eric.openflows

I'm registered to vote in NYC, but not in any political party. If I wanted to, I could change my affiliation and run in the Democratic Party primary in September. But, as a voter, if I switch my affiliation today, I am prevented from voting in the primary until the next election.

I understand to an extent the reasoning -- prevent a mass re-registration in order to skew the results of the opposing party. However, I really think that this should be considered an illegal barrier to my participation in the democratic process.

Last night's Critical Mass bike ride could have gone without any problems. However, no matter how far we compromise, the NYPD insists on continuing to treat us as if we were dangerous terrorists. They continue to criminalize a legal gathering; they continue to try to harass us into giving up. Dear NYPD: Fuck You! We will not back down. Rights are rights only when you use them.

We all tried so hard last night to have a fun ride. We all tried so hard to give the cops no excuse to arrest, ticket, or otherwise interfere with our right to assemble and ride.

The ride stopped at every light. We blocked no traffic. We kept the ride to one or two lanes, making sure we could not be accused of blocking traffic or disorderly conduct of any kind.

Everything seemed to be going along fine. We had a crew of cops on fancy new scooters riding along side us the entire time. They seemed completely bored. Based on the money the NYPD must have spent on those new rides and the overtime for all those cops, you'd never know there's a financial crisis in this city.

The ride was moving uptown on 6th avenue. When we stopped at a red light at 41st street a couple dozen cops appeared out of no where, walked towards us and ordered a bunch of us to get off our bikes and give them our ID.

A friend complained on facebook today about an application called PicDoodle that she had installed.

It was supposed to give her a way of drawing fancy things on images and share that fun with her friends.

Instead, she got one of her images with a roughly scrawled heart on the corner and it automatically has been taking names from her friends list and "tagging" the image with their names.

Radical Reference is an online reference service provided by volunteer library workers in a collaborative virtual setting using free/open source technology. Come learn more about how you can use this model to deliver services in your own communities (social, political, familial, spiritual, etc.). Presenters will share the five year history of the group and discuss how it collaborates, as well as give an accessible history of free/open source software.

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I spent the last few days fighting with dynamic generation of pdf files using the tcpdf php library.

tcpdf is not well documented, so much of the process of getting it to work is trial and error (and error and error...)

The one thing that really kicked my ass was trying to print an item rotated 90 degrees, and then getting another rotated item to print where I wanted it. Finally after reading the documentation a dozen times, I saw that my answer was there but is not all that clear.

If you want to have control over more than one rotated item, you have to add a line to start and end each rotation/transformation