Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

A few tools are being updated today:

• Amazon (1.6.2.1) -- CD track listings; a few new attributes in the details list; changing store does not clear the search field.
• Movies (1.6.2.1) -- Fixed AppleScript to force the QuickTime Player opened to be the Mac OS X version.
• PriceGrabber (1.6.2.2) -- Updated to latest product hierarchy (including cross-references); fixed bug that prevented showing more than 25 items in the list generated from the third column; emphasized digital photography since it was hard to find
• Packages (1.6.2.2) -- Fix UPS site parsing.

I've given up using rsync on the Mac. Maybe it's not on my end, but I'm getting all sorts of mystery files with "dirattr" in their name showing up when I upload files from the local development machine to the hosting server. And mysterious messages of "fopen: No such file or directory", and attempts to upload "rsrc" directories that don't exist. A Google search doesn't turn up much help, though others are having that problem as well.

Here's something kind of cool. It's possible to embed files of any type inside a TextEdit "rtfd" document, much like you'd put attachments in an e-mail message! (But see the caveat below!)

Putting attachments in your file is easy -- just drag a file (or folder) into your document. (The icon will now be placed in with the text.) The "receiver" of the document can just drag the icon out to their desktop.

The caveat: Be careful when saving your document with the embedded files. If you had changed the file externally, and then you save your document containing that file, you will lose your changes!

(Note: There's a Mac OS X Hints article similar to this tip, and it discusses possible security implications of embedded applications.)

An interesting speech compression technology has been invented by a fellow I know. Maybe it's time to start thinking about integration with Watson.