Applied Miscellany

I’ve been using the CodeIgniter PHP framework to develop a web site that connects to a MySQL database using InnoDB tables and transactions. I ran into some trouble when I filled the MySQL process list with entries with “Sleep” in the command column. This happened even if I was rendering a page that […]

Last Friday, the regulars at the IT Policy reading group meeting tried something completely different. Instead of discussing the paper of the week, the meeting became an event to sample sour foods before and after eating miraculin, an extract of miracle fruit. (For pictures and additional details, see Ed Felten’s blog entry.) In […]

I thought it was particularly interesting to read the first paragraph and then the last paragraph of today’s AP article (as seen in the New York Times) reporting of the security breach of TJX Cos, the owner of T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s stores. First paragraph:
Information from at least 45.7 million credit and debit cards […]

While wandering through Wikipedia, I ran across the Mojave phone booth article. While the phone booth is long gone, I ran across this satellite photo. By reading descriptions of the location at the same site, I managed to find the location on Google Maps. Maybe I’ll visit someday.
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This year, Alex Halderman, Ed Felten, and I put our heads together to come up with a single list of predictions. They are posted at Freedom to Tinker.
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I recently got around to a project that had been on my “to do” list for many months when I transferred a personal video from analog tape to DVD. As part of the transfer, I also learned how to author a DVD. In this case, authoring meant creating an eight-screen menu system where […]

Maury Wright has a couple of interesting columns in recent issues of EDN magazine:

Triple-play trickery: Beware the buzzword bandwagon
Triple-play update: Telcos falter; cable companies soar

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A hybrid hard drive (HHD) is a device that combines a standard drive with a significant amount of non-volatile Flash memory. In 2005, a Samsung press release annouced they would team with Microsoft to develop such a device. The result appears to be the Samsung FlashON drive (with 2Gbytes of Flash) specifically for […]

Last week I posted a short overview of Ron Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system paper. In his weblog, Ed Felten has begun a discussion about issues related to write-in candidates.
At first, I didn’t think the issue of write-in candidates was much of a problem. An approach for write-ins would be to slightly mechanize the process. […]

Ron Rivest has posted a fascinating paper called The ThreeBallot Voting System. This paper describes a paper-based, low-tech, three-part voting system. Each voter actually marks three identical ballots. To vote FOR a candidate in a race, they mark exactly 2 of the 3 ballots. To vote AGAINST a candidate in a […]