Well, today was our day to do our civic duty and vote in Colorado's presidential primary election. Too bad the race lost all pretense of competition two days ago...

At least I got to vote in a Colorado election for the first time. Arapahoe County has some advanced technology, with these computerized voting booths where you punch buttons next to the options you're voting for (which light up), then press a big button to record your vote. Cool. Back in Santa Barbara, they're still using marking pens to fill in bubbles on Scantron-like cards. I'll have to wait until November, though, to see how this equipment really gets used in a general election.

Added some bugfix code to icq-transport, and some enhancement code to JECI, today. I really need to think about how we're going to redo the Webb Java applet client for the new protocol. A lot more support is needed on the client side. Not to mention that every single one of the customers we have want different graphics for the UI.

At first, I thought maybe I could try completely specifying the UI in XML, ala Glade. (After all, we've got an XML parser on hand, we might as well use it.) Then I thought, "Wait a minute...this is an applet. Having to download and interpret an XML file for each dialog, as well as download multiple images, will suck BIG time." I'm trying to think how I could do it halfway, though...what I need is some sort of "skins" support similar to that used with WinAmp or XMMS. I'm researching how that might be accomplished in Java.

Meanwhile, Pamela points out that our home page hasn't been updated in eons, so I'm engaged in a crash program to redesign and update it. Thankfully, I have a copy of Apache running on Delenn, so Pamela can test it from Lavender (her box) to make sure it looks OK under Windows. Previous versions of our home page have used Micro$oft software and techniques (ech!); this time, I'm going back to first principles and editing all the HTML in Emacs. And editing the graphics with The GIMP of course :-).