The company I work for, Green Hills Software, made the front page of Slashdot today.

It’s interesting reading some of the comments there, and while I’m somewhat tempted to respond to some of them, I know I shouldn’t (and I won’t). Too bad I don’t have mod points right now.

At some point in the near future, I’ll post about my Thanksgiving trip. Nothing terribly interesting, though.

Pittsburgh, PA

I noticed my site being very slow to load lately. After messing around with it a bit, I came to the conclusion that it was the actual page generation that was being slow, and not the web server or connection. Digging a bit more, I found that most of the slowdown was because of the script I was using to track how many hits my page was getting. It was storing a whole lot more data than necessary, and filling up a MySQL table with far too many records (it was at over 73,000). That’s been fixed. I also cleaned up the database I’m using for the newsfeeds on my sidebars so it deletes old data, and only keeps what it needs to. The boingboing and slashdot tables were at around 2000 lines each. That produced some speedup as well.

The page generation time has gone from 2.5-4 seconds to generally under 0.3 seconds. At some point, I’m going to see if I can cut down on the number of database queries I do. That should help bring that number down even lower.

[Note: If you're interested, you can view the source of the page, and see how long it took to get to various points of generation in comments in the HTML.]

Florida law says a tie may be settled by “lots.” Assistant County Attorney Ken Tinkler told the candidates that could include drawing straws, choosing cards or a coin flip. Coin tosses have been popular in settling other ties around the state.

But Whitaker and Castro had talked.

“I think we’d prefer cards,” said Whitaker, an attorney.

“Ace high?” asked Castro, a Dillards sales associate.

Whitaker agreed.

Update:
More cards: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Nov-04-Thu-2004/news/25170219.html
Cointoss: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/12/national2033EST0732.DTL

This time in Indiana: Glitch causes Franklin Co. recount

Kerry’s votes went to Badnarik. It’s only a few hundred votes, and clearly won’t change the outcome for Indiana, but it’s yet another error in favor of Bush by the electronic voting machines.

Can anyone point me to any errors they made that took votes away from Bush or gave votes to Kerry? I haven’t seen any.

Update: It did change the outcome of one local election. This is proof enough that the system needs to be fixed. It should also be noted that the machine in question was sold to the state by Fidlar Election Co., but was manufactured by (guess who?!) Diebold.

It seems the third party candidates want recounts more than the Democrats. At least, they can request them without looking crazier than they already do, anyway.

Ralph Nader has requested recounts in New Hampshire and Ohio, and wants to do so in Florida. Cobb and Badnarik are working to make sure a recount happens in Ohio.

This is all good news. I don’t expect this will change the outcome of the election at all, but I have no doubt it will reveal massive errors or fraud with the new electronic voting machines. We need auditable machines with paper trails, or we just can’t trust the voting results in the future.

Republicans seem to want to move the other way. There were huge problems with Florida with hanging chads and dimpled chads in recounting the ballots in 2000, so what did they do? They eliminated that problem by using machines that you just can’t do that sort of recount with. Brilliant. Now, they want to do away with http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html. (Sorry, that link is to a highly biased website; I can’t get at the article it links to, and can’t find this anywhere else. Thanks, mainstream media!)

After early exit polls in Tuesday’s election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.

In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. “I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession — look at the precincts and the turnout, see who’s turning out to vote,” Mr. Gillespie said. “Don’t build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be.”

Exit polls aren’t perfect, but they’re one of the few remaining tools we have to ensure a fair voting process. If they’re broken, we need to fix them, not get rid of them. Either way, if we keep eliminating the possibility of a recount, the exit polls become more important than ever.

I’ve been using spamassassin for quite a while now. It’s a great spam filter, and supports Bayesian training on messages. Actually doing the training is a little annoying, though, as I have to log in to the server, separate out all the messages into a separate file, and then run the command line program sa-learn on that file. That finally got to be too annoying for me. I looked around quickly for some web-based training app, but couldn’t find anything. They may exist, and I may just not have looked hard enough.

Anyway, not having found one quickly, I wrote my own. It’s really simple to install and use. From the README:

You can download it here.

Note: This will only work if the user the web server runs as has read access to your mail file. To delete, it needs write access as well. This only works on mbox files. There are no plans to expand it to anything else.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has resigned!

Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.”

Woohoo! We’re safe from terror! Ashcroft’s job is done. He is no longer needed. Do we still need Bush?