Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
As a followup on my interactions with the Baltimore City's Environmental Control Board, the state's Attorney General's office recently posted an opinion as to some of their practices. It is available here.
As mentioned before, all of my ECB documents are here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.
Posted in Politics | No Comments »
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
There is a small blog community here in Baltimore that covers politics and government: the anonymous quartet of Baltimore Slumlord Watch, Baltimore Crime, BaltiLeaks and Baltimore Government Watch (recently shut down); Adam Meister, Hassan Giordano and Sean Tully at the Examiner; Stephen Janis and his staff at the Investigative Voice; ...
Posted in Politics | 3 Comments »
Friday, March 25th, 2011
You can view it here: ecb-letter.
UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe.
Posted in Personal, Politics | No Comments »
Monday, February 28th, 2011
This is a followup on my earlier post regarding Baltimore's Environmental Control Board otherwise known as "trash court". Below are copies of the most recent contracts for the administrative law judges that hear the cases for the Board. These were obtained via the Maryland Public Information Act (PIA) from the ...
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
UPDATE: All of the ECB related documents I have collected are now available here: http://goo.gl/kdGZe
For those of you not local to Baltimore, the Environmental Control Board informally known as "trash court" is an agency of the city government that does administrative hearings on trash, health, safety and related violations. My ...
Posted in Personal, Politics | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
Copy of my op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun:
A better plan for transparency
Instead of televising city meetings on cable, publish all relevant information online
By Yakov Shafranovich; 5:35 p.m. EST, November 17, 2010
Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young recently proposed new legislation to achieve greater transparency in the ...
Posted in Personal, Politics | No Comments »
Friday, January 30th, 2009
For a few years, Google Book Search has provided PDF downloads of public domain books. The books came with a page listing some guidelines that Google asked people to follow and the same guidelines are listed in their Google Book Search help center. The old guidelines were as follows:
The new ...
Posted in Personal, Politics | 3 Comments »
Friday, June 3rd, 2005
One of the questions that recently came up is how to remove vowels from Hebrew characters in Unicode (or any other similar language). A quick look at Hebrew Unicode chart shows that the vowels are all located between 0x0591 (1425) and 0x05C7 (1479). With this and Javascript's charCodeAt function, it ...
Posted in Politics, Programming | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
USA Today is running a story about new guidelines on background checks from the Transportation Security Administration:
The federal government plans to begin collecting the full names and birth dates of air travelers this summer in its latest effort to screen passengers for possible links to terrorism. In a few weeks, ...
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 1st, 2005
There has been quite some talk on the 'Net and in the media about whether giving permission to the government for the use of commercial database services will help with fighting terrorism. I recently ordered a report from one of these companies, Axciom and frankly the results that I got ...
Posted in Politics | No Comments »