I've had a rough time lately and the old blog has been neglected but I think I'm back to the point that I can focus on it. I'd rather not go into personal specifics and all that stuff here on the Interwebs, but I can say I have a good story if you catch me at FlashForward or some other conference and ask me about it..

Oh, and I am planning on being at FlashForward.
It's been a while since I had a breather and had time to go to a conference so I'm looking forward to it.

I've been working in Flex some.. wow. I tinkered with it way, way back but stuck with AS2 for work so didn't want to dive in and muddy the waters in my noggin. So it's fun to get back to it and start working with it. I keep wishing for a "groundhog day" so I can spend a year or two doing nothing but learning Flex and other things that I need to catch up on. Ah well.

I had a hard drive on my mac pro get wiped out. Totally. It was my "data" drive. The sad thing is, it was because I was setting up backup software (Chronosync) and configured it in such a way that it decided to totally erase the drive before my first little test of backing up my iTunes files on it with no warnings. Nice. I sent an e-mail to their support folks and after clarification of exactly how I set it up and what it did I got this response:

Ouch. We should get rid of Delete immediately or make it harder to use.
The Targets don't copy over otherwise you would end up with something like a
Documents folder inside a Documents folder. Which does not make sense. But I
can see where initially you would miss that.

Our next version does have stronger warnings about using the Archive.
Sorry for the mess.

Ahh.. ok. Good thing I had a somewhat recent backup and was able to recover the few other files I missed. In their defense it was kind of a crazy setup I tried, but if it'd given me a big warning (dude! you're about to wipe out data!) I would have changed course. As it was I lost some hours restoring my files and getting things set back up. The other irony is I'm normally super paranoid about data backup and back things up to 3 or 4 places and had my "data" drive set up as a mirrored raid array in case of hardware failure between backups... well.. before this little incident I'd been having some apps crash and other weirdness.. once I pulled that raid array out all the weirdness went away. I checked the drives and one was bad. I hadn't gotten a warning about it, but it was failing.

I ended up setting Chronosync up and have it doing all kinds of synchronizing and backing up fun. It's actually a nice app and easy to use. Eventually I'll upgrade to Leopard and use that nifty Time Machine thing, but in the meantime Chronosync will do fine as long as I'm careful.

I've been sitting on the sidelines of the democratic process in the US for oh.. about 20 years. I've voted, but I've never donated to a campaign, never put a bumper sticker on, never really gotten involved in it. I've always voted for the lesser of two evils and had just written the whole 2008 election off. I figured the Democrats would win this election (the online gambling sites and polls agree). However, this election I see something very, very different happening and it's actually scaring the crap out of me.

What I see happening is a clear, blatant, and successful attempt by the media and the GOP to sway Republican voters away from a a Republican candidate. There were weeks where I never heard his name on CNN, but heard the other candidates hundreds if not thousands of times. In hour and a half debates he might get 6 minutes of time. When cornered on the issue they point to low numbers in the polls. You don't get high numbers in the polls unless people see you on TV a lot first. I'm not alone in seeing this bias in action, as others are noticing it.

I'm not quite sure what we as citizens can do about it at this point and that's what frightens me. You see Dr. Ron Paul has the most support by far of the Republican candidates (and by support I mean people who are willing to do more than just walk in and vote like they've been told to). His grassroots volunteer support is the top at fundraising, the top at getting signs out, the top of going around knocking on doors and talking to people, the top of gathering and waving signs on street corners, the top of commenting on anything that moves on the web, the top of actually going and voting in online polls, and on and on.. and yet they can't come close to countering the effect of the "old" media. If his 200,000+ rabid supporters can't overcome the bias of the media, then heaven help us.

Enough about my fears of the menace of the media - here's some info on Ron Paul since you probably haven't heard too much about him other than the false memes presented by the media.

He:
- received more donations from active and retired military personnel than ANY candidate (Dem or Rep) and more donations than ALL other Republican candidates combined during the 4th quarter of 2007. Think about that next time you hear one of the candidates say they have the "support of the troops" or that the troops "want us to stay to finish the job with honor".
- has come in second (above McCain, Romney, and Huckabee) in two states (LA and NV) and may have won the most state delegates in Maine (the final vote isn't in yet).
- raised more money from individuals than any other Republican candidate in the 4th quarter.
- is a ten-term Texas congressman
- is a practicing OB/GYN doctor and has delivered over 4,000 babies (yes, he's pro-life but doesn't want the federal government overseeing that)
- voted against the Iraq War but is not opposed to war for defensive purposes (rather than preemptive war).
- is against NAFTA and steps we are taking towards a "North American Union"
- voted against the Patriot Act
- voted against the Real ID Act
- voted against internet regulation
- voted against those acts last year that stripped Habeas Corpus and Posse Commitatis
- voted against this week's Democrat sponsored Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (a precursor to internet filtering and University monitoring by the Department of Homeland Security).
- has written several books (he currently has one on the Amazon best seller list) on economics and unlike other candidates has put his economic plan out for us to see. See how McCain reacts when Paul asked a simple question about the "Working Group on Financial Markets" during one of the debates (McCain doesn't know the answer and just name drops).

He beat McCain in Maine, and is rumored to be set up to do well in at least 4 states tomorrow.

Now.. I don't know about you, but he seems like a viable candidate. Especially when the majority of the people in the US (and the world for that matter) want the US out of Iraq. So why would the GOP sit back and allow the media to force a pro-war candidate to be their nominee? Maybe they don't want to win this next election?... because they'll have to deal with this:


The value of your dollar:




The US national debt:



It's a mystery to me.

This is interesting too.. NC is currently considering not having him on the ballot (um.. he finished second in two states recently..maybe three of them when all the dust settles) and take a look at this:

Here's part of how NC determines who should be on the ballot:

"The list must be compromised of candidates whose candidacy is generally advocated and recognized in the news media throughout the United States or in North Carolina, .."

Yep, that's right. The media picks who goes on the ballot. Ugh.

Am I hoping people will vote for him based on this little blog post? Nope. I think the media has done it's job well of spreading the "long shot" and "McCain vs Romney" memes and there are very, very few people who will ignore what the talking heads on TV tell them. I'm hoping that as people come to this post they might read it, and then the next time they're watching CNN or reading a paper maybe a light bulb will come on when they realize that the media is choosing our candidates for us and democracy has lost.

(updated to add.. just to clarify.. I was aware of the media manipulating voters before, but what has shocked me this go-round is that it's much more evident. We now have YouTube to instantly share every instance of abuse, we have volunteers who put together sites like this one to track the media.. it's so obvious now, and yet it's still so widespread and it's not merely bias - it's censorship and blatant misinformation. The media is incredibly brazen with their attempts to sway the election.. as if they are above the people, above the government, and above the law. It's scary.).

The table below is from Journalism.orgs analysis of January 21 - 27, 2008 .. now you can't possibly tell me that the media gave equal time to the candidates. Bias is somewhat ok, but this is far, far beyond that. Bill freaking Clinton got almost three times as much coverage as Huckabee and more than ALL of the Republican candidates for crying out loud and Bill isn't even running for office.. well.. ahem.

It's time for the primaries in the US and I've been seeing an incredible amount of enthusiasm coming from the Ron Paul supporters on Digg and elsewhere. Probably the root of the energy seems to be coming from a few things they believe:
1 - Ron Paul is being ignored by the "main stream media".
2 - The polls aren't accurately reflecting their numbers.
3 - Ron Paul

If you've been on Digg or YouTube at all in the last few weeks you've probably seen something related to Paul and then a freakin' slew of comments supporting him and a slew of comments from supporters of other candidates (or people just fed up with the enthusiasm) attacking the Paul supporters for being so over the top. The arguments usually go something like this:
"You morons! Paul doesn't stand a chance. He's only getting 4-5% in the polls"
... ... ... followed by the three Paul bots massively commenting (I'm kidding here..) things like:
"The polls don't include Paul - when they call us they only list giuliani, Huckabee, and McRomney and OTHER"
"The polls don't include people registered as independents or people who haven't voted in a long time"
"When we pressed the button to vote for Paul it registered it as a vote for Huckabee (or 'please take me off the list')"
"The polls target people who still use land lines.. that's not us"
"The polls are rigged by the media or other candidates"
"We vote in online polls and stomp the other candidates so bad everyone claims we're cheating so the poll isn't counted"

So being curious I decided to go see whether these Paul supporters had an honest claim on that last one.

You see there really is a huge number of traditional polls that say he's down in that "margin of error" territory where candidates who are ignored by the media dwell. Take a look at this graph and realize that each of those dots represents how a candidate did on a poll.. and Paul is in red.


If you go here (where that graph came from..) and scroll down just a bit you'll see a long list of polls where he hasn't done well AT ALL.

So when you look at the online polls, some with more than 100,000 votes, you'll find quite a few where Paul isn't just doing ok, but is actually winning by a decent margin. This means there's a huge disconnect. Either the traditional phone polls really aren't picking up on the Paul movement, the online polls are being gamed, or maybe a little of both.

Two of the online polls use Flash and I expected them to have some decent mechanisms in place to keep people from voting more than once. Nope. Just clear the old browser cookies and vote again. Dang. That kind of makes it easy for people to claim the online polls have been gamed, and rightfully so. But why would someone go through the effort of putting a poll online for something as important as this and leave it wide open to cheating? That's a question for the folks who try to make sense of politics. The question I had was what could they have done rather than relying on just a cookie to keep people from voting more than once.

I looked into this for a bit and thought it over. I really don't think it's possible to make a poll using Flash (or any other technology really) that would be 100% fraud proof. If someone is determined enough they'll find a way to vote more than once.

That said, there is one super simple way to keep the honest and lazy people from voting more than once. With Flash you can use a Local Shared Object in addition to the cookie. An LSO is not cleared when the user clears the cookies in their browser which will stop the casual poll cheater from voting more than once.

For the more hard core poll cheaters who may or may not be trying to use an automated bot you could do something with one or more of these (and hopefully some of your own tricks thrown in):
- Load a SWF containing a key and use that key in your POST request. If the keys are rotated periodically then it makes it much harder for someone to replay a POST request repeatedly since a valid request will be formed by the code in the application SWF which includes some bits from the loaded key SWF.
- Use AMF (AMFPHP for example) for transmitting the data.. if the data is transferred in binary format it'll take more effort to tinker with it. That.. and it's faster than sending your data in plain text.
- Require an e-mail address and send them a link they have to click to verify for their vote to count.
- Send them to a verification page with a captcha before their vote counts.
- Check the client that responds and make sure it's either a browser or someone who took enough time to spoof a browser when they formed their request

I added the BlogRush widget thing onto my blog to see what the fuss is about. It looks like an interesting way to link to other related blogs and offer a different way to surf, etc.. they'll eventually put some ads in with the links, and it looks like people will be able to buy "credits" so their links will show up in the little widget, but it doesn't look like bloggers will be able to make $ off of it unless maybe there's a way to sell credits? hmm.. However, it might provide some increased traffic.

If you run a blog take a look at what they're building up here. They have a nice stats system on the backend that lets you see how much traffic you've generated, and how many times your links have shown up on other sites.

It's also based on a referral system, so if you get others to join then your links will show up more often on other sites.