Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I stumbled on something that I find hard to believe ... it's not being picked up by the mainstream media, but it has found its way onto kuro5hin, Wired News, and there are various other references in a Google Search — it looks like the same day the story broke about Saddam's capture*, Bush quietly signed HR 2417 into law which expands the USA PATRIOT act. Some are calling it the dreaded "Patriot II" that no sane person could possibly be in favor of. (But the mainstream media doesn't have a single mention of it — a comparable search on Google News returns a result from "Conspiracy Planet" and another from Pravda — hardly mainstream!) What gives?

* For an even stranger trip, which I won't comment on, Google for "Yellow Dates"

Watson's 'Phone' tool was bumped to version 1.7.5.2 today to accomodate some changes that affected lookup of Canadian phone numbers.

The last few months of MacTech magazine (which I have written for semi-regularly, but not recently) have been kind of dull. Lots of reviews of gadgets or talking about technologies that are peripheral to the needs of a Mac developer have made recent issues pretty uninteresting to the likes of me.

The latest issue, December 2003, is a huge improvement. Suddenly, it's technical again. I actually learned a lot in this issue! There are articles on net networking techniques in Panther; techniques for getting stack traces to track down bugs; Cocoa in Java; APIs for Kiosk Mode. Even the non-technical articles on driving traffic to your web site and running a small software business had some fresh techniques that I'll find useful.

Kudos to the MacTech team for putting out a substantial issue! I hope this is a sign of things to come now that Dave Mark is on board as Editor-in-Chief!

There were over 1500 (!) entries submitted; 1017 were qualified entries. Yikes! It would take 8-1/2 hours to watch them all straight through Do I have a chance to win the competition? There are some very good ads — I' ve seen a small handful of them. Maybe my "message" will be interesting for enough people....

Anyhow, I'm concerned enough about things that I took the time and effort to make this commercial, so I hope you'll give it a look. If you like it, I hope you'll look at some of the other entries and, if you think it merits it, vote for it in the competition.

(BTW, the commercial was produced on a shoestring budget. I used public domain images of presidents; I enlisted the voiceover talents of Beth Holland, a fellow Alameda resident; I spent $25 licensing the music ("Call to Arms" by Giovanni Lodigiani that I found on sounddogs.com); I put it all together with iMovie.)

Check out the movie here. To vote for some ads, you'll need to create an account and vote here. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's a way just to have you directly vote on mine, oh well.)

Try this on Panther. What a cool animation!

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Choose "Security."
3. Click "Turn on FileVault..." (Don't worry, we won't actually turn it on.)
4. Authenticate yourself as an administrator, if needed.
5. A sheet will slide down saying "FileVault requires that you type your password." Enter your account's password and hit "OK"

Did you catch it? Pretty slick transition to the confirmation dialog, eh? (Probably no simple way to put that into other applications, is there? Grrrr....) At this point, you probably want to hit Cancel unless you really do want to use FileVault.

I miss ChezMark. This site used to feature a reasonably digestible list of interesting new Mac software each week or two. But it hasn't been updated for months now.

I want to keep up with the latest cool new software on Mac OS X, but the VersionTracker listings are just too darn big nowadays. I liked ChezMark because he filtered out a lot of the junk and pointed out interesting new titles.

What do you use to keep informed of new applications?

Operation Hero Miles is, I believe, a great way to help US soldiers who are allowed to come home for the holidays, but have to pay for the flights themselves (!) come home. You can donate frequent flyer miles. Participating airlines are AirTran, Alaska, American, Continental, Delta, Frontier, Midwest, Northwest, Pan Am, Southwest, United, US Airways. You can donate online, over the phone, or via e-mail.

Many soldiers on R&R leave must purchase high-priced last minute airfares to connect to their hometowns once their military flights land at the airports in Baltimore, Dallas or Atlanta. Soldiers on "Emergency Leave" must still pay the full cost of their domestic travel when they are rushed home for the family death, birth, illness or other emergency. The military does not pay the cost of their travel in the United States, so your frequent flyer miles are a huge help.

I just donated the 10,000 or so miles that have been sitting around unused in my United Airlines account. Somebody can sure use them. (I have lost track of some other accounts on Delta or American ... I wish I knew if they had any miles in them!)

What a simple way to make somebody else's life better.

Today, a number of Watson tools got updated. Here's the run-down.

• Pricegrabber
  • Synchronized with database updates at pricegrabber.com so that movies and music subcategories will display properly
  • New Categories previously only available on the web site: Babies & Kids, Home & Garden, Flowers & Gourmet, Health & Beauty
  • Preview images for movies and music now use the larger sizes to be more consistent with the other categories
  • A few minor bugfixes
• ZipCode: fixes to catch up with changes in web site
• TVGuide: fixed bug where resizing the window would hide columns
• Phone: Fixed business and toll-free listings issues
• eBay: Fixed "by seller" search
• Weather: Fixed missing forecast icons for certain locations in Georgia

Like the majority of Americans, I'm not a Dubya-Bush kind of guy. (OK, that's an understatement — stay tuned to this blog...) Then again, I was pretty disenfranchised last election because the Democrats seemed to be not that much different than the Republicans. Anyhow, I've been following Howard Dean's campaign because even though I don't agree with his take on 100 percent of the issues, he (and his campaign) seems to be actually people-powered, rather than being waged by and for the United States of Enron, to coopt a term from Molly Ivins' book.

Tonight, I took the plunge and attended a Howard Dean event in nearby San Francisco. Based on what I heard tonight (what Gov. Dean said, not just Bonnie Raitt singing — wow!), and some transcripts of recent speeches he's given regarding employment in the country and race issues, I've decided to take the red pill. Howard's my man now. (Of course, I'll support whoever it takes to get Dubya out of office, but I just don't see many of the other more "establishment" democrats being much more than just "Republicrats" that are so fun to make fun of. (Interestingly, one of Kerry's biggest online supporters has just dropped out, hat-tip to Dori)

Some interesting stats: While Dubya raises gazillions from his corporate buddies, Dean's average campaign contribution is under $100. But it's from just a whole lot of people. (And, of course, they are looking for more.) And 25 percent of Dean's contributors are under 30.

I've never gotten involved in national politics before ... I guess there's a first time for everything.

For those who use Watson's 'Pricegrabber' tool: You may experience some strange behaviors today with the Music and Movies categories. We will be 'servicing' the tool today, and the lag between the server and client updates may cause some strange behaviors.

Here's what's happening. Internally, the IDs representing music's and movie's subcategories are not handled by Pricegrabber.com the same way the rest of the subcategories are handled. As Pricegrabber has grown, subcategories from other top-level categories have encroached on the Movies and Music territory.

Today, the folks at PriceGrabber will be fixing things on their end -- and then we'll try to get the Watson tool caught up with these changes as soon as possible. But in between the time that things change on PriceGrabber's side and the new version of the Watson tool gets 'streamed' out, things may be a bit strange.

If you will be using the PriceGrabber tool today or tomorrow, be sure to re-launch Watson every so often (or pay attention to this weblog) to be notified of the update.

As promised, my pick for "turkey of the year" of Mac OS X software. No, I'm not going to pick on a little application that somebody wrote one evening in Basic that PerversionTracker might lampoon. And going after a Microsoft product, well, that's just too easy.

Quicken 2004

No, this year's Turkey award goes to Quicken, the 2004 edition of the program that never seems to get any better with each new version they issue. Every year they come up with some useless new bells and whistles that you will never use, while never actually making the program more robust and fixing the bugs. (The one positive: At least the UI is pretty and aqua-like. But that's useless if it's impossible to use!)

Here's our story: My wife has been trying to retire her ancient PC for years, and I finally convinced her to transition to the new Quicken now that it's firmly established on OS X. She spent hours and hours trying to get the data exported from an older PC Quicken to the Mac. I think she would have preferred a root canal or two. It required tons of manual data clean-up (e.g. making account names shorter) on the PC end before it could be exported. And then — get this — when we finally got it imported to the Mac, The numbers didn't add up the same! After much investigation with both of us pouring over the numbers, it turns out that certain transactions just didn't copy over. Other features, we discovered after talking on the phone with support people who insisted that we shouldn't be getting the error message we were getting, are PC-only, even though the first-level tech support people didn't realize it, and actually didn't even have a Mac around to verify. (Apologies to all my past English teachers for that last sentence.) And then there's the overall user experience, where you can't select multiple transactions and process them, or where certain columns show up or don't show up almost haphazardly.

If this were a stamp-collecting database, no big deal about the bugs. But this is people's money it's keeping track of, and we as customers deserve a lot more than this.

This program is getting 2.3 stars on its page at VersionTracker -- and I think that's generous.

And to think that I was actually offered a job to work at Intuit on the Quicken team, many years ago....

This is part three of a series... probably the last part unless I can think of some other favorite applications from small, perhaps under-publicized developers. (There are lots of other great programs out there, but these are ones that I personally tend to use fairly frequently

VueScan

I have a Canon scanner, which is great except for the fact that the drivers don't work on Panther. Canon's tech support is MIA. But VueScan is an application that does that job. The user interface is a little bit clunky, but is actually works! $60/$80

OmniOutliner

I used to use ACTA back in the early days of the Mac, and I used to yearn for a Mac OS X program that was as useful. Finally, after several revisions, OmniOutliner is now my outline processor of choice. A great way to organize tasks. $30

UnicodeChecker

A great utility to browse and search the thousands of Unicode characters installed on your Mac. I find the search capability extremely useful. Even if you aren't a polyglot, it's still handy for finding all sorts of symbols. Want card symbols? It will find you ♠ ♤ ♣ ♧, etc. Musical symbols? How about ♩ ♯ ♬. Currency? How about ₪ ₭ ₰ ₱. free

Peripheral Vision

A very useful utility to indicate visually when you have added or removed hardware to your system, mounted or unmounted volumes, gained or lost network connections, and so on. A subtle transparent display (not unlike when you adjust your brightness or volume from the keyboard) appears for a moment on your screen. Very handy. $7

Coming next: Turkey of the Year Award!

A Watson user pointed out this interesting bug, which will work in Watson or any other program with "drawers." While a drawer is opening, hit F9 to invoke exposé. When you get back to the Watson window, chances are very good that the position of the drawer will be positioned all wrong, relative to the window. (Thanks, SeannonO)

The MoveOn.org voter fund has just posted a print and video ad talking about President Bush's "Christmas List". Definitely worth checking out.

I realize that many readers of my weblog may like Bush, and for those of you, feel free to "move on." But I suspect that a lot of Americans, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, are seeing the American Dream fade away under our current leadership. If you are tired of this trend, I encourage you to check out MoveOn.org, and get involved. They are a nonpartisan group, not affiliated with any political party. Right now, they are having a membership drive to get more people on board, and thanks to some matching funds, any new member joining with a contribution of at least $20 (less than the license to a half-decent software program!), they'll get a matching donation of another $20. Follow this link here. Update: GregW pointed out that this was an insecure URL; I changed it to https

Used to be that starting around the first of December, people would say "Merry Christmas" to just about everybody they encountered. That was fine enough for many, but not for the folks who don't celebrate Christmas.

So starting last year, I noticed that nobody said "Merry Christmas" anymore, trying not to offend those who might celebrate instead Channukah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, the Winter Solstice, Festivus, or none of the above. Instead, you'd hear "Happy Holidays." Boy oh boy, has that gotten old quickly ... it's now more overused than the term "innovation" in Silicon Valley.

But now this year, it's gone even further. Every group that is doing something special this year seems to be having a "Winterfest". No holiday parties, certainly no "Christmas" parties....

What's next.... "Happy December"?

Here are a couple of unrelated online videos I discovered recently:

• The Apple Store's opening in Tokyo. I cannot believe how long these lines are. Warning: 31 Megabytes!
• Ben Cohen (ice cream guy) discusses the US's national budget with Oreo Cookies. Funny and educational!

This is part two of a series in which I showcase some of my favorite applications, which all tend to be from small companies. (Do the big ones really need any publicity from weblogs?) Check these out and give 'em a spin.

NetNewsWire

What a great way to keep up with news and weblogs. I used to have a daily ritual of web sites to visit to see if anything was new, but now I just subscribe to the feeds of my favorite sites and NNW picks up all the new stories for me. I also use NNW to post stories to my weblog. This should be on every Mac user's dock. Congratulations to Brent and team for their 2003 Eddy Award! free (NNW Lite) / $40

OmniGraffle

A great tool for building up diagrams of all types. The images it generates are very slick (with shadows and such). My only complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a way to select a group of items to drag from a "stencil" to your document. $70/$120 (Pro)

PDF Browser Plugin

I got tired of finding my desktop littered with PDFs that Safari would download for me; most of the time, I want to see PDFs that I get from the Web right in my browser window. This plug-in allows me to do this. I wish I could search PDFs from the plug-in, but otherwise it's perfect. free

DVDBackup

This is handy for occasional use when we don't get a chance to watch a movie that we've rented at home. All it needs is 5 to 10 gigs of free space on your hard drive (not always an easy thing to find!) and you can save the DVD for watching later. free

More to come soon...

Now that we are deep into the holiday season, I thought it would be nice to showcase some of my favorite Mac OS X applications. Most of these are from small development companies, not unlike Karelia. Check out these applications and get them for yourselves or as "stocking stuffers" for your friends.

RBrowser

This is a great application when you need to connect to a remote server using SSH. There are other good FTP client applications like Transmit, but I like RBrowser because it does "scp". It also has a mechanism where you can double-click a remote document to download it and open it in your text editor of choice; any save to the file is monitored and uploaded immediately. My only complaint about the app is that its UI is not completely polished for Aqua; it still holds onto many vestiges of its NeXT/Rhapsody heritage. I rely on RBrowser to maintain www.karelia.com and the other web sites I contribute to. $29/$49

LapCop

This is a great utility that monitors your network settings, and if there is a change, it emails you a warning. This is useful if your laptop is stolen; the police could theoretically use the computer's current IP address to track down its new whereabouts once the computer connects to the Internet again. Warning: Be sure to install and configure this when you are logged in as an administrator user, otherwise the installation will fail. $25/$39

SubEthaEdit

This program is vaunted for its ability to edit one document by simultaneous users (over a local network or across the Net). That feature is amazing. But it's also a great general-purpose text editor for programming and technical tasks; it features syntax coloring and sectional navigation for a wide variety of formats. free

Aquatint

A great utility if you are building applications or web pages and you want to give something the "aqua" look. $15/$50

More to come soon...