Over the weekend the San Jose Mercury News had a story about Michael White's icasualties.org. Widely regarded to be the leading authority on the US-led coalition's casualty count, the Iraq Coalition Casualties site is an excellent example of how much good the Internet can do in the hands of a motivated individual. While browsing the site I noticed Mr. White hadn't created a way for interested people to include the current total on their sites, so I sat down and started hacking. What resulted is a badge containing the  icasualties number, information from two other interesting sites, iraqbodycount.org and costofwar.com, plus the current headline photo from the Yahoo! News RSS feed on Iraq.

If you're interested, Mashing Up the War is yours to play with. There's also a tiny API behind it, which was highly educational to set up.

Longtime readers may recall the spring's Who Created the World Poll in this space ... today I'm pleased to announce we have actual photographic evidence, hosted by no less an authority than the United States Air Force.

This, my friends, is the Real Deal: a life-sized manifestation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, with a C-17 Globemaster military transport airplane for scale.  The original's available for your inspection courtesy of the USAF; exercise caution, however, since it's 3000 by 2076 pixels.

Sigh ... when my time comes, I only hope I'm able to stay as cool as the pilot of this craft, keeping it straight and level after being touched by His Quarter-Mile-Long Noodly Appendage.

[Updated: no help from any quarter.  Made another attempt to burn the DVD, which failed again. Wound up going to Fry's, investing $50 in a 2-gig thumb drive, and moving all that music over via the good old sneaker network. And then I had to figure out what to do with Allie's spanking-new iPod, which needed to be reformatted before it would talk to her PC, even though it was stuffed with songs from her dad's collection.

Long story short: it turns out that a Mac-formatted iPod won't talk to a PC, but a PC-formatted iPod will talk to a Mac. I also sense the same attitude in people, which seems more than a bit ironic.]

So I'm banging my brain against OSX again.  This time I'd like to grab my stepdaughter's 900-song iTunes library and move it from her iMac (which is running Tiger) over to her brand-new Compaq off-to-college-in-the-fall laptop.  As with previous adventures in OSX--see "In Which I Fail Miserably In My Attempt to Share a Windows Printer with OSX" and "In Which I Fail Miserably In My Attempt to Copy Files from OSX to the Network"--I am feeling very cranky and stupid right now.

Here's the deal.  Most of Allie's songs are imports from her CD collection and can't be reinstalled from iTunes.  I'm looking for a quick easy way to export these songs so she doesn't have to suck 'em all down again from the original disks.

First, I try burning them to DVD.  Ah, what a comedy of errors.  I can't figure out how to get the DVD to show up anywhere on the system, for starters.  Turns out I need to go into system preferences and re-rig the default behavior when the blank DVD is inserted, and then "name" the DVD, AND THEN go through a completely random set of actions ("Finder," "Disk Utility") before anything appears on my desktop suggesting that a blank DVD is actually in the drive.  This takes a mind-numbing amount of time to figure out, maybe a half-hour or more, mostly because I lack the vocabulary to phrase the question in such a way that makes sense to the help program or the Internet.

Then I start dragging things in from iTunes, which is problematic: try to drag too many files (over about 60) and the system will randomly hang.  Several abortive attempts later (this takes at least another hour) I have all the files dragged over to the DVD. 

Sweet, I think, clicking into the DVD to check files ... and ... arrgh.  No.  Only about 400 of the 900 files are there.  I can't tell which are missing, because the file names are not the same as the song titles, which are all I could see in iTunes.  

Next thought:  "Okay, screw it, let's just burn that sucker and go to bed."  Um.  Hmmm.  How exactly do you burn a DVD with MacOS?  Shouldn't there be, um, something?  A button?  There's nothing, just that blank-faced icon, mocking me with its simplicity. ("It's so SIMPLE," whispers the icon.  "But you can't figure it out, so you're a MORON.")

Off to Help I go again, feeling stupider and stupider, and Help is singularly unhelpful.  Off to the Web, which is opaque: apparently this is something that everybody knows how to do: they just say "burn the DVD."  

And then, finally, I find it.  To burn a DVD on MacOSX, you drag files to the DVD, and then DRAG THE FREAKING DVD INTO THE FREAKING TRASH.  (Why, God, why????)

So I do this ... and it starts humming to itself ... and it's now 1am, and I'm sick, so I go to bed.  

In the morning, I get up, and there's nothing on the screen.  No success message, no error, the disk hasn't popped out, and there's nothing to indicate a DVD was written.  So I pop the thing out, look at it, and there are writing-tracks on the DVD.  I plug this into Allie's new laptop, and nawp, there's nothing on it, as far as Windows is concerned.

Neeeeeat.  What a giant fucked-up waste of time.  (I cannot wait to take a sledgehammer to this thing; I've got the Gheto Boys' "Still" cued up on my $40 non-iPod MP3 player, which by the way works like this: I plug it into a USB port, drag files onto it, and I'm done.)

Before heading off to work I try installing a drag-and-drop SSH client called Fugu.  This kinda-sorta works; I can log onto any of several handy Unix accounts and create directories just fine, but when I try copying a file, it hangs about 90% through.  Doesn't matter which file; the same thing happens with music and with text. Sigh.

Is Fugu junk? If so, what else could I be using? What are the signs that my DVD has been successfully created? What am I doing wrong? Little help? Pleeeeze? :)

This year's version of Yahoo! Celebrates Earth Day has something different: a list of the top ten things you can do to help save the planet, along with a checkbox where you can pledge to do any or all of those things during the coming year. We just kicked over 100,000 pledges ... people of Earth, you make me proud to be one of you. :)