Law and Software

Another day spent with kids doing their DACA renewals, and some just starting out on this road. DACA may be the best there is but it is not good. The kids have to sit at the back of the bus. They are separate but equal. Just without any pretense of equal. They have lawful presence but not lawful status. They are statusless. They didn’t ask for this and they act grateful for the crumbs thrown from the master’s table. Filling out the forms feels like helping stitch a triangle onto their shirts. I cannot tell the difference between these young people and “real americans” other than this triangle that they have to wear. I am the kapo who puts them in the safe line for the work detail

This is an initial post about mods to PDFBox to allow XFA form filling on modern AES encrypted PDF forms, so that they still load into Acrobat Reader, and do not get the dreaded message informing you that the document has been modified and the Reader (form filling) extensions no longer work.

I imagine that PDF toolkits have a very limited audience. So this first post isn’t about the changes to PDFBox. Well, maybe just a little. It’s more about why this matters. And we’ll also cover XFA, form filling in Acrobat, and IText. more…

Two things surprised me about the obamacare websites. The first was that (at least for Covered California) the errors thrown by an overloaded system on the last evening for enrollment were java exceptions. The second was the proud claim that the federal site was able to handle 60k visitors at a time and 800k in a day. more…

those nice people at Google sent me a new invite.
a shale glass. my visit to studio on the embarcadero timed to coincide with the new IOS7 myglass app.

to get used to glass, I signed up for google play music, uploaded the mp3s of the Open Goldberg Variations. and pretend to be a glass exploder as I whisper “ok glass, listen to goldberg variations”

looks like the open well tempered clavier project is also fully funded…. ok glass…

My google glass experiment ended almost before it started.

i had received an invite. I chose a tangerine set and home delivery. It arrived next morning UPS next day air.

20 minutes into playing with glass, it was hot. The plastic side disagreeably warm, and the metal frame  even warmer. Ideal central heating for an arctic winter – but more like having a computer strapped to your head than a ‘wearable’ more…

The July (2013) USCIS Office of Performance and Quality  report  gives a list of acceptances and approvals by country of origin. more…

In July (2013) the USCIS Office of Performance and Quality  reported 7.1% of DACA applications denied during review. That’s 1 in 13 who apply. Unlucky 13. Why the increase in DACA denials,  when – until May and the first 360,000 reviews – the denial rate was less than 3%? more…

I wonder.

What do you do if the bad guys aren’t using the internet any more? more…

What to do about FNU? Some people come to the United States from places in the world where only one name is used. If that name is their given name, then their immigration documentation – and maybe their drivers’ license as well will have FNU for their first name. First Name Unknown. Or if the name is their first name, then they might get GNU – nothing to do with the free software foundation – but Given Name Unknown. They live their lives as FNU or GNU. more…

Today, twitter decided I really wasn’t a spammer.

more…