E-Voting system opened for public scruntiny

Ed Felton's effort has finally paid dividend and Sequoia has opened up their Frontier e-voting system source code that is still in development for public scrutiny.

Yesterday, Sequoia made good on this promise and you can now pull the source code they've made available from their Subversion repository here:
http://sequoiadev.svn.beanstalkapp.com/projects/

They should be applauded to ensure full confidence in their product. I just wish many companies, particularly those producing ERP and critical software, are that inclined.

What is of great interest to me is the fact that this system is developed using MS .Net Framework V2/3.5 and the projects are developed using C# in VS2008.

A quick scan of the projects revealed some issues:
1) The solution failed to be self-contained. In other words, the solution should contains all the third party supporting DLLs and then projects needing it are then referring them in relative path. In this way, the source control and solution will contain everything a developer would need when the solution is checked the solution out. Perhaps they are not included in the public code because of licensing issues.

2) Many classes should be marked static but are not. There are signs showing the code may have been migrated from .Net 1.x, which does not have static class. For example, the Contract class in Core solution.

3) Projects have not turned on Code Analysis. May be they do not use Visual Studio Team System.

4) The System.Data.IDataReader that is returned by Sequoia.EMS.Core.DataServices.BaseDataService or Sequoia.Ems.Data.Custom.BaseEntrySet does not appear to have been disposed after entries are added in Sequoia.Ems.Data.Custom.BaseEntrySet.Load(). IDataReader is derived from IDisposable.

5) Good to see the use of the Workflow engine.

6) Use of NUnit is evidence in the code but does not appear to be widespread usage of the Unit Test or TDD.

7) It is also using Microsoft Enterprise Library but it appears that it is using its own implementation to do logging.

8) Some project for example, the Core, is set to use .Net 2.0 but it contains references to .Net 3.5 specifics namely System.Xml.Linq. Very strange. Just wondering if it is in the process of upgrading all project to .Net 3.5. There are currently 10 projects in .Net 2 and 12 in .Net 3.5. Altogether there are 22 projects.

9) Personally I am not too keen on the way the Core project is organized. Essentially Core is a project containing 34 files which are grouped into pseudo-sub-projects using solution folders. This kind of design can encourage tight coupling because each sub-project's internal artifacts are available to each other. May be that is their intention. Preliminary review does not support this.


This kind of organization also makes partitioning the module to be managed by several developers difficult. It is most unfortunate that VS2008 does not support netmodule in the IDE otherwise, partitioning Core into several netmodules is a better organization.

Open Office 2 - coming of age?

I have been testing Open Office on and off and I must say the Open Office 2.3 is pretty impressive.

I am not here to give free advertisement extolling its specialties or features but to flag areas that are still raw:
1) Dialog box modality is still a problem. The program fails to disable the owned window allowing user to click or access the owned window when the dialog box is supposed to be the top level window. For example try Tools | Options... and while the dialog box is up, click on the resize button on the windows behind it. In a well designed Windows program, you cannot click onto the one behind it.

This weakness is the result of Java which still has great deal of difficulties in handling this simple UI task.

2) It is great to see a portable version of OpenOffice that I can take it with me on my USB drive. It only takes about 250M.

Sadly, it does not support Tablet PC's Tablet Input Panel (TIP). Without this floating panel, the only way is to use the Input Panel from the task bar, which has the side-effect of causing every visible window to resize.

Otherwise, it is quite steady and has not experienced any crashes. However, I must admit that I have not given it a reasonably large document to chew on.

Outlook Clone - Evolution in Windows at last

Microsoft's Outlook has been the kind of the defacto PIM/Mail Client for a long time with no challenger insight.

The reasons why it is so popular are:

• It is a damn good Internet Mail Client.
  
• A Microsoft Exchange Server Client. Not too many program can touch the Exchange Server
• It has extremely good synchronisation ability with Pocket PC - naturally as they come from the same stable.
• It is a good organiser for Calendar activities and tasks.

Well, Outlook's sole dominance in this arena is now being challenged by a program called Evolution, which has been around in Linux for a few years. Now, it has been ported to Windows.

I am always on the look out for ways of not paying Microsoft therefore I obviously do not pass up the challenge.

The installation in XP is rather smooth and uneventful. What is disturbing is the lack of any entry in the Start Menu nor was there any option not to create Start Menu during installation.

After installation in Admin account, I return to RANU to test Evolution for the LUA compliance. Surprisingly, it runs fine in LUA.

The installer appears to have forgotten to create the start menu. Hence to start Evolution, you need to run the Evolution.cmd in the Evolution directory. This starts a Command console briefly while it starts the StartX.exe which then runs the Step2.cmd. The comment in Step2.cmd is kind of worrying: Yes, I know this takes a while. Sorry. So be patient.

The first time it starts in an account, it will present you with the customary wizard to set up the POP account. The first thing an Outlook user will notice is the difference in user interfaces. The MS Outlook is slick and Windows-ish naturally, while the clone has the distinct alien look, but still functional.

Once that task is completed, the main screen is up. This is where I got lost completely. I was struggling to find the "Send/Receive Mail" button so that I could pull down some mail messages, which I knew were in this account.

After a bit of struggle, I found it under the File menu. But after pressing that and seeing the momentarily displayed progress window, I still could not find the Inbox messages. The WebMail access to this POP account confirmed the disappearance of the test messages. So obviously Evolution must be working.

After some exploration of the menu, I discovered the key ones to set and they are:

1. Press "View | Layout | Show Side Bar" as this will present you the customary Outlook side bar allowing you to select folders.
   
2. Press "View | Layout | Show Toolbar" as this will present you the toolbar.

Once these two settings are set, the operations and appearance of Evolution are uncannily close to Outlook.

It is early the days to proclaim that I will flip over to this but I will definitely monitor its development.

One of the claim of fame of Evolution is that it can hook up to a Microsoft Exchange Server and the Linux people have been using this for that purpose. Since I do not have an Exchange server to test it, I will take their words for it.

There are some Windows Z-order problem and is very typical for program that has forgotten to nominate the correct owner window of the dialog box. For example, when it is prompting for the password of POP account when the current one is incorrect. This sequence of windows is very untidy.

During closing down Evolution 2.8.2, it causes an application error. At the moment, I cannot determine the cause of it but it is repeatable.

Since it is free and some of the roughness is tolerable. The next is to compare this with Thunderbird 2 with the Lightning calendar plug in. So stay tune.

Bug reporting - a lesson CodeGear can learn from Open Source

My recent usage of the GNU Win32 port of Grep resulted in my discovery of a bug and in custom with my practice, I filed a report. What happened next is a lesson that Borland/CodeGear should learn from the Open Source community.

Not only did they not whinged, throwing up excuses, calling their user and bug reporter not understanding their 'feature', they digested my bug report carefully and promptly acknowledged that was a genuine bug. Even when Borland's bug has been proven beyond doubt, yet they still refused to fix it.

Within a short time, they posted me a message advising me a bug fixed version is available. Full mark for that.

Contrasting that with CodeGear's Delphi bug reports I have filed over the years, I have never received this kind of acknowledgment and quick response. More disturbingly CodeGear's Delphi product is NOT FREE and yet providing far worse support than free stuff. Hence, price does not equate to provision of support, not even meager support.

People considering CodeGear software needs to remember this before spending your money.