January 10, 2006

TCG’s David G. Cassidy Appointed to Thompson Federal Grants Management Handbook Advisory Board

This press release was just issued, about yours truly.  I just finished my first column for the newsletter, which will appear in February. Washington, DC, January 10, 2006: TCG announced today that David G. Cassidy, Vice President of the company, has…
December 22, 2005

Race condition at my bank

I have a bank account that’s set up so when I withdraw funds from that account by wire or check or whatever, if there’s less in the account than the amount I’m spending, the money is automatically pulled from my line of…
December 15, 2005

Copying Text from Encrypted PDF Files

PDF encryption is sort of silly.  If you really wanted to grab the text, you can screen capture each page and then OCR it.  So clearly the true intention of the encryption is to deter the 99% of the users…
December 14, 2005

The Promise of Ajax and DOM: Simple Event-Driven Widget-Based Web Applications

As a Web developer, I have a confession to make: I prefer writting desktop applications.  In an enterprise-level Web application, just to get a usable display tier you need to perform gymnastics in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSP, Java, and Struts (a similar set of gymnastics…
December 5, 2005

NCI warns users about using IE

According to an email apparently sent to users at the National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services) on Friday, an IE bug could allow evil web…
December 3, 2005

Microsoft and OpenDocument

I’ve been following the firestorm over Massachussetts’ possible adoption of the OASIS OpenDocument XML format as their standard format for office documents with interest. The ability of governments (and indeed, all computer users) to have guaranteed access to their data…
December 1, 2005

foXpose — Tile your tabs!

I just installed Viamatic foXpose and my web browsing will never be the same again. With a single click, all of my open Firefox tabs are represented in thumbnails one one screen, enabling quick review and identification of interesting content.…

Kim Nelson, EPA CIO, going to Microsoft

Nelson to step down as EPA CIO. Kim’s been a vocal supporter of e‑government and a strong manager. This is a great move for her…and a great catch for Microsoft.…

Information sharing awards — Excellence.Gov 2006

Every year the eGov Shared Interest Group of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), which is part of the American Council for Technology (ACT), organizes the Excellence.Gov Awards. Nominate your program now! The deadline has just been pushed back to December…

Backing up in real-time

I just purchased some new software: NTI’s Shadow 2. It’s pretty neat — makes an instant copy (to any mounted drive or directory) of any file that changes on your windows box. It even keeps past revisions of files, so…