Major Hack (not)

Update 2: Dreamhost finally recognized and corrected the problem on Thursday evening. That added up to five days of outage for a small minority of folks at DH using MySQL in a somewhat advanced but perfectly standard way. Even worse, nearly all DH’s clients were down for close to a day that week while […]

The Launch

Officially, “The Launch” was last Wednesday, when I posted the announcement as Daily Kos diary. Feeling a strong affinity with that community, I was hoping for a much greater response. The dozen or so votes that came through were certainly better than nothing, but not enough to force a runoff among the official candidates. I […]

Catching Up

The first multi-user test took place three weeks ago. The result has kept me pretty busy. As expected, it bombed. I had four browsers open on two machines. Ballots were filled out and ready to go, mice in position. I clicked “cast ballot” as fast as I could and watched the screens go into never […]

DEM President: February, 2007 (Test Poll Alpha)

DEM President: February, 2007
I’ve been experimenting with this poll the last couple of months, and also using it as a demo for friends and family. The results are completely meaningless (except for revealing my pro-Richardson sentiments), since a lot of the tests involve artificial attempts to create ties, force certain runoffs victories and transfers, or […]

A new day

Life intervened. I had to put indaba aside for an extended period in order to produce some income and to help a friend who was dealing with medical troubles. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten a lot done, including stabilizing the CSS template, adding some nifty Java tooltips, and putting up a mission statement. I’m in the middle […]

More touchup.

Two people have tried the system so far, and both had good suggestions for improvements. Neither found it intuitve, but they both got it after a brief explanation. Nothing blew up, which is a good thing, of course.
There’s still a little issue about how the results sort out on the bottom line of […]

Activity

There’s been lots of progress. It’s now possible to post ballots via the web interface (though this still depends on manual entry of a Voter_ID), and there are working (if drafty) displays of the Ballot Tally and the top row of the Irving Chart on the main Elections page. More to do, but it looks […]

Annoying bug

There’s a known problem with Internet Explorer 6.029.2180 (and probably some other versions) that’s giving me some grief. It even affects the blog post preview!
If you see the blog or the main site as a single column, rather than multiple columns displayed side by side, you know what I mean. I just tried one […]

Venting

It took a while to figure out that MySQL’s Query Browser doesn’t support doing a select on a temporary table created within the same query. It’s a known problem, having something to do with creating a new connection on the fly (thereby leaving the temp table session), but I don’t have the link right now.
In […]

A technical test

This blogsforbush.com sample poll is wonderfully easy to use and share, but has no authentication features. Unfortunately, ballot stuffing (freeping) got so bad on its most recent version that the site was temporarily shut down.
I’m pasting it to my blog for testing purposes only. Apparently all the polls at the host site resolve to […]