Yesterday was the annual Kings County/Queens County Christmas Bird Count. I did the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with Nancy Tim and Liz White. We found 30 species total, a surprisingly large number. I’ve been in the gardens a lot lately and haven’t seen nearly this much. It just goes to show that if you go out early, look carefully, and walk slowly, there’s more out there than you think.
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Since last week’s Warcraft patch I’ve noticed a few significant changes here and there in Azeroth that foreshadow the Burning Crusade. Among them:
CookieSafe 2.0 (a Firefox add-on) is seriously broken, It no longer allows you to manually enable or disable cookies for a site from its popup menu. I am not the only one having the problem. Stay with CookieSafe 1.x for the moment.
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Several people have started to push back on the REST vs. WS-* and RELAX vs. W3C XSD and Rails vs. JEE fronts with a self-defeating argument. Well, of course, you’re right they say; but it doesn’t matter. The big vendors are selling these big, expensive complex solutions; and that’s all the CIO hears; so that’s all that matters. Sure, you can get the job done better/faster/cheaper with Rails/REST/RELAX, but you won’t. Well, to these pessimists I have a one-word response:
Well, at least one right-winger doesn’t. Here’s a howler from Taylor Dinerman at Pajamas Media explaining why we shouldn’t bother to test weapons systems before buying and deploying them:
Certainly testing sounds reasonable. Why not make sure the stuff works before blowing billions on it? But the testing fixation ignores that, like software, most successful weapons systems are best debugged after being deployed. And some weapons systems were never tested at all before deployment.
