Preparing for the US 2026 general election

There are a number of important elections happening around the world. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in their presidential election this past weekend. This past Tuesday, Israel held national parliamentary elections, which will determine if Benjamin Netanyahu will continue as prime minister. In the United States, early voting and mail voting is underway for local, state, and federal elections, culminating on November 3rd (Election Day in the US).

The most important step that voters can take is to vote early if possible, and be prepared to vote in person on Election Day if that is the voter’s choice (i.e., show up early with identification). What is at stake? The issue being covered in the mainstream media is control of the US Congress (currently the House and Senate have Republican majorities). Election polls are indicating that the Democrats could take control of at least the House, and perhaps the Senate as well.

The other issue that is getting a lot of attention is the possibility that Republicans could block Democrats from taking control of the House or Senate when the new Congress meets on January 3, 2027. Again, mainstream media are publishing a lot of negative “what-if” scenarios on how this could occur. I recommend following the Election Law Blog headed by Rick Hasen at UCLA Law School. This is an excellent resource on following any election-related litigation. In addition, there have been multiple posts evaluating these “what-if” scenarios at Election Law Blog and other sites on how the likelihood of success is low to none:

Retirement Update

I have been retired now for several months, and thought it was a good time to reflect on how things have changed for me.

When I started my retirement, I would start each day with a written list of to-dos on my computer, and work to complete all the things on the list. After about two months, I decided that I did not need to have a list. Now, I have a hand-written list to collect things/tasks as they come to mind, and I just keep adding items, not starting a new list until the page is full.

I had some planned projects for when I retired (mostly website maintenance/migration, start looking at using AI for software development). I was able to finish the migration work in a few months, and did some experiments with AI after that. Over the past few months, I have had difficulty thinking of a project where I want to invest my time. For example, I see articles/posts about apps that people have developed using AI, and I have no interest in those things. If anyone has any ideas for a good project, send them my way!

In general, I have become more relaxed in my day-to-day activities. If I don’t get a task done, there is always tomorrow to get it done, or the day after that….and I have also taken a lot of naps!

The passing of MIT/NASA pioneer Margaret Hamilton

This week, it was announced that Margaret Hamilton had died. From the MIT News article announcing her death: “Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.”

Hamilton worked for the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a contractor working for NASA on the Apollo program. The team she lead was developing software for the Apollo Guidance Computer. This computer had 2K words of random-access memory (RAM) and 36K words of read-only memory (ROM). Even with those constraints, and limited processor capability, NASA was able to conduct the Apollo missions. Hamilton deserves a lot of credit, and stands on par with other women at NASA such as Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn.

Thanks to Manton Reece and Sven Dahlstrand for posting on this event.

Podcast on design engineering in software development

I am 2/3 of the way listening to this podcast, and it is giving me some insight into the (visual) design of software. In my career in the aerospace industry, this was not a topic that was included in most of the software I worked on. Maggie Appleton talks about the importance of the human input in creating user interfaces, and how most, if not all, of agent software tools (Claude, Chat-GPT, etc.) have not been successful in producing good designs from prompt input. The part that I am finding most interesting is near the end, where she talks about a prototype app her team was creating. I found this more inspiring than her stories of iterating on user interfaces with Figma, etc.

Followup on support for Drummer oldSchool blogs

Recently, I mentioned that I worked with Claude Code to add scripts and changes to the drummerCms Github repo to be able to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog from a Drummer OPML file. In conversation with Frank McPherson, he asked if the web-based outliner from Dave Winer that I modified this year could support editing a OPML file for Drummer oldSchool blog use. This morning, I was able to add outline elements matching those in an oldSchool blog OPML file and was able to build a new local copy with those changes correctly rendered.

Based on this testing, I believe my OPML outliner can support oldSchool blogging use, with some inconveniences (having to add other outline elements used within oldSchool). If anyone is interested in collaborating on updating the outliner UI to support oldSchool blogging, let me know!

Got the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress working

Today I gave the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress another try, and was successful! First, I upgraded to the latest version (from 9.0.2 to 9.3.1). I accepted the default settings, so my new ActivityPub account based on my settings would be alsylves@andysylvester.com. Next, I logged into mastodon.social (https://mastodon.social/@AndySylvester), pasted my new account in the search box, clicked “Cancel request” on the old version, then clicked “Follow”, and saw the button change to “Unfollow”. Finally, I went back to my website, created a post, and saw it appear on my Mastodon home page. After that, I marked the post as a “favorite” and I created a reply to the post in Mastodon. Within a minute, it appeared as a comment on my WordPress post. Success!