Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Those who have known me for a long time know how big I was into Babylon 5 when it first came out; my virtual fingerprints are all still visible all over the Lurker's Guide.

I was sad to hear that Andreas Katsulas, perhaps its best actor, certainly under-appreciated by the world at large, passed away a couple of days ago at age 59.

Cigarettes were the cause, lung cancer was the result. Score yet another win for the Tobacco Industry, and a big loss for the rest of us.

Insanely Great has a posting with praise for eMusic, an online music subscription download service. Emusic doesn't have the top-of-the-charts stuff, but if you are interested in non-top-40 music, classical, jazz, etc., it's worth checking out. You can download MP3s, and you get to keep them after your subscription expires, so it might even be worth signing up for a short time, getting what you want, and then leaving.

I find it hard to browse online for music in general, and eMusic is no exception. Still, if you have a "wish list", they might find you several hits, at far less expensive than ITMS. I found a lot of stuff I had been meaning to get: Delerium, Thelonious Monk, Electronic, Señor Coconut, Sharon Shannon. (Yes, my tastes are wide.) And they have Vienna Teng's albums so how can you go wrong?

Please follow This link if you sign up so I can get a few more music credits — my wish-list is bigger than my current allotment! :-)

I'll be happy to report this as a "bug" to Apple, but I thought I'd see if anybody felt that I'm going about this all wrong.

The problem has to do with XCode. I like to use the keyboard to navigate quickly, but here's something I haven't figured out how to work around.

Annoyance #1, Viewing an arbitrary file: I can either root around in the source tree with the mouse (scrolling, disclosing groups, etc.) and eventually find the file I want, or I can choose the project view from the mouse (I use all-in-one layout), scroll up and click the tree's root (again with the mouse), click in the search field in the right corner of the toolbar, start typing the file name, and then click on the file from the list below to make its contents appear in the editor below. It would be nice to be able to select and open an arbitrary file with a keyboard command, typing a few letters of the file name, maybe an arrow key or two, and return.

Annoyance #2, Accessing code in another open project: I usually have two projects I have open all the time -- the application and its main framework. From the application project, I can command-double-click on a method to bring up its implementation if the method is in the same project, but if the implementation is in the framework project, it brings up its declaration in the .h file. Fine, but then I can't do command-option-up-arrow to get to the corresponding .m file because it's not in that project. So then I have to click on the other project, and find the desired file manually (see above).

Anybody have any suggested workarounds? Other annoyances about navigating in XCode? Please leave them in the comments....

Over a decade ago, I saw a poster that fascinated me; it was a diamond-shape graphic that organized political leanings in two dimensions, not one (the usual left vs. right). I never saw it again until today; it's called a Nolan Chart. The other dimension is essentially authoritarian vs. libertarian. The chart makes the most visual sense (to me, at least) when it's a diamond, but the Wikipedia article shows it as a square.

There's an interesting couple of charts where somebody has rated current members of Congress on that chart. Wow, the right wing is unsurprisingly authoritarian, and as expected, there are a lot of Democrats in congress who are centrist — but quite a few who are in the Authoritarian Camp, an even one over in the right. (Zell Miller? Lieberman?)

There's a quiz where you can rate yourself on that chart. (It's sponsored by a libertarian group, so there might be a bit of bias; several of the questions were framed in such as way that might skew the results. Still, it's interesting.) FWIW, my point was in the left, but close to the top.

Finally, the article that I stumbled upon — again, a libertarian bent — has an interesting chart comparing the congressional concentration vs. Kerry/Bush voters.

Yesterday Buzz introduced me to JSON, a cool way for Javascript to load remote data.

This technology, it turns out, will come in handy for Sandvox pagelets, because websites can load up interesting live data from a third-party information source without needing to go through Karelia's server as an intermediary (as our RSS pagelet does, using MagpieRSS to convert RSS/Atom to HTML).

I've recently put together a cool new pagelet which uses JSON; we'll probably make it available soon. I'm hoping to create some more JSON-based pagelets, or see others created once our SDK is released.

One thing that's really cool is that Yahoo! is going JSON for many of their services. Alas, the one that I was hoping to access was their stock quote service. They provide CSV feeds of stock data but no JSON yet. Anybody know how to give them a nudge in the right direction here? :-)