Not Quite a Blog

"I consider MS Word to be a form of denial-of-service attack" --Aaron Burstein

Jason points out ("utube.com suit against YouTube.com for too much traffic") that utube is apparently suing youtube because millions of IM'ing idiots spell "you" with only one letter. This has rendered their website useless. Based on the complaint, my first piece of advice would be to tell them to fire their lawyers. Second piece of advice: get universaltubes.com.

The emails that utube got from idiots are hillarious (at paras 34-36 of the complaint). Things like "where r da videos?" and "WHERE THE FUCK ARE ALL THE VIDEOS??? 1.5 BILLION FOR THIS PIECE OF SHIT WEBSITE? GOOGLE GOT TAKEN!". Yikes.

Cross-posted on the ACCURATE blog: "ACCURATE Submits Comments on VSTCP Manual"

Today ACCURATE submitted a public comment to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on the draft Voting System Testing & Certification Program (VSTCP) Manual. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Verified Voting Foundation endorsed the comment.

The VSTCP Manual is an important document. When finalized, it will essentially be the rulebook that the EAC, vendors, and test labs will follow throughout the testing and certification process. The Manual also outlines the EAC's approach to publishing testing- and certification-related information, as well as how and when the EAC will solicit information from the public. The Manual also acknowledges some of the critical purposes of the federal process: to support state and local election officials and to increase voter confidence.

Although, as ACCURATE's comments acknowledge, the Manual takes some important steps toward serving these purposes -- for example, the EAC will publish test reports (albeit after redacting trade secret and confidential information) -- it doesn't go far enough. In many places, it is unclear about whether the EAC will publish certain information at all. In others, the Manual seems to say that the EAC will give information only to certain individuals or groups, or that it will accept information about testing and certification issues from a narrowly defined group.

In other areas of the testing and certification process, including specifying testing methods and increasing test lab accountability, the Manual doesn't do all that it could to increase voter confidence and support state and local election officials.

These issues are all covered in detail in ACCURATE's public comment.

I love carving pumpkins... here's my take on a Cthulu design.

Here's a Macro that replaces carriage return characters in a selection with nothing. This is useful if you get a chunk of text where someone has ended each line of a paragraph with a carriage return instead of allowing the software to wrap the lines. You can use this macro in MS Word (or anything that reads MS Word macros).

So, if you have a para like this:

one two three
four five six
seven eight nine

and you want it to look like this:

one two three four five six seven eight nine

Instead of manually going through the para and removing the return characters by hand, you can select the paragraph (but not the final return character!) and run the unfill macro below on it.

To put this macro in your copy of Word:

1. go to Tools -> Macro -> Macros... and hit Edit.
2. You should see either a blank editor (if you have no macros) or the code behind your other macros.
3. Put the text below at the end.
4. Go to File and save it and then quit and return to word.
5. To assign that macro to a key combination, go to Tools -> Customize -> Customize Keyboard.
6. In the Categories pane, scroll down to and select Macros.
7. Place your cursor in the box for "press new shortcut key" and enter in a key combination that you'll remember and that is (or might be) unique.
8. Then hit Assign and then OK.

Here's the macro code:

Sub unfill()
'
' unfill Macro
' Macro recorded 9/4/06 by Joseph Hall
'
   Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
   Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
   With Selection.Find
       .Text = "^p"
       .Replacement.Text = " "
       .Forward = True
       .Wrap = wdFindAsk
       .Format = False
       .MatchCase = False
       .MatchWholeWord = False
       .MatchWildcards = False
       .MatchSoundsLike = False
       .MatchAllWordForms = False
   End With
   Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub