Mokka mit Schlag

Sachem Skipper, Atalopedes campestris
Floyd Bennett Field, 2007-09-23

Monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus
Floyd Bennett Field, 2007-09-23

As many monarchs as we see around here, we don’t see too many monarch caterpillars because there isn’t that much (or any) milkweed in most of the parks. I spotted this caterpillar grazing on milkweed on a Brooklyn Bird Club field trip this morning. It’s getting a little late in the season for caterpillars. I hope this fella can metamorphosize and head south before winter hits.
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Coccinella bipunctata
Oslo, Norway, 2007-09-08
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I do most of my presentation slides in pure XML, but I also do a few more high-level/less-code talks in PowerPoint. Sometimes I need to give the same presentation to different audiences or at different lengths. In XML it’s easy to “comment out” individual slides or whole sections to reduce a presentation to size. Is there any plausible way to do this in PowerPoint?
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My search for a reliable, fast, correct, usable program to synchronize my G5 with my TiBook over Ethernet continues. It had been almost a year since I last evaluated and rejected Decimus Synk, but it had been through several minor versions since then. I figured it was time to give it another try, and see if Decimus had fixed the bug syncing large (> 2.1 GB) files that had led me to reject it last year.

I synced up the TiBook before I left for Norway and all went well, after I finally excluded enough data to allow the desktop content to fit on the laptop. However when I came home and ran the sync in the other direction, Synk hung on my Thunderbird Inbox. Seems I hadn’t cleaned it out enough in Norway and it had grown from just about 2.0GB to 2.4GB in the week I was away. Apparently that was enough to break Synk.

When are programmers going to learn that a signed four-byte int (or even an unsigned four-byte int) just isn’t big enough to hold a file size any more? It hasn’t been large enough for years. Heck, I’m not sure even a long would be large enough for some applications. It’s not just e-mail Inboxes that are big but any sort of data recorded from the outside world: sound, video, scientific imagery, DVD images, backup sets and more. Large files are proliferating. We’ve got to stop ignoring them.
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Daring Jumping Spider, Phidippus audax
Prospect Park, 2007-09-16
Thanks to Jay Barnes for the ID
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