Law and Software

I have two active sites. This one, and law191.org – my community immigration law office site. I keep them separate because I am not writing a splog. I need this blog space to write about anything and everything without worrying whether clients will approve or disapprove or whether it will affect my search position.

This post is about improving google’s assessment of my office site’s performance from embarrassing to  the high 90s. As an immigration lawyer, being found in search is very important. As a low-fee community lawyer, being found organically is the only game in town because high-stakes advertising isn’t in my budget.

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This is an initial post about mods to PDFBox to allow XFA form filling on modern AES encrypted PDF forms, so that they still load into Acrobat Reader, and do not get the dreaded message informing you that the document has been modified and the Reader (form filling) extensions no longer work.

I imagine that PDF toolkits have a very limited audience. So this first post isn’t about the changes to PDFBox. Well, maybe just a little. It’s more about why this matters. And we’ll also cover XFA, form filling in Acrobat, and IText. more…

Two things surprised me about the obamacare websites. The first was that (at least for Covered California) the errors thrown by an overloaded system on the last evening for enrollment were java exceptions. The second was the proud claim that the federal site was able to handle 60k visitors at a time and 800k in a day. more…

I wonder.

What do you do if the bad guys aren’t using the internet any more? more…

Remember Sun Microsystems? I’ll always have fond memories. But not for Solaris, graphics workstations, Java and all the other wonderful work done at Garcia Ave, and then at SunQuentin by the bridge. The fondness comes from the Mr Protocol column in the old Sun Expert magazine. You can find a sample here . more…

Que tengo miedo perderte, perderte despues.

Here it is. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, complete with hyperlinks and hoverlinks.

Wednesday, the Gang of Eight Senate Bill S744 “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” was published. A PDF, 800+ pages long, full of all the cross-references that make the immigration statute so hard to study, and the reason for my flatlining back in December to produce the Law and Software Online Edition of the Immigration and Nationality Act. And I don’t have much time for hiding content in a dense and awkward format that few will read. Enter the Law and Software Edition of the Immigration Reform Bill –  BSEOIMA Mucho. more…

The Border Security Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act Senate Bill, otherwise known as the Gang of Eight Bipartisan Senate Bill is hard to read in the traditional PDF Senate Bill format. So I have adapted the HTML I use for my online version of the Immigration and Nationality Act to put up an HTML version of the immigration reform bill. It’s a draft. The PDF was only released on Wednesday.

I am on a “dormant” mail-alias for software migration. Software migration is a polite way of referring to the process of ripping out an old API from your software application, and replacing it with something more modern. Like when you flip a house for resale and give it a new kitchen and a fresh coat of paint. This nightmare process pwns you when your user interface toolkit (like Motif) finally bites the dust. You either throw away your software and start again, or migrate to another toolkit (like Qt)  that is likely heading the same way – but your competitors are all using the “new” one, so it must be ok. more…

I never liked database apps. And Software as a Service doesn’t thrill me much either. I just don’t want to hunt around someone else’s interface in order to get to my data. No matter how pretty the interface is. Sorry to be obnoxious. I want information at my fingertips when I want it.

But you can tame these beasts. At least, you can tame Clio. more…

Everywhere I turn as I set up my practice there’s software that needs writing. Maybe that’s because legal tech is mostly designed for lawyers, not by them. I can’t believe those “contact me” or “send me an email” boxes on attorney websites. They scream malpractice.

I had some fun with CM this week. Confidential Messaging. Like Instant Messaging except a) it isn’t instant, and b) it is confidential.

And I mean “really confidential” – as in, “if I weren’t a lawyer building this for attorney/client privileged conversations, I’d probably be on a no-fly list by now” more…