unplugging devices safely?

[lou_g at softhome.net]

Ok, so i was playing around with my ipod and HAL, when it comes to 
unplugging i just usually unplug (even when do not disconnect is flashing) 
as long as there is no disk activity (indicated by an icon on ipod screen). 
so i plugged it in, hotplug saw it, loaded modulespassed it to hal and hal 
opened nautillus (via gvm) (or however it works).
I then unplugged it (as described above) and checked th eloaded modules, 
they still listed the firewire modules used for the ipod (i assuemd they'd 
get unloaded when the kernel noticed it had disappeared).
then i did "lshal | grep info.product to get  anice list of all my hardware 
HAL see's and noticed the ipod was still in the list (even though it was not 
pluggged). 

So my question is, is there a specific way to safely remove hardware so 
everything know's it's gone, if not, is there a planned system? 

Other misc info
Kernel 2.6.9
HAL 0.4.1
D-BUS 0.22
UDEV 043
Hotplug 2004_09_23
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