Mokka mit Schlag

According to State Farm,

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB®) has compiled a list of the 10 vehicles most frequently reported stolen in the U.S. in 2005.

1. 1991 Honda Accord
2. 1995 Honda Civic
3. 1989 Toyota Camry
4. 1994 Dodge Caravan
5. 1994 Nissan Sentra
6. 1997 Ford F150 Series
7. 1990 Acura Integra
8. 1986 Toyota Pickup
9. 1993 Saturn SL
10. 2004 Dodge Ram Pickup

This doesn’t match my expectations at all. With the single exception of the 2004 Dodge Ram Pickup, these are all a decade old or older. Can anyone explain why?
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Mostly the Migration Assistant in Mac OS X works, but there are some surprising things that don’t come across and have to be reinstalled manually. So far I’ve noticed:
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What tools are people using to validate their web pages? In Refactoring HTML so far I’m writing about four, somewhat related tools:

• W3C Validator
• LogValidator
• xmllint
• The button/menu item in your editor that says “Validate this document”

Anything else worthy of mention? In particular, is there anything significantly different enough from these four that it deserves to be called out separately? Or is there anything better that should replace one of these options? (This is a relatively small book, and I am trying very hard not to cover absolutely every possibility and option.) Open source tools are strongly preferred.

Prospect Lake attracts a lot of interesting waterfowl in the winter, including two recent Northern Pintails, so I thought I’d take a quick spin around the lake today after lunch and see what I could see. I thought maybe I’d get a Scaup, Redhead, Canvasback, or even a Eurasian Wigeon; but I was not expecting a life bird. However, there it was. A Red-necked Grebe. I’ve managed to miss this bird on multiple trips where either it was expected or other people saw it but not me, so it was especially nice to pick it up in my backyard. It’s my first Prospect Park lifer for the year.
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It’s a slow Sunday morning so I was going to browse around a new language I’d been hearing rumors of, and maybe send them a little link love if I liked what I saw. However it seems all their tutorials, manuals, white papers, and almost everything else are in PDF. Yuck. Not worth my time.

They’re complaining that they can’t get any thought leaders to pay attention to them. If they insist on publishing on the Web in a format designed for paper books, it’s no wonder no one has noticed them. Write back when you start noticing this little thing called HTML, guys. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be big one of these days.
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Rails (and similar frameworks like Seam, Grails, etc.) work by inspecting database schemas and dynamically generating code at runtime. They implicitly assume a SQL database, which isn’t really a good fit for most publishing applications. Sure you can slice and dice documents enough to force them into tables, but it’s a lot like pounding screws into set concrete with hammers.

Many publishing applications, especially generic systems like Wikis, content management systems, and blog engines, would be better served by a native XML database and XQuery; e.g. eXist instead of MySQL. What would a Rails-like system look like in this environment? What would the conventions (instead of configurations) be?
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