Mokka mit Schlag

Red-eared Slider, Trachemys scripta elegans, Prospect Park. 2007-05-25

These are common in Prospect Park and other New York area parks. They’re not native. The colonies are all the results of released pets. These cute little guys grow into much larger turtles, and turtles just can’t hold a child’s interest as long as a dog or cat.

In many places, they’re crowding out the native turtles. I rarely see any other turtle species in Prospect Park these days.
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Apple Insider is reporting that Apple plans to discontinue the Mac Mini. I can only hope they’re wrong. The last two Macs I’ve bought, including the one that powers this site, are both Minis; and I’ve assumed I’ll be able to buy more in the future.

The Mini is a wonderful apartment computer: fits in a small space, draws little power, makes almost no noise. I’m tempted to replace my dual G5 tower with a Mini next go round. The expandability of the tower is nice, but to be honest all I ever do is plugin one USB or Firewire device after another. I’ve never actually bothered to pop the hood and install a new drive or ATA card or anything.

If I were buying a new desktop today, a tricked out Mac Mini with 2 gigabytes of RAM and 160 GB hard drive would cost $1249. By contrast the minimum Mac Pro (1GB, 250GB) starts at $2200, and goes up to $2499 when I add enough RAM to run Parallels. I could use the bigger hard drive in the Mac Pro and might want a more powerful graphics card (though I’m not sure about that) but otherwise the Mini is adequate for my needs.

Small is beautiful. More importantly, small is convenient and cheap. Add an HDMI port, a cable card, and DVR software; and the Mac Mini could become the digital hub that AppleTV so much isn’t. We need more Minis, not less. Please Apple: don’t kill the Mini.

Quick tip: if you’re playing with JavaFX Script, stick to NetBeans 5.5. The JFX plugin is pretty throughly broken in 6.0, as are several other unrelated features. 6.0 M9 is way too buggy to be used in production just yet.

I noticed this morning that the main World of Warcraft site is indeed raw XML styled with XSLT. They’re serving straight XML directly to browsers. It appears to be mostly well-formed HTML (but not XHTML) wrapped up inside a custom page element.

I’m not quite sure why they’re doing this. It seems like an extra burden just for a different root element, but maybe the stylesheet does a little more. Hmm, looks like they’re using XSLT as a client-side templating language. Not bad. Saves them bandwidth and server-side processing I expect.

Interestingly the HTML includes some JavaScript. JavaScript inside XML didn’t used to work, even after a transformation to HTML. I’m guessing at least some browsers have gotten smarter about that.

Yesterday Shane Blodgett led the Brooklyn Bird Club up the Doodletown trail in Bear Mountain State Park. Some birds are common there that are quite unusual here in the city and vice versa. In particular, it’s a good site for Yellow-throated Vireo, Hooded Warbler, Blue-winged Warbler, Golden-winged Warbler, and Cerulean Warbler. The latter would be a life bird for me.

Once we got high enough up on the mountain, we saw several Ceruleans and heard quite a few more. They’re small birds that flit around in the tops of the trees, so they’re hard to spot. However I did eventually see one from the water tank, and that was my life bird for the day. We also had Golden-winged Warbler and Yellow-throated Vireo at the water tank. I thought the latter was a life bird too, but when I got home and checked my records, it seems I saw Yellow-throated Vireo a couple of times in Prospect Park last year, so I only got two life birds this weekend, not three.
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Malacosoma americanum, Mine Road, Rockland County, 2007-05-20