Categories
Documents

Flying high in the (Document) clouds

DocumentCloud is an online document management system for journalists. It provides a way to upload and organize documents, making them easier to share with the public and other team members. In addition, DocumentCloud also provides a set of tools enabling a host of functionality, including the ability to search among all of the uploaded accessible documents. (example from the Washington Post)

Currently, my documents are all uploaded to my own server. They’re easily available, true, but if I were to someday be nibbled to death by ducks, the documents would vanish from the internets. In addition, there’s no functionality available for searching among the documents, and they’re isolated from other comparable documents, making them a little less than useful for generalized researching. Yes, they are accessible via Google, but documents need a bit more.

They need persistence not dependent on a frail human body.

DocumentCloud was kind enough to give me an account, once I demonstrated the intent of my document web site, and how I’ve used my documents as source material for writings. Now I’m in the process of figuring out how best to organize them for uploading, which includes determining what I’m going to name the document files.

The RECAP folks had legitimate criticism of my file name scheme, which consists of folders containing documents named “document1.pdf” and so on. The names are meaningful in context, but meaningless out of context. This is especially true for my court documents.

I could use the RECAP naming scheme, which consists of court system, specific court designation, case number, document number, and attachment number, if any. An example is “gov.uscourts.dcd.129639.1.0.pdf”, which is the US federal court system, the DC court, case number “129639”, document 1, and the main document, not an attachment.

The FOIA Project uses something similar, but it actually spells out the name for the document. An example is “dc-1-2010cv00883-complaint-attachment-1.pdf”. This name breaks down to the DC court system, the year and court type (“2010” and “cv” for Civil), as well as the case number, in addition to the document type and attachment. (As a side note, the FOIA Project also uses DocumentCloud.)

PACER assigns each case a unique PACER number within the system, but that’s only useful when accessing the documents via PACER.

I’ll have to live with whatever I decide, because some of the cases I follow have hundreds, even thousands, of court documents. I’m going to do the “rename and upload to DocumentCloud” thing once.

You can provide file name suggestions on Google+.

Categories
Documents Web

Harvard Business School: it will cost you to link to us

Discovered via Facebook, Harvard Business School’s extraordinarily parsimonious attempts to milk every last penny out of its material:

No one ever charges people for the act of curating and directing attention. That is our job. It is our mantra. But that is precisely what HBSP are doing. To be sure, HBR looks like any other magazine and is already paid for under an institutional license by the UofT library. What HBSP are charging for are the links to those articles made by academics in the ordinary course of teaching. While our Dean was clear that he wanted us to continue to treat ideas as ideas and give the best to our students, he also wanted us now to be aware that it was costing money each time we did so. I don’t know how much it costs but my guess is that it is $5 or so per article per student. So if I have a class of 40 students and in the process of being thorough, add 10 HBR articles to my reading list or class webpage or, if the students do the same on bulletin boards for the class, we have to pay $2,000 for the privilege. I want to adhere to norms but that is enough to cause me to think twice.

Note, this isn’t direct access to the article content, this is just linking to, or citing the article.

I guess Harvard must be hard up for cash.

Categories
Healthcare

Stage 2 on the Healthcare Marketplace

update

Yesterday, I was able to upload my identification. Now, some human somewhere will have to concur that it indeed verifies I am me.

In the meantime, USA Today has posted a story with tech details about the fixes being done on the system this weekend. It interviews the “top technology expert” behind the system, who managed to use the word “geekalicious”.

I was especially surprised when reading the following:

It is upgrading software that lets people create accounts to apply for insurance. One symptom of this has been malfunctioning pull-down menus that have worked only intermittently all week. And HealthCare.gov is moving one part of the site that processes applications from so-called virtual machine technology, which uses software to let a website securely share computer servers with other sites, to using servers dedicated exclusively to that process, he said.

earlier

I am not who I say I am. Or I can’t be verified to be who I say I am.

I’ve been able to go through the entire application process…except for verifying who I am. And evidently, they forgot to turn this part of the application on.

I’ve put in my correct name, address, social security number, and so on. I put in what I know the IRS has for me.

Nada. Zip.

So I took the option to upload a document. A simple scan of my driver’s license.

I tried once, and got a message that maximum file size is 10MB. My file size was a little larger than 1MB. OK. So I compressed the PDF down to about 67KB.

Nada. Zip. Same error message.

I snipped out just my drivers license, and created a JPEG of the image. File size? A svelte 34KB. I uploaded it…

Nada. Zip.

And, as usual for almost any activity associated with this system, I must now call in. Except I have no interest in calling in. I’m going to wait a week, in hopes that someone remembers to turn on the rest of the application. I’m disappointed, though, that I couldn’t even look at the plans, because I’m stuck in the never never land of “verification”.

This isn’t load problems, people. This is a crappy system that has all the symptoms of never having been tested. Other than a cursory run through.

I may like Obamacare, but the Marketplace sucks.

PS Oh, and I’ve never been able to use Chrome to access the Marketplace. Not once. I’ve had to use IE and Firefox.

Categories
Documents

Lavabit Court documents

The company Lavabit shut down rather than give the government encryption keys that would expose all private communication related to its email server. This is the same server used by Edward Snowden.

The Lavabit founder, Ladar Levinson, was finally able to get the court documents related to this action unsealed, and they were posted yesterday. I was fairly sure that Kevin Poulsen of Wired’s Threat Level would post an actual copy, rather than just discuss them, and I was correct.

I’m also posting a copy in the interest of dissemination. I recommend, though, that you read Poulsen’s overview of the case.

Categories
Healthcare

Healthcare Exchange: 1 Shelley: 0

I joined the masses in attempting to access the new Healthcare Exchange yesterday. I thought I had an edge by creating an account with the system a few weeks back, but no such luck. Attempting to log in kept resulting in a blank page (which showed itself to be a “downstream error” when accessing the site using Firefox).

I noticed that the format of username that was acceptable a few weeks back no longer meets the criteria for new user names, so I don’t know if I have an account or not. And forget trying to use Chat to verify whether I need to create a new account, or can use my existing one (with its improper username format).

I expected glitches, but not such wide systematic failures, where people can’t even get access to the security questions to create an account. This breakdown isn’t the fault of Obamacare. This breakdown is, unfortunately, all too typical with large new systems developed with too many inputs from middle management and too little heed paid to experienced software developers. And way too little effective load testing.

Using Java doesn’t help. Java requires a very savvy tech architect, and well designed infrastructure. Even tiny fractures can cause big pile ups in a poorly designed Java system.

Regardless, I’m not going to bash the law just because of early system failures. I’m irritated at journalists and their pondering of “people giving up” because they can’t access the system. Hey boys and girls: people who want and need affordable healthcare coverage aren’t going to give up because of software glitches. Perhaps if the pundits would stop talking and start listening, they wouldn’t write or say such silly crap.

However, someone needs to be kicked in the ass behind the scenes of the Healthcare Marketplace.