Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I got back from a week's vacation (and isolation from any computer), which explains the lack of a bug report on Friday. But thanks to the many folks who have continued to keep this new tradition alive....

So what are you gonna report this coming Friday? Answer in the comments....

Brent is off to an early start on Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday ... so I'd better get on the ball.

This week's bug is inspired by the recent interview with John Gruber. He mentions that Lucida Grande, the system font on OSX, needs an italic version. (Well, technically, an oblique version since it's a sans-serif font.) What he said! It's crazy how Safari substitutes Helvetica Oblique for it, too (see below). I have been lamenting this for years, but it didn't occur to me to submit it as a %#$#$# bug report until now! So now I have .. bug 4223632.

Lucida really needs a true oblique variant, not Helvetica!

So why don't you, dear reader, do the same. (Use this if you don't have an Apple Developer Account.) (Hopefully, John will too.... he may never be Chief UI designer or Chief UI Critic at Apple, but he, like you, can have some impact.

(By the way, I will miss next Friday for this exciting series. If all goes as planned, I will be nowhere near a computer then. So please carry on without me — don't let me down — and I'll resume the following week. I have some great ideas about difficulty deleting songs in iTunes and photos in iPhoto to report...)

When I was a kid/teenager, I was an avid stamp collector. Years later, postage rates are almost triple what it was, all stamps seem to be self-adhesive, and the topics on the commemoratives rarely seem that interesting.

But I've noticed some nice new geeky stamps. At the post office, I found this quartet. Von Neumann? Richard Feynman? Coooool.

And let's not forget last year's stamp of Bucky Fuller. Probably the weirdest stamp I've ever seen!

And now, the geekiest, available end-of-September: Muppet Stamps! I'm going to have to get hundreds of them!

(Note: Never buy stamps online through the mail; get them at your post office. When you buy them through the mail, they are individually packaged in cardboard and plastic. Just about the most wasteful packaging I've ever seen. Harumph.)

Take a look at the link at the bottom of this page ... it's abuse@your ISP. Cool, it's a spam trap. The email conversation on the aforementioned page, about somebody mistakenly thinking that they were being linked to, is amusing....

It's about time they started this project! It will take a while to catch up with Luntz's playbook. Now if some "blue" moneybags (like the blue companies listed here) would send them a little "green" love...

Last night, my wife and I were doing some online research in a few varying topics. Time and time again, we discovered that the web site that would have had what we needed was either hopelessly out of date, or even expired completly, only to be visible via Gooogle's cache or the Wayback machine.

I realized then that anybody who sets up a website should be given the same stern warning that should be given to anybody considering buying a turtle as a pet: Be sure it is cared for even after you are gone.

I'm no reptile expert, but apparently box turtles can live to be 100 years old. That means that unless you get your turtle when you're a toddler and you wind up getting wished a happy 100th+ birthday on the Today Show, the turtle is going to outlast you, so you'd better consider who's going to take care of it next. Similarly, your web site needs to outlast you. I don't mean that you need to keep it going personally for the next century, but realize that whatever interest you have in some topic or activity is probably going to fade, but others are still going to want to access that information in the future. So letting your content collect dust or, worse yet, letting the domain name expire, is really annoying. You need a hand-off plan for when your personal involvement wanes.

A Web site, like a turtle, is a long-term commitment.

It's amazing to see Cindy Sheehan's vigil is still in the limelight. It is getting to be more and more like the ending scene of "Field of Dreams."

One of the most interesting daily reads is the weblog of Cindy herself. The latest post is a great read.

Running for President?

What the heck?

Update:

OK, by the time you read this, this is all over the blogosphere and probably the news. Since it seems to be such a new development, I looked on Technorati to see how long it's been discussed. The earliest mention of it I could find was this post. (Note that it's pointing to his web page at his hosting site, not at the walken2008.com domain.)

What's really cool is that what also came out recently — dated today, in fact — is the news that Walken wants to play a zombie.

Or, maybe it's the same story...

I'm going to try to start a new regular feature for most Fridays. Others do Friday Cat Blogging, but seeing that I'm terribly allergic to the cute little beasts, I will have to try something else.

My idea is Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday, in which I point out an annoying Apple "bug" and encourage all of my readers (Yes, you!) to report that bug (or some other bug you are inspired by) to Apple. If enough of us squeak, they might fix it.

I've been doing this on my own for a long time. For instance, I've issued bug reports about:

• #3418488: Safari, please detect if a page has an RSS feed available (fixed!)
• #3460492: Please add PDF viewing directly to Safari (fixed!)
• #3568756: iTunes needs a way to store cover art in external files (I hate having to embed image data into every song file in an album; wastes precious iPod space!)
• #4146413: System needs to look inside files to find metadata (see "man 5 magic" at the command line)

But today, I'm going report, and encourage others to report, the following annoyance. You insert a CD into iTunes, and the GraceNote/CDDB database has more than one data entry. You have to choose which one you want -- but the information Apple presents isn't enough to make an informed choice. Daniel J. Wilson (Membranophonist) wrote a good explanation of this — He even provides a mockup on how to solve it.

So here's my suggestion. If you are a member of Apple Developer Connection, log in here. If you are not, go to this page. In your own words, describe the problem and offer a solution.

Who knows, we might have an impact. (I just submitted mine; bug #4214525.)

Feel free to leave suggestions for future editions of Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday in the comments.

It's time for the occasional obligatory music post. My musical tastes are probably less sophisticated than yours, so feel free to turn up your nose now. At least my tastes are eclectic.

I've noticed that way that I've been introduced to music has changed drastically in the last few years. With the omnipresence of the Internet and the fact that I'm rarely anywhere near a radio, my exposure to new music is not really that mainstream.

See more ...

I've been reading for weeks about an imminent iPod phone. OK, fair enough ... I guess it's a cell phone that you can also use for listening to your music.

I've also been reading rumors or conjectures of an iPod video, along with accompanying videos for sale by the Apple Store. Considering that iTunes already supports videos, it's not a big stretch.

But what I would like to do is go out on a limb and offer one more prediction. What happens when you combine the notion of the state-of-the-art cell phone (with picture-taking capability standard fare these days) with QuickTime and its H.264 compression, which Apple touts as being great for mobile phones?

A video (ipod) phone, with audio/video recording, not just playback. (And perhaps more far-fetched, transmission — now we're talking beyond Dick Tracy).

Why would they do this? Because the whole "iPod Phone" and/or "iPod Video" is not that particularly interesting. The former, as it is currently speculated, is just combining two items into one package, the only real opportunity for synergy is ringtones. The latter is just an evolutionary step (Heck, it's practically been done already), and it's not like a tiny handheld TV is very useful or exciting. So for this new thing to be interesting, it has to be thinking way outside the box.

That's just my prediction. Take it or leave it.

Part of the process of my coming up with the original idea for Sandvox was seeing what CSS could do. I read Jeffrey Zeldman's book, Designing with Web Standards. And I was inspired by the CSS Zen Garden.

That was all a while ago, of course.

A few days ago, I came across a couple of online presentations that were actually published a year ago, by Douglas Bowman. They get a lot of the important across in a concise presentation.

The first is Beautiful Interfaces; the other (more technical) is No More Tables. This is the tastiest CSS Kool aid on the web.

The presentations themselves, BTW, are great testimonials. Take a look at any page of the presentation as HTML source. Or, drag this link [Toggle CSS] to your bookmarks bar, and click it when viewing a page of the presentation, to see what content there is when you strip away the presentation.

If you are using Subversion, as we are, you owe it to yourself to check out bbum's entry on Using FileMerge with Subversion.