Blog

January 13, 2006

NIH BCIG Book Club

The NIH Biomedical Computing Interest Group (BCIG) has organized a book club which is holding its first event on January 26 at 5.30pm at the NIH Clinical Center (Building 10), Medical Board Room (Room 2C116). The first event will be a discussion…

MySQL now on GSA Schedule

[Via Slashdot] Government buyers can now get MySQL on a GSA Schedule. Is this the first time this has happened, though? A quick look at the GSA Advantage site yields at least one or two results for MySQL database license vendors. Besides…
January 12, 2006

“You’ve got a grant!” phishing

A Tennessee woman has been the victim of a phishing scam in which she was told she’d won a government grant. Apparently she had applied for an SBA grant through Grants.gov and then received an e‑mail, evidently from another source, congratulating her…
January 10, 2006

OMB’s selling of e‑government to Congress

Jason Miller at GCN does a great job in reporting on OMB’s report to Congress which attempts to salvage funding for e‑gov projects. The crux of OMB’s problem is that Congress assigns money to each agency for specified purposes but has…

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…