Neat Cartography Article

(I tagged this as politics, but don't let that scare you. It's poltical analysis and it's about as non-partisan as you can get.) This is a neat site where several ways of drawing the 2008 presidential turnout are displayed. It's interesting to look at the maps and it makes something really clear: it's not so much that the coasts are "blue" and the "heartland" are "red". Instead, the cities are blue and the rural areas are red. For example, look at the southwest in particular and you can really pick out what I think are Las Vegas and Phoenix. Or in Texas you can see El Paso and San Antonio pretty clearly. (I found the site via Rands's Twitter.)
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OmniFocus, WebDAV, and OS X

Long time blog readers will know that I'm an enthusiastic user for OmniFocus. My biggest outstanding issue with OmniFocus was that syncing the iPhone would take an excruciatingly long time. Lately it had gotten so bad that every couple of weeks or so the phone would power off while still syncing and eventually I'd have to delete the app and data from the phone and start all over again. I've been syncing from MobileMe's iDisk and lately I've been noticing that iDisk was randomly really slow. I decided today to try switching OmniFocus from iDisk to a WebDAV server. I found a page with good instructions on setting up WebDAV on OS X. If you go do to do this please note two things: I'm able to use a self-signed web certificate just fine, and you should look at comment 19 about using digest authorization. I did both of these, so now OmniFocus (both the computer and phone clients) is using SSL and an encrypted password, so that's pretty nice. And the WebDAV server is inside the LAN, so syncs at hope are pretty much instant. I've only been running this for a few hours so far but it appears to work much faster than using iDisk.
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Must be time to complain about being a California voter again

I'm a permanent vote-by-mail person so I've been working on my ballot. California does way more direct voting (the Propositions) then I like. First off, I don't know that I really trust the populace at large to make decisions. But the main issue is that everything gets funded the same way - it's a bond! We need a bond for hospitals! We need a bond for high-speed trains! Guess what all these descriptions of these Propositions say? "This does X WITHOUT RAISING TAXES" (and they say it in all caps like that). Well no, it doesn't directly raise taxes but it does institutionalize a debt that somebody has to pay someday. Basically the government of California has become a college freshmen who got three new credit cards and maxed them all by Christmas. It has to stop! Look, I'm all in favor of high-speed trains and of course I support children's hospitals. What's funny is that California knows how to to solve the problem. Cities and counties can put bond-based propositions on the ballot, but they have to fund the payment of these bonds with either a sales tax or a property tax. So everything is funded, all the time. Oddly this means I don't ever see "tax-free" huge bonds at the county or city level, only at the state level. Ask me if I want to pay an additional hundred bucks on my property taxes and I'll probably say yes. Ask me if I want to just pile more debt into the future and I have to say no. It's just poor fiscal management. Even if we really, really want that high-speed train. (Besides which, we still haven't figured out how to get BART to San Jose or make CalTrain really attractive and usable but now we're going to build trains to LA?) And let's not even talk about the whole "Wait? Equal rights for gays? Can we make a constiutional amendment to prevent that?" morass. Ironically I don't mind that one as much because it's at least easy to figure out what the not-bigoted stance is and neither side wants to use a huge unfunded bond to create money from thin air. Some of these other ones take some research to handle properly.
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Hmm

Hmm. Sony updated their Playstation Network User Agreement and conveniently highlighted the new stuff in red. Most of the new stuff seems fairly innocuous, but this section caught my eye:
Unless otherwise required by applicable law, there is no requirement or expectation that SCEA will monitor or record any online activity on PSN, including communications. However, SCEA reserves the right to monitor and record any online activity and communication throughout PSN and you give SCEA your express consent to monitor and record your activities. SCEA reserves the right to remove any content and communication from PSN at SCEA's sole discretion without further notice to you. Any data collected in this way, including the content of your communications, the time and location of your activities, your Online ID and IP address and other related information may be used by us to enforce this Agreement or protect the interests of SCEA, its users, or licensors. Such information may be disclosed to the appropriate authorities or agencies. Any other use is subject to the terms of the applicable Privacy Policy.
I suspect that many online services have (or should have) such a block of text, but still it's a bit disconcerting to have Sony call it out like this. They sent me an email directing me to this page where they explicitly say "Oh hey, we just decided that we can spy on you and you agree that's cool." Which makes you wonder why this just happened. One theory is that a lawyer just happened by and shat all over us. The other theory would be that Home and/or Little Big Planet have some sort of spying function built in. I have one possible comparative piece of data. I can't speak to the 360 but back when Microsoft launched voice chat for the first Xbox there was a minor kerfluffle. You see, the Xbox Live libraries explicitly encrypted all data sent over the network. Then suddenly they changed the protocol so that voice traffic was sent separately and unencrypted. The word was they did that at the behest of the US government. They never SAID the voice chat was being logged somewhere, but I think that implied it. Or at least that XBL could be "wire-tapped". Say, if the NSA had an illegal tap of all network traffic secretly installed at a trunk in AT&T's office. Hypothetically speaking of course, because the NSA breaking the law? Crazy talk!
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