Mokka mit Schlag

After you’ve been birding for a few years, you begin to notice certain patterns in when birds arrive where. For instance, the Ruddy Ducks and American Coots pretty reliably show up on Prospect Lake every fall, and leave in the Spring. Some species are irruptive: some years they show up everywhere. Some years you’re lucky to see one.

One such species is the Red-breasted Nuthatch. It’s been pretty common in New York in winter for the last few years, but almost totally absent this season. Peter Dorosh just found our first one since May in Prospect Park yesterday at one of the feeders. They’re probably staying north due to a good cone crop this year.

The four banded Canada Geese I first spotted back on October 30, and that have continued in Prospect Park ever since, have been identified. Turns out they’re locals. They were banded at the Pennsylvania Ave. Landfill in Queens on June 26, this year. NA07, NA23, and NA 27 are adult males, NA26 is an adult female.

A piece I’m writing for IBM developerWorks has turned into the article that ate Pittsburgh. Trying to understand and document a certain class keeps leading me deeper into PHP internals, and is revealing some bugs in a certain PHP extension bundled with PHP 5.1 and later. Naturally I want to fix these.

However it’s all C code, and I haven’t done any serious C work in 15 years. (I did write some C++ about eight years ago, but this is straight C, not C++.)

What IDE are folks using on the Mac (or alternately Linux) to hack PHP itself? Xcode? Eclipse with the C development tools installed? Something else? This is just a short quick open source patch project (I hope) so I’d prefer not to pay multiple hundreds of dollars; just use the simplest, quickest thing that will get the job done.
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I’m getting ready to install PHP 5.2.0 here. Mostly I just want to try to make it link to a newer version of libxml. If it all goes pear-shaped, I’ll post a note on Cafe au Lait while I restore.
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Does anyone know how to upgrade open source libraries bundled with Mac OS X? My specific concern is with the version of libxml installed on this server (2.6.16) which has serious bugs in RELAX NG validation. I want to upgrade that to version 2.6.26.
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Today is an auspicious day. For the first time in several years I am putting fingers to keyboard to commence a completely new book, my first one since Effective XML. This is always an exciting and anxious time.

For the last few years I have written several second and third editions, and generated a copious amount of articles and conference presentations. However the book work has really slacked off. Quite a few good ideas never found a publisher; but the contract for the next book is now signed. It’s still a computer book, but it’s branching out into a new area I haven’t previously written about. Look for it in early summer 2007.