Vlad » Search Results » search

Romanian Uninominal Elections: Internet Failure

Vlad — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:54:49 +0000

I don’t like politics either. I only tolerate the idea because I do believe the society needs some form of administration to keep it from reverting to pure anarchy. But reading on various blogs about the upcoming elections and how casting a thoughtful vote is a citizen’s duty, I decided to dedicate a couple of hours to documenting for this matter.

The upcoming elections are for the Romanian Parliament, and they’re using a new, uninominal system. Time to find out the culprits candidates. The Internet can’t fail on this, right?

Step 1 – What district (college) am I in?

This should be a no-brainer. According to the law the local administration must publish the list of colleges and the areas they cover. So, off to the City Hall’s website. Yuppie, they have a link related to the elections on the main page – click! No game! Just a bunch of pages with a circa 1990s design and linking to various PDFs. Not what I wanted!

Ok, I’ll just search the info. Uuuuu… Lots of results: infovot.ro, becparlamentare2008.ro, alegeri-parlamentare.ro, e-oferta.ro wtf???, various publications. None looking to be an official site. Can’t trust those, right? Right! Back to the city hall. Look they have a Links section. And they’re linking to becparlamentare2008.ro. Is that the best name they could find? A quick traceroute reveals it’s probably an official site (hosted on STS – Special Telecommunication Service, dedicated to agencies and governamental sites).

Ok, let’s dig through becparlamentare2008.ro. 1990’s design strikes back! Hooray! List of colleges – click! Bucharest – click! PDF download – oh, no! It’s a 48 pages scanned document. No OCR. Can’t search. It takes a while to find what I’m looking for but, hey! I know the college I’m in!

Step 2 – Who are the candidates?

Back to the official website. Candidates – click! Meaningless text and three links – click on the first! Bucharest – click! Parties list… I don’t care. I want the candidates list, grouped by college, not by party. It’s uninominal, I’m voting for the PERSON. Now I have to go through a list of 9 parties’ candidates plus another list of independent candidates, and other lists of minorities & all, just to find out the names of people running in my college. This annoys me!

Who built this crap? nadolu co – a small town, pretty much unknown LTD. Website claims they’re webdesigners, identity creators and SEO experts. Website is a free wordpress theme. Indeed, great designing skills. Google reveals they’ve been working for some time with the Electoral Agency. Other people praise their skills, too. Finance Ministry website is down so I can’t check their economical results. I bet they don’t have other clients but they’re still making a nice buck.

How hard is it, in 2008, to hire a decent, local web design studio and have them build a user-friendly, modern website for the Electoral Agency and the upcoming elections?

It must be rocket science!

I’ll just stop here, for what’s worth here’s what I had in plan to do after finding out the candidates names. Instead, I’m blogging. Hooray me! The Internet has failed on this one.

Step 3 – The candidates’ message

Step 4 – Candidates’ backgrounds and proven track record

Step 5 – Digesting the information

Step 6 – Decision

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Google Calculator Mixes Physics And Economics

Vlad — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:41:29 +0000

£35k = (UK£ 35) * Boltzmann constant = 7.13872141 × 10^-22 m² kg s^-2 K^-1 U.S. Dollars

Wtf?

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Face Recognition

Vlad — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:54:00 +0000

Google stepped up yesterday with two launches: a web browser (Chrome) and updated versions of PicasaWeb and Picasa 3 picture management software. I won’t comment much on Chrome, except that it seems very fast and wheel-like scrolling up doesn’t work on my laptop’s touchpad… and I miss the dedicated search box (I really do).

But the new PicasaWeb features something really cool: face recognition. It will analyze all your uploaded pictures and find faces, then group them together and ask for you to assign names/persons. This is not new, Riya’s been doing this for some time already, right? Yeah, but my experience with Riya wasn’t the greatest and I found it almost unusable while PicasaWeb simply… just works.

That’s WOW in my dictionary!(...)
Read the rest of Face Recognition (124 words)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

In The Clouds

Vlad — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:09:21 +0000

From Google Blog:

We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Good thing they’re keeping their mojo in the clouds:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Outlook 2007, Vista, Spam Protection and Lightning Fast Search

Vlad — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:47:26 +0000

Apparently they have nothing in common. Vista is a bloat. Office 2007 is just a funny menu showcase. Outlook’s spam filtering is pathetic and Live! Search sucks and takes forever. And… you get to use them on a daily basis. Your email piles up in the inbox, spam flourishes and you have no clue where in the 8 GB of archived messages is the one you’re looking for.

Plugins to the rescue: SpamBayes and Lookout. Don’t get fooled by their venerable age: these oldies still rock.

DISCLAIMER: These are not officially supported. You might render your Vista inoperable and have to install Windows XP instead. Wait, that’s not nearly half that bad!

(...)
Read the rest of Outlook 2007, Vista, Spam Protection and Lightning Fast Search (521 words)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

iFake, iFone, iTouch Phone – No iPhone

Vlad — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:25:38 +0000

In the spirit of Engadget’s Keepin’ It Real… Fake: the iTouch Phone – so cleverly advertised on GMail:

Now at 50% discount = half price (for the mathematically impaired).

In stock! Limited offer! (I mean seriously, how many idiots could there be? I’m just taking an optimistic guess their number is finite.)

Cristi, weren’t you on the market for a replacement for your iPhone?

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Google App Engine

Vlad — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:31:00 +0000

This is getting really interesting. Big Brother Google opened it’s App Engine to 10,000 developers for preview. This means full access to Google’s storage, search & computing power (limitations do apply) and to the authentication system.

This is gonna take a serious dent in Amazon’s S3 and EC2 market share.

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Why Google Reader?

Vlad — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:29:45 +0000

I’m generally not a Google fanboy. Really! Though, I do think their search is the best thing since sliced bread and Gmail is the greatest free service (just a figure of speech, nothing is free these days). And I love the Reader.

Web feeds (RSS or Atom) are great if you want to track blogs, discussions, news and web sites of all kind. I’ve been using them for some time and I have a strong feeling I’ll stick to them some more. But consuming them is a long story. In time I’ve used numerous systems. Some were desktop apps, others were web services. I’ve had my share of passing OPMLs from one program/service to another.(...)
Read the rest of Why Google Reader? (782 words)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Wordpress 2.5 RC 1

Vlad — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:01:49 +0000

I guess Tuesday is not the best time to test stuff… so I’ll leave it for later. But feel free to try it!

Wordpress 2.5 RC 1

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Smiley Cookies

Vlad — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:21:18 +0000

Sweet!

Bake your own or get them from ThePopcornFactory.com or Gifts.com!

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh