Rob Boudrie

True, but I put that more in the category of "scared of liability" rather than "choosing to limit what legal level of legal firepower a civilian may purchase". But, Glock as been at the forefront supporting civilian gun ownership and, unlike Ruger, never requested a federal limit on magazine capacity.

Not intended as criticism, but information. There is a long history of gun companies engaging in voluntary bans of items that are perfectly legal to sell, for example: - Prior to the 1994 ban, it was Gary's position that Caspian would not make 170mm mags since their existence might be used as justification/motivation for a ban. - Glock, prior to the 1994 ban, had strict LEO only limitations on sales of their 33 round 9mm magazines (intended for the full auto Model 18, but also suitable for their 9mm guns), and sold them only on a "direct ship to government" basis. There was no law requiring them to impose this limit. - Ruger has a long history of restricting sales of their large Mini-14 magazines and, to the best of my knowledge, will not sell a > 10 round Mini 14 magazine to civilians to this day. In fact, Ruger asked for a complete and total ban on the civilian possession of high capacity magazines.

Are you saying Glock changed their finish or surface treatment?

Brilliant. I once told someone that my license plate stands for the United States Para Sailing Association.

I did, by pointing out the security issue But then, TJ Max had specialists in this area, so even that is not always enough. The simple fact is that ANY system can have security vulnerabilities, and that maintaining a "hardened" system is considerably more difficult that it initially appear. It takes an expert to *know* you have a secure system rather than *thknk* you have one. This is one reason why credit card numbers never pass through the USPSA server.

Just wondering - what background in computer security do you have in computer security that qualifies you to make that statement? And by patches, it obviously means OS Commerce, the operating system and all other components.

Just be careful about the security of a system with OS Commerce. If you're on a system where unencrypted FTP is available, multiple ports are opened, and patches are not regularly applied you could find the system, and the credit card numbers compromised as the OS Commerce interfaces I have seen pass the CC# to the service, they don't have the service handle all aspects of the security. There are a log more people who *think* they are secure than actually are. For example, how many of the OS Commerce based sites sent each subscribe a notice that a PHP bug that could compromise security was found and they could offer no assurance they have never been hacked? My guess is few to none.

Square Deal Sporsmens in NY runs a great rifle only match each year, but it tends to sell out early.

It must be something in the ink. Here's an even bigger idiot. We had a case out in Massachusetts where a suspect denied that a .380 POS handgun found in the common area of an apartment was his. The below article shows the suspect belongs in some sort of dump criminal hall of fame. The only copy I could find was posted to firestream.net: From the Middlesex News (about 20 miles west of Boston) : Man facing gun charges has a tattoo of one of the guns May 21, 2005 FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- A Framingham man facing gun charges may have a hard time convincing authorities that one of three guns seized from his apartment building is not his -- because he has an exact replica of the .380 caliber pistol, including the serial number, tattooed on his hip, police said. "I've never, never seen something like this," Deputy Chief Craig Davis told the MetroWest Daily News. "This is like the world's dumbest criminal." The guns were found on Thursday after two Middlesex sheriff's deputies went to 18-year-old Justin Breakspear's apartment to serve a pair of warrants for a break-in and marijuana possession. The deputies saw ammunition, a gun holster and what looked like gun parts. Police obtained a search warrant for the home and found the weapons -- the pistol, a 16-gauge sawed-off shotgun and a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun -- in a common storage area. It would be hard for Breakspear to deny at least one gun was his because of the tattoo, Davis said. Breakspear is charged with the illegal possession of a firearm, the illegal possession of ammunition, failure to secure a firearm, two counts of the illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun and defacing the serial number of a firearm, Davis said. Davis said the guns have been sent to the state crime lab for ballistics testing.

USPSA sequesterd all data arriving by the close of business on the 10th, enters it all, and then Roger Maier uploads to the web (generally 2-5 days after the 10th). The flat data uploaded to the web is used to populate the database on the server in the middle of the night. BUT..... Roger will be uploading an additional (there is one file for each division in the zip file he uploads), so the data conversion process on the web server will need to be changed - and the classification display code will need to be modified to display the actual SS class rather than one imputed from other classes. This could mean an extra day's delay or so and there is always the chance of a bump in the road. And none of the above includes the work Roger has already done to use the Single Stack scores we have been accumulating to populate the new SS division in the database at Sedro. Everyone can rest assured that Dave Thomas, Roger Maier and myself are well aware of the importance of this being done in a timely manner and it is being treated as a high priority item.

Bingo. Fortunately, there are no circumstances in USPSA rules or match procedure where we make any such statement, direct or implied. No need to direct any of that anger at the current board, and there were absolutely no objections to that rule when I proposed it. John Amidon and the rules committee did some tweaking of the words, but managed to capture the exact intent of what I requested be added.

I contacted the support company in Uruguay and asked why their monitoring did not detect the failure of web pages to load. They determined that the http server was responding, just not sending any content, and that was sufficient to pass their scan. They have updated the configuration of their service monitoring system to attempt an actual URL load, so they should be able to detect such a problem if it recurs and take appropriate action without any need for intervention by myself or USPSA staff. The server is hosted in Houston, however, the server farm's response time for technical support is "good" rather than "excellent", and they limit their assistance to only those specific packages they install. The support company in Uruguay (www.my-tss.com) has a highly competent staff, responds virtually instantly (I don't think any of them ever sleep), provides a broader spectrum of support, and charges USPSA the grand total of $75/month to be on-call - and does not charge us anything additional when they fix specific problems. They run automatic monitoring software, and even log on to the server from time to time to make sure everything is running smoothly.

This is covered in the 2008 USPSA rulebook: I proposed this rule since I felt it would increase safety, as there will no longer be a temptation for persons to unload while in the car on the way to the range, or to do so in the car at the range while concurrently trying to practice the Monty Python art of not being seen. Also, note the choice of wording "Unloading/Loading" station. This rule was written to cover getting dressed to go home as well as preparing for the match.

This should have been caught and resolved by the offshore support team. I've contacted them and they are looking into why their monitoring system did not catch the problem.

Our DNS records have been unchanged for ages (except for steelchallenge.com which we recently moved to the USPSA server). The fact that an httpd restart resolved the issue instantly confirms that the most recent problem was not simply a DNS resolution issue.

This was a definitely a strange one - the server was up, easy to log into, email processing working just fine - but a boatload of Apache processes. I restarted the Apache server and all seems well now.

www.americart.com includes an Authorize.net payment gateway. If you want to build your own payment gateway to Authorize.net from scratch you'll need someone with at least basic programming skills since even their Simple Interface Method (SIM) uses techniques such as a timestamp MD5 hash composed of various bits and pieces including a secret key. The Americart.com interface takes care of all of this nicely - which means that your only problem is configuring your Americart store and generating (manually or under program control) the HTML for your products. I've done an Authorize.net implementation from scratch (for the USPSA membership system) and Americart based Authorize.net system (for the USPSA store). I'm fully occupied with other projects, so I'm not able to take this on as a job. I am, however, willing to answer specific questions if you find someone to take on the project. Rob

Roger Maier is the person to talk to if you want to get a basic change to the user interface such as this into the product.

As opposed to: "Flip to next score sheet, read in competitor number, type competitor number in and hit enter; check competitor name that comes up against score sheet to make sure the correct competitor was selected, punch in scores/times, repeat". Of course, if you skip that part about "check to competitor name to make sure it matches score sheet" you can save a bit of time .

I got a pie plate with 3.141592 printed on the edge, a T shirt with the internal organs showing, and a set of organ magnets to decorate the safe.

The scary part is to consider how much worse it would have been if you did not have the knowledge to know what to demand.

Yikes - you mean there coverage is doctors who might feel like coming it?

Don't search by part number, use the search string "ccd barcode" - it will give you lots of choices. The Acan one is the most common and works just fine, however, the Litele seeme to be a bit more nicely built: http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-80mm-Long-CCD-BARC...1QQcmdZViewItem

I'll give you a bit of unsolicited marital advice - a barcode scanner does not fulfill one's obligations for a Valentine's day gift.

I'm online on 12/25 since the kid and dogs are asleep, and my wife left for work a couple of hours before I woke up. RE: Local matches The easiest way to do this is to prepare a dummy match with 100 competitors and prepare labels. If you enable the Palm feature (just set a transfer directory in match setup), even if you don't have a Palm, that will enable the Palm transfer window. You'll find a very useful button on that window "Add Walkins". This button will create 10 walking competitors. Click this 10 times, and you have 100 competitors so you can print out labels. Now, when people come to the match have them register on a numbered sign-in sheet, and give them the corresponding label set. When you score the match, start a new database, and register people in the order they appear on the registration sheet making sure the numbers match. RE: Handheld scoring "Tablet PC"s and Palms have the same issue - price. The Palm software isn't cheap, but neither would tablet PC's on each stage (even if we did get the software for free). Barcodes are a step towards increased automation that costs almost nothing ($35 one time - and that's per club, not per stage). RE: Spare Labels EzWinScore 3.03 will have a convenient "Spare label" feature. Consider a match with 7 stages. Currently, it's common for the stats person to create 3 "dummy stages" so that the stage labels can be printed in groups of 10 (makes it easy to cut a column of 10 labels from a standard 3 column 10 row label sheet). Starting with 3.03, you won't need to define any "dummy stages" just enter the number of spare labels required (3 in this example), and EzWinsScore will generate the stage specific labels plus the number of requested spares for each competitor. Hopefully none. If you're not using this feature, you'll see an additional checkbox on the label generation and score entry page. If you don't select these boxes, nothing changes. I don't know when 3.03 will be released, but it will definitely be before the start of the spring shooting season.