techno.blog("Dion")

I am proud to be in Wisconsin:

Among the 15 bills governor Jim Doyle signed into law on Wednesday will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source.

Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used.

Any voting machines to be used in the state already had to pass State Elections Board tests. Electronic voting machines, in particular, already were required to maintain their results tallies even if the power goes out, and to produce paper ballots that could be used in case of a recount. The new law also requires the paper ballots to be presented to voters for verification before being stored.

Please listen Sun. Please do something about this, rather than adding one opcode as Ted put it ;)

Mr IronPython (and former AspectJ lead, and Jython, …) Jim Hugunin posted:

We

On the last 10 projects that I have worked on URLs have really mattered.

We recently updated ajaxian.com from Movable Type to Wordpress, and felt that pain once more.

I tend to get a little anal about URLs in my applications these days because I have gone through too many upgrade cycles, and your URLs are like your public interfaces. You do NOT want to change them.

Who knows who is using those interfaces? ;) Hopefully there are lots of bookmarks, and links in from other sites, and of course Google and the like.

So, I try to abstract away my implementation from my interface, and often start off with Apache aliases even on v1.0 (unless I am using a framework that really lets me choose nice URLs such as Rails).

I never use extensions (such as .jsp, .php, or what have you) unless I use .html. I think about the URLs that make the most sense, and create aliases for important ones (e.g. /jobs instead of /by/category/jobs).

If you do this correctly, then you can swap out the implementation with the minimal amount of tweakage required. Do it when you aren’t popular.

Ben and I put together the original template for ajaxian.com in a few hours at 3am.

As always, we wanted to update it, but never had time.

Well, finally, we put in the time and have relaunched the site on Wordpress, with a brand spanking new look and feel that we don’t have to be embarassed about :)

This is just the beginning, as we are now on a platform that allows us to add a lot of features as well as great content!