Ryano Stuff

Some American e-Voting experts have launched a group blog at evoting-experts.com. So far it is understandably focused on specific e-Voting issues in the USA: (1, 2)

I was not surprised to learn that some of the highest spending local election candidates in the Dublin City Council area were in the Rathmines ward. Tony Williams of the PDs spent over €18,000, and Brian Gillen (FG) spent more than €16,000. Jim O’Callaghan (FF) also spent almost €13,000. Of these three, only Gillen was elected.

These figures only account for spending in the last four weeks of the election campaign. The corresponding figure for my campaign was approximately €3,500, most of which was spent on election posters.

This week’s Sunday Business Post ran two stories on the spending figures: Big spenders fall flat at local elections, Council candidates spent €800,000.

If you have any interest in planning in Dublin City, get yourself down to Wood Quay to check out the latest version of the draft Dublin City Development Plan 2005-2011. The maps on display in the Atrium of Civic Offices show the zoning changes etc. proposed by the elected members of Dublin City Council. The proposed amendments to the written statement which accompanies the maps can be viewed in this PDF document (1.4 MB).

Observations must be made by 10th November 2004.

The new site www.NoSoftwarePatents.com, which was launched yesterday in 12 languages, may provide a focus for the campaign against software patents in the EU. Florian Müller is managing the campaign, which has the backing of three corporate partners: 1&1, Red Hat, and MySQL AB.

Here in Ireland, The Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) are leading the fight against software patents. Their software patents page lays out the current status.

Jacques Derrida died on Friday, October 8th 2004. The Guardian has a good obituary, which includes a lot of discussion of his theories and how they have been received. I’ve always found his work fascinating, but generally only when it is being explained by another writer; Derrida’s own texts I find impenetrable and rarely worth the effort involved in reading them.

In any case, in honour of the great man I am republishing below some silliness I wrote about Derrida on another web site.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wired News are carrying an article about the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in elections.

I spent most of the last election campaign wishing I had some way of linking my database of voters to street maps. This stuff is not rocket science, but the biggest impediment seems to be the limited availability of the geographic data itself, i.e. maps. In Ireland there seem to be two main suppliers of map data: the Ordnance Survey and a company called Mapflow. Both charge rates which would put this outside the budget of most campaigning organisations.

Bertie Ahern has announced his new cabinet, and there are a fair few changes. The two that interest me most are the new appointments in the departments of Transport and Environment.

The new Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government is Dick Roche, Wicklow TD and formerly Minister for State with responsibility for European Affairs. I’m obviously keen to find out what his approach to environmental policy, local government policy, and the electronic voting issue will be, but at this stage we don’t have very much to go on, apart from the following:

• He has made several fairly vehement attacks on An Taisce. Apparently he has held a grudge against the organisation since they decided not to join him in opposing a development in his constituency. Will he move to remove their status as a Prescribed Organisation under the planning acts?
• When he appeared on RTE’s Questions and Answers during the height of the e-Voting debate, he appeared to be unaware of the fact that the system the Government were proposing to introduce did not allow for proportional transfers at all stages of the count.

Read the rest of this entry »

We didn’t win the Big Quiz, but we did put in a respectable effort to come joint 6th out of over 280 teams. The final scores (look for team name “The Hammer”) put us as joint 4th, but if you follow that methodology the last-placed team is joint 44th, so I’ll settle for 6th. In any case we were only 4 points off the winning score.

The Quiz itself was also a success, in that it succeeded in setting a new world record for the largest number of participants in a table quiz: 1141.

I’m messing with the stylesheet of the site at the moment, so please ignore any oddness.

Eamon Ryan has decided not to continue with his attempt to get a presidential nomination, so we will not have an election after all. There is also a news story on RTÉ. I can understand the reasons put forward, but I was really looking forward to a campaign.

There is still a slim chance of an election going ahead, if Dana or Vincent Salafia can get themselves nominated, but in all likelihood Mary McAleese will be nodded through for another seven years.

Eamon Ryan TD has announced that he is seeking a nomination to run for President. You can hear him being interviewed about this on RTÉ Radio One’s News at One. I think Eamon is an excellent candidate and look forward to the campaign!

I have made a submission as part of the public consultation on the Rathgar Road to Grand Canal section of the Tallaght Quality Bus Corridor (QBC) scheme. My main comments relate to the proposed design whereby cycle lanes would be marked within general traffic lanes - see my earlier post ‘Half-and-half cycle lane’ for details.

The text of my submission follows: Read the rest of this entry »

An official World Record attempt for the biggest table quiz ever - sounds good to me! It’s happening on 16th September 2004 in the RDS.

Yesterday I handed our appeal against the Scully’s Field decision into An Bord Pleanála. The appeal itself is no masterpiece, but I’m making it available here for what it’s worth.

Text of appeal to An Bord Pleanála re Scully’s Field (PDF format - 96k)

This article from Wired News indicates that the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) are “in the process of drafting new standards for electronic voting systems.” Worryingly, the article suggests that the IEEE committee working on this has been dominated by the voting machine companies:

The committee has, in the past, been dominated by people who oppose adding a paper trail to e-voting machines and by people who oppose examining commercial off-the-shelf software used in voting machines

More encouragingly, however, David Dill of verifiedvoting.org is also a member of the committee.