Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

James Moore suggests that bloggers place a link on their web sites linking the word Sudan to http://passionofthepresent.org, because it will increase Google's ranking of the page when somebody searches for Sudan, where genocide is going on right now, unchecked. (Note that I've put this into the right column of this weblog, if you're reading this on the Web.)

If you have a web site or weblog, please consider doing this too.

Richard Biggs was one of my favorite actors from one of my favorite TV series, Babylon 5. He passed away a few days ago.

John Hudgens, who has put together some great video compilations of scenes from Babylon 5, made an amazing tribute video (Quicktime) showing footage from Babylon 5 of his character, Dr. Stephen Franklin, reflecting the joys of life and living.

Amazingly well-done and touching.

I just signed a petition, to send to Congress and the secretaries of state of every state planning to use electronic voting machines, to ensure that our voting systems leave a paper trail.

After the Florida debacle, with all the flaws in the voting systems there, at least the votes could be re-counted if there was a problem. With the electronic voting machines in place in some states, some voters won't be able to verify their choices. No receipt is printed. There's no way of recounting the votes if there is a problem. And worse yet, from what I understand, the information is transmitted over insecure means, using verifiably crackable Microsoft technologies.

And when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it turns out that the head of the major supplier of these machines is a major contributor to one of the candidates. (Does is matter which one? This is clearly not an impartial manufacturer of black-box technology!)

Please sign the petition. It can't hurt, can it?

My wife was showing me some literature for a couple of upcoming 'Juneteenth' events in the San Francisco Bay Area. Neither of us had heard the term before; I figured it was something vaguely Shakespearean that occured on the something-teenth of June. But the literature we saw used the term as if it was a familiar day like Christmas or Labor Day.

I guess I'm an ignoramus because apparently it's been around for a long time. I found this on the history page at juneteenth.com:

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.

Well, you learn something new every day. In any case, I'll be at our local festival in Alameda, California!

SubEthaEdit, the remarkable collaborative/technical text editor, turned 2.0 today. If you haven't caught on to this amazing software, now is the time to check it out.

They are now accepting payments for 'commercial' use of this software. And donations for non-commercial use. I like to encourage good software by paying for it! If you also want to see cool independent (e.g. not-from-Apple) applications like this, I highly recommend buying some licenses!

In what is shaping up to be a weekly event, here are a couple more Watson updates to mention:

• eBay: they are still fiddling with their pages, and Watson must catch up again.
• Phone: Fixes to business listings to catch up with changes on both Web sources.

A quick note: I'm taking a couple of "days off" but I managed to sneak out an update to the eBay tool this evening that should solve problems with loading more than 100 results.

It happened again. I lost a whole bunch of unsaved work due to a crash. This time, I was converting some scribbles to lovely design documentation in OmniGraffle when my G4 suddenly shut down. (It's been doing that lately; this time I reset the power manager to see if that would help. I had been working for maybe 45 minutes, without remembering to save once. (Shame on me?) Other times, the program I'm running will crash or the Mac will freeze up, while I've been working on artistic masterpieces, programming source code, diagrams, letters to the editor, term papers, and so forth. I know it has happened to you, too. And you probably felt like an idiot for not having saved more often.

Twenty years ago, Apple came out with the Macintosh, and part of its user interface was the Save item in the File menu. Why was there a menu to save? Because back then, Macs had only one floppy drive and there wasn't enough space on them to store both programs and data. So when you were ready to save, it was a manual process that involved disk swapping. You only saved once in a while.

But that was a long time ago, and now we have fast hard drives. It would be a piece of cake for programs to continually save a snapshot of what the user is working on onto the hard disk in case, heaven forbid, something unexpected happened. So why are we still forcing users to manually save their work?

Some programs deserve credit for automatically saving. HyperCard was one of them — in fact, its lack of a 'Save' menu was disconcerting. But when you used HyperCard back then, you didn't lose data except in rare circumstances.

For a while, it seemed that Apple was going to make things better. I remember a WWDC when they were introducing the aborted "Copland" OS. Included in its document model and UI specification was auto-save. It would have been glorious. (The auto-save feature, not Copland!) If Apple had standardized on a methodology and user experience for auto-save those many years ago, think of how developers would have adapted it, and how many hours we would have saved.

Computers are supposed to enhance productivity. Forcing users to remember to periodically save every few minutes to prevent a loss of data is just plain nasty.

In a future article, I'll talk about some specific ideas as to how this work work from a user interface and user experience point of view. But for now, I hereby pledge that all future software programs that I write will not force the user to manually save, so that if there is a crash, at most a few seconds' or minutes worth of work will be lost. I urge readers of this weblog to consider doing the same.

Another link roundup ... politics and art:

An amazing website that monitors and corrects conservative misinformation in the media: Media Matters · A possible way that a vote for Nader actually not help Bush: 2-for-1 Voting · It's time for us to stop this fox from guarding the henhouse: Fire Griles · Women who do their workouts at Curves, beware: What's Wrong with Curves · Try before you buy Music: Magnatune · Animation on the web as long as you don't mind getting a headache: Akiyoshi's illusion pages · This guy's art is beautiful and disturbing: Mark Ryden

A couple more Watson updates again:

• Movies — a "fix to the fix" in which many users were only able to see the five first theaters.
• Packages — an update to properly parse information from FedEx.

Ever since the 1.2 update to Safari, this weblog has some formatting problems in its CSS .... the text crams up against the sidebars on the right. This was OK before. This behavior is also showing in Mozilla, leading me to believe that Safari is doing what's right, and that there is something in the CSS that was just taking advantage of a "bug" in earlier versions of Safari. (In IE 5.2/Mac, things are truly bizarre, so who know's what up there?) Anybody know offhand what's going on?

I updated my iPod and iTunes to their latest versions yesterday, wondering if I was going to have problems like I did a short while ago, where the process of trying to update my iPod caused iTunes and even the whole Mac to freeze up.

Sure enough, I had similar problems. Last time, I discovered that my Belkin 6-port FireWire hub's power supply wasn't plugged in all the way (a bad design I reported to Belkin without any reply from them — you'd think that if something is not plugged in properly, it wouldn't show a glowing green light!) and fixing that made the problems go away.

This time, I checked my connections, and the hub had gotten partly unplugged again. I pushed the adaptor, rebooted, and tried again. Did that fix things? No. So I took the hub out of the equation and plugged the iPod connector directly into the Mac. Another reboot, another try. Did that fix things? No!

Running out of ideas, I browsed the discussion lists at Apple's support site, and found this interesting thread: iPod and iTunes freeze during update Somebody suggested that the iSight and iPod can't be plugged into the computer at the same time, due to power usage problems. So I unplugged my iSight, and yipee, the iPod is happily transferring the almost 40 gigs of music to my iPod as I type this.

So ... if you are using an iSight and an iPod, unplug your iSight while you are using your iPod.