavy, a multi-core power sucking CPU, and a huge screen. Outside of that, its like any other laptop with a few other enhancements. In my case, this EeePC has these features which I love about it.
- Long battery life, claims one day computing (6+hrs)
- Solid State Drives (SSD) - no moving parts & better battery life!
- Multi-touch track pad
- Very usable keyboard (92% from a normal laptop)
- Lightweight (2lbs 15oz)
- Fast 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor
- 802.11n Wi-Fi and Blue-tooth
- 1.3MP web cam
I've used my trusty 15" PowerBook for many years and I still use it, but its become more of a hassle to carry around with me. I'm a UNIX Admin, so I don't need much on my laptop (xterm, Firefox, Thunderbird, and pidgin) to get work done and the EeePC was a perfect fit. The first models that ASUS releases for the EeePC didn't appeal to me since they had a screen and keyboard that was too small for me to deal with. A good friend of mine (who also has the habit of being an enabler for me :P) purchased one for himself and kept raging about it. I was actually considering getting an upgrade for my PowerBook but didn't want to pay $2K for a new MacBook, so instead I decided to get this EeePC for around $500 (its down to $430 now).
Asus gives you two options for Operating Systems on these laptops: Windows XP or Linux (Xandros). Since I'm a Gentoo developer, I decided to give it a try on this laptop. I encountered a few issues of course, but overall I have all the hardware working. The only annoying thing so far is the wireless driver not being included in the mainline kernel, but that's going to change soon I hope. There is an open source driver but its a little finicky to deal with on networks using any form of security passwords. But it does work!
In the upcoming posts, I plan to write about the following:
- How I installed Gentoo on it
- Gentoo tweaks I use on it
- Window management
- Firefox tweaks (yes, you need them!)
- How netbooks are helping promote Linux to the masses
I love my EeePC and you should get one too! :)