So for some reason I feel compelled to work on Windows tho I don’t use it at all myself. The sad fact is the majority of computer users out there are on Windows. And someone has to make the Pd builds on Windows, so here I find myself again. In order to reduce the pain as much as possible, I use Cygwin, MinGW, and MSYS to make it as UNIX-like as possible. There is just one little thing missing for me, and that is the ability to ssh into a Windows box and get the MSYS/MinGW shell.

I did just find that I can get a broken-ish MinGW MSYS shell by sshing into Cygwin, then running /cygdrive/c/msys/1.0/bin/sh --login -i. But it inherits the environment variables from Cygwin, and so it barely works. I did find this Python script that is supposed to fix that problem, but no luck for me.

Has anyone out there done this successfully?

Ok, this is more of a rant/question than my more usual editorial-style essay. I just read The Big Gamble on Electronic Voting in the New York Times, which is really just a reiteration of what a bunch of people have been saying about electronic voting machines. Its appalling to me that our government is so corrupt that even in the face of repeating and deeply embarrasing discoveries about just how pathetic these electronic voting machines really are, there is not a whole lot of pressure to reform them.

For people who work in software and security, its well established fact that obscurity does not equal security, and that opening up the source makes software and even hardware more secure. Everyone knows that opening up government to scrutiny makes government less corrupt. Yet Diebold and others are still getting away with threatening people who show just how bad their machines really are.

More more information on this topic, Freedom to Tinker looks like a very good place to go.

This all leads me to the next step. The processing power and hardware needs for building a voting machine are not expensive or hard to use. Basically all of the needed free software for making one of these machines exists, there are well established methods of building hardened boxes that many amateurs do at home.

So my question is, why aren’t there more people working on this themselves? Just because we have a government doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for them to do things, let’s do this ourselves!

And in the end, I’ll bet such grassroots machines will be far more secure and far cheaper.

So I just got back from teaching a “minishop” at Ars Electronica and I got to vent on an issue that is coming to dominate my thoughts on electronic art. We already consume so much, so much of everything from food to toys to whatever. We are also consuming more and more electronics. This raises the bar big time, lots of really nasty things are used in the production of electronics of any kind, and lots of really nasty things are included in the electronics that we buy. Yet many self-proclaimed environmentalists seem to have no qualms about upgrading their mobile phones every year, or buying a new iPod, or a new laptop. Then you have the flood of dirt cheap electronic gadgets coming out of China and other countries.

In the developed nations, most of us are well insulated from the effects of all this pollution, so its easy to forget about all this. Now in the art world, people are also using more and more electronics. Yet even tho there is an ancient tradition in the human pursuit of creativity for reusing things that are around us to create art, it seems that the world of electronic art has completely forgotten about this. We throw away mobile phones, computers, iPods, etc all of the time, even tho they could easily be repurposed.

First and foremost, I have to say I am no angel, and I really don’t want to look like I am trying to claim the moral high ground. Instead its far more important to get the ideas out there and for everyone to realize what we are doing, and the effects of our actions. But since I am also deeply immersed in the realm of electronic arts, I thought I would throw out some ideas. First off, free software like GNU/Linux, Pure Data, Audacity, etc. are written by scrappy, broke people, so such software generally runs quite well on old hardware. Then throw in all those amazing Linux geeks who hack into everything from Linksys routers to iPods to xboxs. You can run GNU/Linux on any of these things, and this opens up a lot of new possibilities that the original creators never intended.

Lastly, I think that the best works of art are born of limitations. When someone has absolute freedom, they generally make crappy art. Limiting yourself to recycled hardware can often trigger unique ideas that otherwise would lay undiscovered given the latest, greatest computer to run your software on.