Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Making the web news yesterday was the relaunch of the Democrats.org. It looks nice, it's well-designed using Web Standards, and it shows a growing party spine. But what confounds me is that in their secure realms of the site, such as their Contribute area or their new Democracy Bonds section, their security certificate is messed up. This means that it's conceivably possible that the site might have been hijacked by, say, the Bushies or the LaRouchies or the BinLadenies, and your donations might be helping to fund them, instead of helping Howard Dean take our country back.

Naturally, I've Reported the problem to them but maybe a few more reports filed might help. I, for one, am not going to get my Democracy Bond until they fix the problem....

Last night, my business phone line rang while I happened to be at my desk. It turns out it was a fairly extensive poll, conducted by Harris Interactive. Since I've recently gotten interested in polls and polling techniques, I answered the questions and took some mental notes.

The first range of questions were a bit strange; the pollster asked about how I felt about my life's achievements. Then, with an abrupt switch, he started asking about what technology terms with which I was familiar: Blu-Ray (I hadn't heard of it), DivX (I wondered if he was talking about the popular compression format, or the failed disposable-DVD technology from a few years ago), HD-DVD, etc.

Then he started asking a bunch of political questions (which is why I've filed this story under the political topic). Most of the questions had to do about the Iraq War. Whether I support the war (I wholeheartedly don't), whether I support our troops (I wholeheartedly do), how likely I was to recommend or discourage somebody from joining the military (way less now than I might have in previous decades), and so forth. The final questions were along the lines of whether I'm better off now than I was five years ago. My answer was a resounding no: nothing to do with my family or financial situation, but because the country and the world that I am a part of — and is a part of me — is much, much worse off.

Overall, I thought the poll was well-done and certainly not a biased "push poll". I'm curious about the results, naturally. I'm also slightly curious if they will have any correlation between the technology familiarity questions and the political questions. If the poll is similar in size to the one they took recently with a survey sample of 1,017, then my answers stood for nearly three hundred thousand Americans. Amazing.

Aside: I really got a kick out of the poll they released yesterday: Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show Tops the List of TV Dads This Father’s Day. Those who have read George Lakoff's books will know why: Lakoff uses Cosby's charaacters as a prototype for the "nuturant family". Anyhow, I'm pleased that so many Americans favor the Cosby Show kind of family, not, say, the Archie Bunker kind of family.... Perhaps there is hope for us after all, if people can better connect the dots between family values and government values.

Just a head's up: My Partner at Karelia, Terrence Talbot, has finally started blogging again. It's pretty much developement stuff (so far), which is why I am posting this note in the Cocoa section. Joe Bob says "check it out."

A month ago, I put out a call for web designers. Of course, I was being coy; not wanting to talk about Sandvox yet, I mentioned that I was looking for a web designer but didn't say why.

Now the cat's out of the bag about what I'm working on for Karelia, and in fact, my blog request paid off well: several of the variants of the Karelia Home Page came from designers who answered the call.

I'm still looking for a couple of more niches to be filled, however. One is a CSS Coder ... we have several designer/coders on-board, but we have a few designs that need to be turned into actual CSS, and not enough CSS experts on-board. The other need is for a Japanese designer (and hopefully CSS coder) who can create some localized designs that will appeal to my neighbors across the Pacific. If you have any leads, feel free to send them my way. Thanks!

I previously blogged about my bad experience last week getting our app to build and run with XCode 2.1, even for PowerPC. Well, our woes continue. This is certainly the most rushed and buggy release of Apple's developer tools that I've seen in a long time. My advice: avoid it!

Last week, I had problems with a GCC option causing the program not to find its linked frameworks, when that option didn't cause any problems using XCode 2.0 (with gcc 4.0). Plus, there was a problem where even when ZeroLink was unchecked, it was still activated because Fix & Continue was turned on.

Now, we are going crazy trying to deal with XCode's new "Build Configurations." This is supposed to make the confusion resulting from the previous "Build Styles" go away. Well, actually, I think it's worse. Now, when you look at a target (of which our projects have many), you can't tell what settings are set as "overrides" for that target, and which are "inherited" from the debug (development) and release (deployment) target/setting. We are unable to get XCode to break on our code, and it's not for lack of trying. We've tried to rebuild the settings from scratch, to no avail. This has wasted a whole day so far, and we're nowhere near the light at the end of the tunnel.

Unless somebody can convince me otherwise, I'm reverting back to XCode 2.0 for a while until Apple can clean things up. Intel can wait.

I'm still excavating myself from last week's amazing WWDC, not to mention the frantic work in the previous work to get Sandvox announced. As a bit of catharsis and debriefing, I though I would do a little summary of the week's activities.

On Monday, Terrence and I, exhausted already from a week's intense work, were ready to post the announcement for Sandvox on the Karelia website some time Monday afternoon or evening. We had been preparing a preview for WWDC week so that we could talk freely about the application that week. Plus, a little public interest in the program will motivate us to get the application out the door! We were almost ready to go live; we were waiting for a couple of designs that were (ahem) a bit late arriving from the designers.

See more ...

At 5 O'clock Pacific time, we put a new face on the Karelia website.

For quite a while now, I — and my partner at Karelia, Terrence Talbot — have been working on our next big thing. We're not ready to release by any means, but we are ready to give the Mac blogosphere a preview of what is coming from Karelia later this year (and something else to think about besides the whole Intel thing). Our application is called Sandvox, and it is — in six words or less — an "iApp" for creating web sites.

We are here at Apple's WWDC this week, to get refreshers and the latest scoop on the technologies which we have been using — or will be soon using — inside the application. And, we're showing demos of the program (still in alpha state) to fellow developers, since there will be a n umber of plugin opportunities. There are a lot of great features in the app that we are excited about that aren't at all obvious by our web site; our new Sandvox Development Blog (itself built by our program) will be helping to fill in some details in the months to come as we get closer to release. Be sure to subscribe to it (RSS FEED) to be kept in the loop.

If you're interested in beta testing or getting the first copies, sign up on our home page. And vote for your favorite design — we are showcasing a selection of the Sandvox's site designs on that page.

There's a great article over at O'Reilly Radar (which is where some great O'Reilly folks have been blogging lately, leaving their usual blogs behind in the dust) called "RSS"...no..."XML"...no...uh...both?. It captures the thoughts that I have been having lately about those RSS/XML badges. A great quick read.