I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama’s desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

Second, this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.

This is a great move for a whole bunch of reasons, and is yet another example to point to when you run into that thankfully increasingly rare type of person who claims open source isn’t secure. The “reduce costs and act quickly” bits are important to remember as well.

Once you get on an open platform the possibilities really open up.

Graeme Rocher introduces Groovy and its corresponding web framework, Grails, followed by a code writing demo intended to highlight the advantages of using Grails over Java EE in order to develop web applications.

Haven’t even watched this one yet but after seeing Graeme present at SpringOne2GX this year, I know this will be a fantastic one to watch if you’re interested in Grails.

Wired is reporting that the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation has announced the first release of Linux- and Ruby-based election management software. This software should compete in the same realm as Election Systems & Software, as well as Diebold/Premiere for use by County registrars. Mitch Kapor — founder of Lotus 1-2-3 — and Dean Logan, Registrar for Los Angeles County, and Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State, all took part in a formal announcement ceremony. The OSDV is working with multiple jurisdictions, activists, developers and other organizations to bring together ‘the best and brightest in technology and policy’ to create ‘guidelines and specifications for high assurance digital voting services.’ The announcement was made as part of the OSDV Trust the Vote project, where open source tools are to be used to create a certifiable and sustainable open source voting system.

Awesome news. I got to see a presentation by and talk to the folks from Trust the Vote at the Open Source Bridge conference earlier this year, and it’s an astonishing effort and the one (that I’ve seen anyway) that is actually starting to succeed.

Yes, there is a MASSIVE amount of red tape involved with getting voting machines certified (and justifiably so), but this is a huge, huge step in the right direction.

In one alarming aspect, the device could be disabled while the advertisements run, thereby forcing users to let the advertisement run its course before the system would unlock and allow further use. In an even more invasive scenario, explained in the patent application, the user could be required to do something, such as click to continue, in order to verify that they are actively watching the advertisement and haven’t simply walked away while the ad runs.

People better be paying me to use devices if this kind of crap starts happening. Yet another reason to use GNU Linux.

The first issue we raise with the Magic Mouse is its size and shape. While there’s no way anyone can dispute its simple hotness, we struggled through a difficult learning curve due to its uniformly narrow profile that sits too low for comfort. It might be because we’re so used to the Logitech MX 1100 cradling each of our fingers with a designated resting point, while the Apple Magic Mouse just feels like a chunk of finely carved polycarbonate.

My first thought looking at an image of this was that it would feel crappy, and apparently I was right. Bet they’ll still sell millions of ’em. 😉

This is seriously misguided and embarrassing. MS didn’t get the memo that community isn’t something you do to people.

I love seeing what geeks I know do with their non-geek hours.