Votebox is now on Googlecode

Hooray! The code is back up, everyone can stop panicking. You can get to the project by going to http://code.google.com/p/votebox-rpi/ and you can use SVN to checkout the code at http://votebox-rpi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/. Back to working on the schema...

Website is Down

As you may have noticed, votebox.us has expired as a domain, and since Joe D. left the project, I don't think it's going to be renewed. I will be moving the code over to a Google code repository, hopefully with change logs intact. Will drop another blog post when everything is set up.

XML Schema Checking

Today has been a trip down memory lane for me. The ballots that Votebox implements are all written in XML, a language I haven't used since high school CS1. XML is an effective form of ballot transcription and Qt works well with it, allowing fairly easy acss to XML elements. While I was originally going to switch the XML ballot system to JSON, which is much more familiar to me now, I decided I'd stick it out and reacquaint myself with the former.

The first step in securing Votebox from erroneous ballots or a transmission based attack is to provide a schema that all ballots, incoming and outgoing, need to abide by. The schema then acts as a keyhole for the XML ballot, and checks its elements to make sure they're in proper order, and then acts accordingly. Hopefully within the week this schema system will be in place.

Hello World!

Testing connection to the RCOS dashboard.

New Votebox Blog

Starting a new blog here seeing that I don't have easy access to the blog on the homepage(www.votebox.us). There has been a good deal of progress in the past month, including getting widgets and elements to work in tandem with ballots and user input, which I urge you to follow on the repository. Next up, we're going to be working on the transfer of ballots in a secure and efficient manner, and we'll also take a look at how the GUI can be changed to account for disabled individuals. You can always grab me at #votebox on freenode-irc if you have any questions.