Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Here's a question for the readership of this weblog -- does anybody know of a web-based e-mail reader (like Mail2Web, MailStart, and the many listed here) that blocks spam, maybe the way that Yahoo! Mail does?

I'm about to hit the road for a while, and I've grown accustomed to Apple Mail's spam filters, which catch maybe 90% of incoming spam. Using Web-based mail readers, the amount of spam is intolerable, but it could be kept in check if the system had a filter like SpamAssassin installed.....

(Yes, I know you can install filters like SpamAssassin on the mail host; but I haven't been able to accomplish that [yet]. If anybody has any suggestions, drop me a line -- mailto link is at the bottom of the page and I'll post any good answers; I don't have comments set up on this weblog yet.....)

Update: Martin recommended FastMail; Sam recommended SquirrelMail -- though SquirrelMail is something you install on your own server. Thanks!

I was thumbing through the latest printed catalog from O'Reilly, and I realized that there are a ton of titles that piqued my curiosity. They weren't topics that I would necessarily buy a book about, because maybe they aren't quite what I'm working on, but I would still like to get familiar with those technologies. (Or maybe I would buy a book, but I might not know why

I realized that what the world needs is a good, new, printed magazine -- something you can thumb through offline, not researching on the web -- to keep computer professionals up to date on the latest cool stuff. Something like Dr. Dobb's, being platform-agnostic, but geared toward more than just coders.

I'd like to get a magazine with articles that provide a general overview of up-and-coming technologies, major updates to existing technologies, cool new RFCs that have been approved or are in progress, and even ground-breaking web sites or desktop applications that will have an impact on the way we use, administer, and program computers.

For instance, these technologies mentioned in O'Reilly's catalog would make interesting articles:

• What's new on the RSS front-lines
• Introduction to Zope
• What is new in Java 1.5
• What is BEEP?
• What is BLAST?
• A quick overview of Extreme Programming (XP)
• What are Jakarta Struts
• Overviews of innovative applications like NetNewsWire and Spring (winners at the recent ETech conference)

I think the perfect publisher for this would be O'Reilly! Articles could even be written by the authors of their books, and obviously plug their books for readers interested in learning more. What do you think, Tim? "O'Reilly's Zoo"? "On O'Reilly's Radar"? "O'Reilly Horizon"?

(And if anybody reading this post thinks that there already is a magazine like what I'm looking for, let me know!)

For those who like to keep up with the nuances of Watson updates, there were a couple of tool fixes posted today.

• Translation - a fix to the FreeTranslation parser
• Movies -- several fixes to handle indie movies that don't have all the information available; those listings were causing HTML junk to show in the movie summary field. Also, improved the graying-out logic for movies not yet released (in the by-Movie view). And a double-click on a theater name now opens up the moviefone.com page showing a map to the theater.

Also, updated the slashdot plugin for SiteSearch to use their RSS feed, this doesn't require a new version of the tool. (Thanks, pudge!)

There's an interesting bug (I sure hope it isn't a feature!) in Safari (Public Beta 2) that people should be aware of -- if you download a binary file, and then for some reason you need to download it again -- perhaps the original download was corrupt and didn't come through properly -- Safari will probably just hand you a cached version of the original download!

For example, I've found that a certain percentage of downloads of the Watson disk image tend to not make it intact to the other side. Normally the user response would be "I'ts corrupt; I'll try downloading it again." But a Safari user has to first empty their cache (from the Safari menu) -- otherwise, the original, corrupt file will reappear instantly on their desktop.

And yes, I've reported it as a bug with Apple (using their real bug-reporting scheme; not the "bug" icon in Safari that generates a message that is probably read with as much attention as messages to president@whitehouse·gov are!)

A week after Watson 1.7 shipped, now 1.7.1 is out the door. This is primarily a maintenance update, fixing a couple of problems that couldn't be resolved with just tool updates (which don't require a new version of the application to be downloaded).

We added some additional options for working with the new "combo boxes" that are used for search inputs across the suite of tools. Many users had requested the ability to clear their search histories; there is now a menu (Watson ▷ Clear Searches) to do just that. There are also a couple of preferences for the combo boxes: how many items to remember, and whether or not to auto-complete as you type.

And based on several requests to "bring back" the ability to drag the preview image from the Epicurious tool onto your desktop or other programs (which had never been an advertised feature), dragging is back. But wait, there's more -- the preview images from Movies and PriceGrabber as well. (The feature was already available on the Amazon.com tool.)

You can drag the images to your desktop or other programs that accept graphics, like Preview or iTunes. You can also drag them into Spring and create "objects." (Spring Version 1.3 or greater is required for this; it's currently in public beta.) So now you can have recipe objects, movie objects, and objects representing products from either Amazon.com or PriceGrabber.com. What a hoot!

Download Watson, as usual, here.

Years ago, I ran across a Hypercard stack that contained an index of thousands of classical music melodies. I grew up in a house with classical music playing all the time, so I know a lot of the music, but I can't actually name more than a handful of pieces. I found this program to be invaluable!

But not many of us have HyperCard anymore, and I hated the idea of this great concept and database languishing. So I looked up the author of the system, Elbert G. Smith, who first started collecting records around 1940! First on 3 x 5 cards, then punched cards, then eventually HyperCard.

I got a hold of the latest database -- now at version 4.11 with over 13,000 entries -- and built a little Cocoa application around it. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles in this early version, but I wanted to make it available to others to elicit feedback and let people play with it. And it's freeware.

I've put the current version of the HyperCard stack online as well, in case anybody wants to make use of it. This version has not been available online until now.

Get the software here.

Here's a hint by Zane Edwards I discovered on a recent MacOSXHints article. You can use the Amazon.com tool on Watson to save album cover art on iTunes 4. Just drag the preview from Watson into the cover art area for the selected songs.

One caveat: Be sure that the magnifying glass is active, meaning that the large preview image is available. Otherwise, the image that it imports will be a tiny placeholder graphic, which you don't want!

Update: Be careful about file bloat! Some sleuthing by Josh Rafofsky has revealed that various sources of image files result in drastically different file sizes resulting, depending on where you drag the image from. Even though the images are always converted to PNG, it seems that the images are stored differently depending on how the image was received. A drag from a file seems to result in a much smaller size than a drag from a program like Watson or Safari. I consider this to be a bug with iTunes (suitable for reporting to Apple here (if you're ADC member) or here (if you're not). So be careful about dragging from Watson, or other sources, if you are concerned about disk space!