Technology Matters

The property owners in Pocatello dealt a death blow to our public school system on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 by defeating the supplemental levy. This levy expires every two years and has been voted up every two years for many, many years until this vote. The levy provides about 10% of the school district’s expenses. Losing that money by itself is very problematic. Coupled with the significant cutbacks in state funding, the defeat of the levy will put the schools into an impossible situation. They will not be able provide the government mandated education. They also won’t be able to provide the services that the community thinks they should be providing.

A goodly part of the blame for the failure lies with the school administration who didn’t take this issue seriously enough to do what was needed to sell the supplemental levy to the taxpayers. A share of the blame resides with one bull-headed (and very stupid) local wannabe politician who campaigned against the levy as way to show how fiscally conservative he is so he can finally prevail in an election. He’s trying to push his own selfish agenda on the broken back of our school system, doing a tremendous disservice to our students. I suspect that the district will float another, smaller levy in hopes of salvaging something. However, the other politician, who I won’t name because I don’t want him to have any more publicity, will be even more emboldened.

Another part of the blame lays at the feet of our new President of Change. Some part of the “stimulus” package is supposed to go to schools. A lot has been made of that in the press including our local, and as usual, out-of-touch newspaper. Even if the money actually stays in the “stimulus” package, there’s no guarantee that any of it will get to our local school district. Further, if any of it does (there are too many sticking places along the way here), it will at best replace about 25% of what the levy generates.

I am very disappointed in the voters in our school district and sickened by the actions of a local wannabe politician. I will do everything I can to make sure he never, ever, gets elected to anything.

I drove to Malad, Preston, Grace, and Soda Springs checking on what entities are there. It was a very interesting trip and I learned a lot of new things. For instance:

Library Districts. There seem to be two ways to fund libraries. One is for a city (in the legal definition) to include library funding in their budget. Most cities in SE Idaho don’t seem to do that, for some reason. The other method is to form a library district. It becomes a taxing entity able to levy property taxes. They are required to have elected officers, publish a budget, and hold budget hearings.

The Grace Library District has one library and was formed in 1940. They have a five-member board, each serving a five-year term. Each May one member is up for re-election as part of the primary election. They have a budget of about $48,000. They were holding a budget hearing this week. I asked if anyone from the public came in specifically for the hearing. “Never,” she replied.

Hopefully www.seidahovotes.com can help educate people about Library Districts, their officers, and how they are spending money.

In order to actually get www.seidahovotes.com up and running, I decided to start posting public notices. I started with those that are published in the Idaho State Journal newspaper and then started to branch out to other entities. I’ve discovered there is an amazing array of legal entities in Idaho. Most of these have budgets that are subject to public hearings. Many also have elected officials and a process for becoming a candidate to an office.

I’ve come up with this list, so far, of these entities:

• Federal Executive Branch. Included here are the President and the Vice President.
• Federal Congressional Branch. Included are Senators and Members of Congress
• State Executive Branch. This includes to governor’s office as well as elected state officials who report to the governor, such as Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Controller, State Treasurer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction.
• State Legislative Branch. This group includes the state senators and representatives for each county.
• State Judicial Branch. This is made up of the State Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, the District Courts located in counties across the state, and the District Magistrate Judges also located in counties across the state.
• Counties, which include the three commissioners, County Clerk, Assessor, Treasurer, Coroner, Sheriff, and Prosecuting Attorney.
• Cities, which include the Mayor and the City Council
• Library Districts, which don’t seem to cross county lines, but some counties may have more than one Library District.
• Soil Conservation Districts. I haven’t seen any budget proposals for Soil Conservation Districts, but the commissioners are elected.
• Rural Fire Departments. Cities have their own fire departments, but the rural, non-city areas have organized fire departments (usually volunteers) with budgets and officer elections.
• Cemetery Districts. Like rural fire departments, cemetery districts are organized in areas outside of cities. They have budgets and may have officers who are elected.

There will probably be other entities as well as I dig deeper. The actual structure of a legal entity web page is beginning to take shape. The major sections right now will look something like this:

• Entity information, including addresses, phone numbers, web sites, and email information as available.
• Elected Officials, including the office, incumbent, address, phone, website, and email.
• Upcoming events, taken from a calendar database. So far I’ve only put public hearing information into this database. Other event types are still to be defined, but probably need to include filing deadlines for candidates for office.
• Upcoming elections, including the name of the election, each office being contested, and information about the office (when the term expires, length of the term, and any other qualifications as known), incumbent information, and lists of candidates along with links to their respective websites. One revenue source for this website will be to make electioneering websites available to candidates.
• Legal and Public information. These will be the blog posts related to this particular entity.
• Related entities. Not sure what all goes here, but it’ll contain links of some sort.

So, today we’ve got the public notices being published for some entities along with a public hearing calendar. More to come, hopefully more quickly now that I’m actually publishing on www.seidahovotes.com.

The programming on Southeastern Idaho Votes is progressing, although quite slowly. We’re in northwestern Montana vacationing with family. While there’s no cell phone coverage here, we do happen to be in a place with high-speed internet. I’m getting about an hour a day of uninterrupted time to work on the programming.

Meanwhile, the Garmin Street Pilot GPS continues to frustrate me. I bought an external antenna to use in the motor home which allows the GPS to get reasonable satellite signals. However, there is no zoom setting that consistently shows the names of streets! In this rural area, the roads are far apart, but the GPS doesn’t display the name of the road … just shows a nameless road going off to the right or to the left. If I zoom out far enough for the GPS to display city/town names, then what few road names it displays disappear completely. I think I’m going to also build a GPS comparison site as an excuse to buy some different GPS units and try them out.

I’m sitting in a mall parking lot waiting in the car … and there’s an unprotected wifi access point somewhere in the vicinity. I’ve no idea if it’s illegal to be using this access point or not, but I am appreciating that someone has set up an open access point!

A while ago I wrote a post about Garmin GPS’s and the horrid customer service experience. I was unhappy with the device (particularly the inaccuracies) as well as the very poor customer service. Apparently, I’m not alone in this experience. Several others have commented about their poor service from Garmin.

The other day I saw a car commercial for a new vehicle that appeared to be targetting young marrieds who wanted a small (but efficient) SUV-like experience. One of the features being touted was a built-in Garmin GPS. That alone would dissuade me from buying the car! There would have to be another option before I would even be interested. I did send the automobile manufacturer an email expressing my disappointment with Garmin and that many others had similar opinions … which possibly could detrimentally affect car sales. Will it make a difference? One could hope….

Meanwhile, the Dash Express GPS has opened up a whole new world of mobile connectivity. Features include real time traffic information, Google maps, over-the-air updates, gprs and wifi connectivity, and that it can twitter my location. While it’s not the perfect solution, it sure seems to be better than what I’ve got now. I gotta get one of these!

The first few tables necessary to be able to describe a political entity, the elected offices associated with the entity, and the incumbents in those offices are nearly complete. The database sketch I made several days ago is holding up reasonably well as I’ve been entering the data for Bannock County. The programming to be able to maintain the tables is almost complete, but working well enough for being able to enter the information on 52 elected offices and the incumbents.

Geek Stuff:

The database will be MySql and the programming is in PHP.

The Entities table contains the information about a specific political entity. Entities owns offices which are described in the Offices table. One of the data fields in the Offices table points to the incumbent information in the People table. The People table has information about a particular person holding an office. Some offices have several regional offices. For instance, each Idaho State Senator and Representative have regional offices in major cities in their district. Consequently, I built a People_off table to contain the information on each of the regional offices.

Normal Stuff:

Another decision was how to represent mailing addresses. I decided that the field for the mailing address would have the complete information including the name of the person (along with any honorific), Title, Street, City, State, and Zip code. That way if someone looking at this information wished, they could simply copy that data from that field and paste it into a letter or onto an envelope.

I’ve got a couple of cleanups to do on the database sketch. When that’s done, I’ll scan it and upload it as a document associated with this blog.

Finally, I’ve change the theme of the blog somewhat. There’s still more work to do (such as get a real logo), but I like the look and feel better than what I had before.

I’ve deployed WordPress and the generic theme to http://www.seidahovotes.com/ along with some explanation in a brief post. I’m negotiating with a graphic artist for a price to build the seidahovotes logo and banner. When that’s done, the new theme will be deployed and the website look will be completed.

A few weeks ago I sketched out what I thought the data table design should be for seidahovotes. The design was at a pretty high level based around what kinds of things I wanted the website to be able to do:

1. Show for a particular jurisdiction or entity (such as a city or a county or a school district) all of the elected offices, the current incumbent, and what the term of office is.
2. Show for a particular jurisdiction upcoming elections and the offices and issues that will be contested along with the candidates for office.
3. For an upcoming election, show information about the candidates and issues and allow public comment on the candidates and issues.
4. Provide a candidate for office who doesn’t have a web presence the ability to have a rich web page on this site.
5. Show the results of past elections.

With those objectives in mind, I’m now on the third iteration of the database … which currently exists on paper and in my Macbook development environment. After version two was sketched out, I decided to assemble all of the data for one political jurisdiction to satisfy objective #1 above.

I settled on the City of Pocatello as the initial entity to gather the data about. That has been a very interesting task and gathering all of the data has proven to be difficult.

The City of Pocatello has seven elected offices: the mayor and six council members. Names and addresses were easily obtained from the city’s website. However, what is their term of office? No online information available. That’ll require either a visit to City Hall or a phone call.

Pocatello is part of Bannock County which has nine elected officials (specified by the Constitution of the State of Idaho, I’ve learned). The County website has names, addresses, and contact information for these people, but again term of office is not available online. Further, the County Commissioners, again by constitutional decree, serve alternating four-year and two-year terms of office. I need to find out who is in which term length and what the ongoing rotation schedule is.

Pocatello is part of the State of Idaho Legislative District 30 with one senator and two representatives. The State of Idaho website provides their name, address, and contact information (scattered in several places). The constitution describes their term of office. That information is now pretty much complete.

Pocatello is part of the State of Idaho Judicial District Six with four District Judges and Five Magistrate Judges. These judges are appointed and stand for re-election after they have served for a period of time.

Pocatello is also part of the State of Idaho with a governor and six other elected officials.

Pocatello is also part of the Federal House of Representative District 2 with a representative in Congress.

The State of Idaho has two Senators, both of whom represent Pocatello and have regional offices in Pocatello.

Finally, there’s the President and Vice President of the United States.

I still have a little bit of data to accumulate, but what I have for the City of Pocatello currently requires fifteen pages to print out (pdf available here)!

My goal is to cover seven counties and all their cities and school districts in southeastern Idaho. I’m beginning to realize this is a big task. Most of the entities do not have much, if any, information online.

Gathering the data for Pocatello has caused me to revise the database and I’m now working on version 3. I’ve decided that I probably need to gather all of the data for another political entity, one that doesn’t have an online presence, as verification that the design will work. Some questions still I need to answer include:

1. What is the definitive list of political jurisdictions? For instance, what cities are in the region? There’s a place in Caribou County called Niter. I think it used to be a city, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t anymore.
2. The elected offices in a county are established by the Idaho constitution. Where is the definition of the elected offices that a city may have?
3. I haven’t even begun looking at school districts. What is the political hierarchy for school districts? Do they all report directly to the State Department of Education?

There’s still a lot of data gathering to be done before I can finalize the database design to satisfy objective #1. Then maybe I can start on objective #2.

This is fun!

After striking out with Qwest, I moved the domain seidahovotes.com back to GoDaddy’s domain name servers (DNS) and pointed DNS at the correct IP address. After correcting my typo in the IP address, the domain started resolving correctly and testing from other parts of the world come up with the right address and display the holding page. Some observations about GoDaddy:

1. The service is comprehensive. All DNS entries are readily managed, including the ability to define Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records to help cut down on spam. Qwest did not have any of this capability.
2. The Interface is clean and intuitive. They use the right DNS language to label the DNS entries and also explain in English what the terms mean.
3. They let me manage Time To Live (TTL)! This is a biggie benefit. The TTL parameter defines how often another computer in the Internet has to check back with GoDaddy’s servers to verify the translation of a domain name to an IP address. Generally speaking, long TTL’s are good and take a significant load off the authoritative servers. However, if something is going to change in the DNS entries for a domain, being able to shorten the TTL to one hour is very important. By doing so, the change will propagate to other domain name servers around the Internet very quickly. Not only does Qwest not allow the customer to manage TTL, even the Qwest engineers do not have the ability to change this number.

However, there are a couple of things that I’d like for GoDaddy to change!

1. The site is slow. I think this is because there is so much advertising (all of it advertising for different GoDaddy services) that has to be dynamically loaded. I have to be patient with the website and give it time to display the page. Further, the pages are generally set up so that the things the customer wants to do are the last to display.
2. There is so much advertising on the pages that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where to click. But, when I get to the actual DNS pages, there’s almost no advertising and the pages are very clean.

I expect to be making a lot more use of this service. It’s definitely better than Qwest for managing domains and a far sight cheaper than Network Solutions for buying domain names.

I have Qwest DSL here at the house. When I had DSL installed, I signed up for the service level that allows me to run web servers and serve up HTTP web pages and along with that I purchased a block of ten IP addresses.

Since then I’ve only been using one of the IP addresses which is associated with rnsmith.com. The Qwest domain name servers (DNS) are authoritative for that domain. Qwest isn’t a domain registrar, so when I bought the domain ’seidahovotes.com’, I bought it from GoDaddy. The next step was to move that domain from GoDaddy to Qwest. There was no online method of doing that (while there is a web form to make the request, submitting the web form always results in an error). So I called Qwest Technical Support.

Eventually I was connected to a person with a very foreign accent quite reminiscent of India who had not a clue about what I was wanting to do. It took at least ten minutes for him to get the spelling of the domain name correct. I was put on hold several times for five to ten minutes while he was checking things out and trying to figure out what to do.

By the way, every time I was put on hold, I got a barrage of Qwest announcements … the same ones over and over and over and over ad nauseum. I got downright tired of all of that. Hold music would have been much better.

Eventually, I learned that the Qwest DSL setup only allows one domain name to be associated with an account. They can do a “reverse DNS” (and their definition of reverse DNS is completely out of context with how DNS works) which will associate the domain with an IP address, but there is no possibility of adding any CNAME (or alias) records, such as www.seidahovotes.com pointing to seidahovotes.com, or any other variation.

So, I need to use a different domain name services provider. Tomorrow I’ll talk with GoDaddy and see if they can be authoritative and point the domain to my Qwest IP addresses.

I’m very puzzled at Qwest’s response. Somehow I need to talk to someone in the United States who speaks American, understands DNS, and knows about their DSL offerings. The answer from Qwest Technical Support doesn’t compute!

I’ve decided to use WordPress as the base software for the Southeast Idaho Votes website. WordPress is a good content management system as well as good blog software. The website currently is on my Macbook where I’m doing the development.

I’ve obtained the domain ’southeastidahovotes.com’ through GoDaddy. I’ve had GoDaddy unlock the domain so I can have Qwest transfer it to their servers so I can manage the Domain Name Services (DNS). Once that is working correctly, I’ll put the basic website out on the web server and then as additional functionality is developed, I’ll release that to the public.

The first planned set of functionality is to be able to select an entity in southeast Idaho, such as a city, or a county, or a school district, and display some information about the entity as well as the current elected officials for that entity.

The information will be stored in database tables and I’ll be writing PHP code in a page template to do the queries and display the information from the database. The WordPress software along with my code will display information and allow the user to submit comments. All of the PHP code for the maintenance of the information will reside outside of WordPress for security purposes