Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

There's a new version of Watson available; this is a last-minute bugfix update to deal with some problems with the Movies tool. Here's the full change summary:

• Bug fixed: If no "Home Base" URL is specified in the preferences, the tools are now useable again.
• Bug fixed that caused Movies tool (and possibly others) to parse HTML incorrectly and thus not function
• Image Search: Minor updates to parsing source pages
• VersionTracker: Restored missing clipboard copy functionality

On another note, a few users have reported crashes while using the Weather tool from Panther, this appears to be related to a problem deep down in the bowels of Apple's text handling system. We are working to isolate the problem and report it to Apple.

When you make a new user account in Panther, the dock looks like this:

Back in Jaguar (10.2.8, where Safari is installed), a new user's dock looked like this:

What's trivial is that a lot of the items have been rearranged. What is significant is what application is now no longer being featured by Apple on the dock. It looks like Apple is no longer particularly interested in desktop interfaces to Web services. That's good news for Watson!

My talk at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference (finishing today) is now available online from the 'home page' for my talk, right here.

Overall, it's been a great conference!

Update: Here is a PDF version of the slides (modified slightly to compensate for the animations). (Hint: Use the PDF Browser Plugin to view PDFs directly from your browser rather than having to download 'em.)

Just for fun, I ran some numbers to see how many Watson users have upgraded to Panther.

When somebody launches Watson, the program contacts Karelia.com to check for updates and news. Part of that request is an indication of what version of the OS is being used, just so I can collect these kinds of stats.

So yesterday — two days after the release of Panther — this is how Watson users were distributed:

• 46.4% on Panther
• 52.4% on Jaguar
• 1.2% on Puma (10.1)

Pretty interesting! Of course, these numbers aren't anything other than anecdotal; I don't claim it to be representative of Mac users in general, or Watson users in general. But I'm quite amazed how quickly people are moving on up!

Perhaps after the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, (Say Hi if you see me there!) I'll take another look and see how many people have upgraded to Panther after the first week.

The latest Watson update today includes:

• Ebay - caught up with a change in the web site that affected searching
• TV - fixed a problem that would cause the status display to not show the current location

I heard about this listening to NPR the other day: Sanyo has come up with a way to create biodegradable CDs, made out of corn. Currently, CDs (music and data) don't biodegrade, and they are filling up landfills (though our local recycling company "recycles" them, as much as that means for plastic). So making a polymer out of corn means that they can biodegrade. (I wonder if I could add my unused backup CDs on the compost in the back yard?) I'm assuming the process is similar to how Biocorp makes biodegradable plasticware out of corn.

Here is a link to a story about 'em. Sign me up! (Except for the CDs that I actually want to last a long, long time, like my iPhoto archives!)

A friend forwarded me a link to this ... uh ... not very useful app.

http://www.bernardbelanger.com/computing/NaDa/

Some minor Watson updates today:

• TV Listings to 1.7.4.2, to handle locations where tvguide provides three hours of listings, not just two hours. (No, I have no idea why or how to make your provider show three hours' worth!)
• Stocks to 1.7.4.1, to fix a URL encoding issue that prevented CBS Marketwatch news stories from being able to open
• Phone to 1.7.4.1, to fix some issues with German phone numbers.

Also, the LyricTracker module got an update streamed out to fix a parsing issue. (No version increment.)

Apple was in the news today with its iTunes updates. Certainly some interesting developments. My observations:

• I'm impressed that Apple has added a bunch of independent music to its offerings. That is surely in direct response to my criticism when the store first launched. Seriously, I'm glad that the indies are getting exposure, but I find it interesting that of the six independent artists I had mentioned, only one of them (Delerium) has any real presence in the new store. Still, one can hope that this is too small of a sample to draw any real conclusions.
• Since Apple has made a business case to release their own software on Macintosh and Windows, could it be far behind that Apple will revive its capability of deploying Cocoa applications on Windows, so that the rest of the independent software developers can do the same without resorting to completely rewriting their applications, or worse, not bothering to write a Mac version at all?
• The circle is now complete. With Apple's upcoming promotion with Pepsi, it looks like Steve Jobs is helping to sell Sugar Water. I bet John Scully is having a good laugh today.

I spent the weekend at O'Reilly's amazing "Foo Camp", a weekend get-together of about 200 people, all of whom seemed to be smarter than me. (Though apparently that was a common sentiment.) It's hard to describe what the event was like: some have equated it to Burning Man, though I don't think it was as weird as that. It was much like any other conference that I've been to, except that the attendees came from all kinds of fields, not just one area of interest like you might find at Apple's Developer Conference, so I think everybody had the opportunity to learn about stuff that wasn't on their radar before. Oh, and the lawn outside the campus and the empty offices indoors were filled with tents and sleeping bags.

A few old friends were there; and a few "famous" people that it was amazing to get to chat with; but for me, the most interesting experience was encountering the people behind so many of the cool companies and projects out there, like Meetup, the spreadsheet, the original Adventure game, BitTorrent, CVS, Wired Magazine, Syndic8, EFF, SixApart... you get the idea. The synergy was crackling in the air around us.

I saw some cool demos and technology. Bernie Krause, former member of the Weavers and now a PhD in BioAcoustics, showed us the work he has been doing, analyzing the "symphony" of sounds in undisturbed habitats, many of which have been since wiped out by human development. (His book/CD, Wild Soundscapes, sounds like an interesting read/listen.) He also demonstrated a speaker that projected audio around the room on a tight beam, the same way that somebody might shine a flashlight around. I could tell that it was a babbling brook when it was pointed elsewhere, but when the "beam" landed on me, the effect was astounding. (I'm worried that this technology will become the bane of our existence when it's used for advertising.) Jaron Lanier showed off some software that analyzed your face from a webcam image feed, then mapped it to an animated avatar "reflecting" your expressions. I missed the presentation by Scott McCloud on comic storytelling an micropayments, but only because I was working with group that was quite productively building a new XML format that will be very handy for news syndication. Stuart Cheshire gave not one but two presentations on Rendezvous that kept most people up until 1 AM -- but not everybody. (I have to apologize to Doc for waking him up -- I think it was something that I typed into a SubEthaEdit document that made everybody laugh.)