imagewriter gives dd the wrong path and hoses the partition table

[Scott Severance]

I'm using usb-imagewriter 0.1.3-0ubuntu1 on Ubuntu Jaunty. When I tried to write an image, imagewriter issued the following command:
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dd if=/home/scott/bin/install/iso/ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img of=/dev/sdb
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Of course, writing to the device instead of the partition hosed my USB stick, forcing me to use fdisk to wipe everything and start over. GParted couldn't understand the stick; fdisk showed four partitions (instead of one as expected) and reported errors:
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Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 2047 MB, 2047678976 bytes
63 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 3906 * 512 = 1999872 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8ef631df

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 ? 540844 1042316 979374166 66 Unknown
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(734, 123, 14) logical=(540843, 53, 21)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(120, 143, 6) logical=(1042315, 32, 22)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb2 ? 883091 1892906 1972168331 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(187, 180, 14) logical=(883090, 54, 52)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(784, 0, 13) logical=(793323, 43, 1)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb3 ? 839687 1339804 976730017 7d Unknown
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(252, 59, 46) logical=(839686, 2, 39)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(139, 118, 4) logical=(240221, 51, 28)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb4 ? 1069986 1072116 4161550 6f Unknown
Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(370, 101, 50) logical=(1069985, 6, 11)
Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(10, 114, 13) logical=(1072115, 59, 44)
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order
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imagewriter should have used the following dd command:
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dd if=/home/scott/bin/install/iso/ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img of=/dev/sdb1
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