Approval voting is an alternate voting system that has many benefits as compared to Instant Run-Off Voting. For years I've been running the on-line officer elections for the local campus chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery. Last year I talked them into switching to approval voting (even though it probably violates their charter), and it worked really well. Their elections have kicked off again, and once again I'm hosting them and using my voting script.

I wrote an article that got posted on the O'Reilly Network. It sounds a little more huckster-ish than I'd like, but the tech does get explained pretty well. There's a link to the new beta 2 release of SwarmStream Public Edition at the bottom of the article.

When writing I frequently find myself searching backward, either visually or using a reverse-find, to see if I've previously used the word that I've just used. Some words, say furthermore for example, just can't show up more than once per paragraph or two without looking overused.

I was thinking that if my editor/word-processor had a feature wherein all instances of the word I just typed were briefly highlighted it would allow me to notice awkward repeats without having to actively watch for them. Nothing terribly intrusive, mind you, but just a quick flicker of highlight while I type.

When you click on a link in your browser to go to a new web page your browser sends along a Referrer: header, which tells the owner of the site that's been linked to the URL of the site where the link was found. It's a nice little feature that helps website creators know who is linking to them. Referrer headers are easily faked or disabled, but in general most people don't bother, because there's generally no harm in telling a website owner who told you about their site.

My latest project for Onion Networks has just been released: it's a first beta release of SwarmStream Public Edition, a completely free Java protocol handler plug-in that transparently augments any HTTP data transfer with caching, automatic fail-over, automatic resume, and wide-area file transfer acceleration.

SwarmStream Public Edition is a scaled-down version of our commercially-licensable SwarmStream SDK. Both systems are designed to provide networked applications with high levels of reliability and performance by combining commodity servers and cheap bandwidth with intelligent networking software.

Earlier I talked about generating random Subject lines for emails. I settled on something that looked like Subject: Your email (1024) . Those were fine, but got dull quickly. By switching the procmail rules to look like:

:0 fhw
* ^Subject:[\ ]*$
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

:0 fhw
* !^Subject:
|formail -i "Subject: RANDOM: $(fortune -n 65 -s | perl -pe 's/\s+/ /g')"

I'm now able to get random subject lines with a little more meat to them. They come out looking like: RANDOM: The coast was clear.  -- Lope de Vega

Jetty is a great Java servlet container and web server. It's fully embeddable and at OnionNetworks we've used it in many of our products. It, however, has the same 2GiB file size limit that a lot of software does. This limit comes from using a 32 bit wide value to store file size yeilding a 4GiB (unsigned) or 2GiB (signed) maximum, and represents a real design gaff on the part of the developers.

Lately I've been corresponding a great deal with someone who doesn't elect to use the Subject: line in emails. When responding to this emails my mail application, mutt, uses the Subject line: re: your mail. Mutt also groups conversations into threads using (among other things) the Subject line. So every reply to every person who has sent a message with a blank subject line gets grouped into a single thread when they, in fact, have nothing to do with one another.

I've switched from a mailing list driven system to a wiki based one for this UnBlog. It's less weird than the mailing list setup was, but it's not exactly moveable type either. It offers RSS feeds and subscriptions, though through entirely different mechanisms than the list did. I think I've moved everything over well enough that there are no dead links into the old space. I ended up using my WikiChump thing modified to handle attachments and create comment pages to populate the data.

I code for a hobby and a profession, but usually it's only the hobby stuff I can release here. However I'm happy to say and proud to announce that Onion Networks, my employer, has okay-ed the release of AntFlow, a tool I largely wrote.

AntFlow adds hot folder triggers and workflow functionality to the ever popular Ant build tool. It's a great fit and a right good bit of code, so check it out at http://antflow.onionnetworks.com/ .