November 01, 2004
Again...
All things look like we will have to sustain the same 2000 agony of watching the USA fall into a bad case of post-election legal challenging nightmare. It is somehow fitting that the country with the most lawyers per capita finally falls totally victim to them, even in its most basic democratic function.
I fully expect us to see a prolonged multifront legal battle, that in the end will reenforce the strategic importance of the choice of supreme court judges. As John Perry Barlow said: either candidate needs to win with a sufficiently high margin to offset the Diebold voting machine fraud and other forms of manipulation, as well as the residual errors of the voting system. This is unlikely to happen, so prepare for a several weeks of massive uncertainty. And in the end, Bush can probably count on his conservative supreme court chums to reinstall him again to power "in the name of the law". What this will do to the US political system, I dont know. The wife of Mr. Edwards answered to the question of a reporter if there might be riots after the election "Not if we win...".
XP biometrics madness
I normally refrain from ranting about operating systems. I have made my choice years ago and have never had long periods of regret (you might have correctly guessed at this point that I am belonging to the Cult of Mac). Now from time to time I encounter problems that initially present themself as "can probably easiest be solved by booting up this Windows XP machine". This evening I wanted to play around with a fingerprint sensor that I got for cheap.
First, the URL that was supplied with the sensor instead of an CD with software (that I would have expected) led to a dead server. A bit of googling around brought up a not very encouraging message regarding CMCMedia . Anyway, a bit more searching led me to the server of Neurotechnologija which has an evaluation version of their VeriFinger software for download, that claims to support the ST Microelectronics Touchchip sensor, which is at the heart of the 15-Euro piece of biometrics technology I try to get running.
Dutifully I downloaded the software, also located and downloaded the freshest drivers from ST for the fingerprint-scanner. All this I did of course on my Mac. But now the fun was about to begin. To transfer the files to the PC, I copied them to my newly purchased and installed Linksys NSLU2 mini-fileserver (a small embedded Linux based device that exports USB-harddrives via SMB). The NSLU2 is worth a separate entry, but I will wait with that until I have the right distribution running on the thing. After some lengthy experimenting I discovered that "Microsoft Network" stuff had been disabled on the LAN configuration of the XP box, denying me access to the NSLU without any meaningful error message (a Mac in similar situation complains that Apple Talk is disabled, which might be the reason why your print job / file transfer does not work, saving you an hour of guessing what went wrong).
Now the ordeal began in earnest. Recognition of the device failed, driver installation aborted, "Install Shield" getting confused by some mysterious remaining body parts of earlier installations, the software (after I managed to install it by manually removing said body parts) not recognizing the scanner, crashing with loud belching noises. At this point, having wasted four hours, I decided to never repeat the same mistake again. Sony has a Mac-compatible fingerprint sensor that should be somewhere on sale for cheap, and this is what I will use for my experiments. Back to the dust-bin with the PC, where it belongs...