Mokka mit Schlag

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.

Steve Jobs and others have said for years that Microsoft copies Apple. Remember the “Redmond, start your photocopiers” banner from WWDC 2004? Well now, someone deep inside the beast has admitted it. Straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s Moishe Lettvin, formerly of the Microsoft Windows Mobile PC User Experience team:

My team had a very talented UI designer and my particular feature had a good, headstrong program manager with strong ideas about user experience. We had a Mac that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI. Of course the Shell team also had some great UI designers and numerous good, headstrong PMs who valued (I can only assume) simplicity and so on. Perhaps they had a Mac too.

Emphasis added. Wow.

I just wasted at least two hours hunting down a bug that turned out to be in this PHP code fragment:

      if ($reader->hasValue) {
        echo ": " + $reader->value;
      }

Do you see the bug?
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Nathan’s, Coney Island, 2006-11-19
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Last night I got an e-mail from Rob Jett alerting me to a belated report from William Murdoch, a west coast birder, of a possible Eurasian Green Woodpecker in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, just across the street from me. Local reaction was skeptical to say the least, for several reasons:

1. The reporter only saw it with the naked eye. He did not have binoculars or a camera.
2. There are no previous reports of this species in North America, ever.
3. The bird is apparently not a long distance migrant, even in its normal range. Consequently it seems very unlikely that it could have made the trip across the Atlantic, even ship assisted.
4. If it is present, it’s likely an escapee from a zoo aviary or private collection. Hmm, I should check if the Prospect Park Zoo has lost a woodpecker recently.
5. It could be mistaken for a Lewis’s Woodpecker. That would still be a great sighting, but at least it’s not a state record. That species has shown up in New York four times previously, the closest record being in Westchester.

To top matters off, we didn’t get the report until eight days after the sighting on November 12th, so the first anybody could look for it was this morning. Thus I would conservatively rate the odds of finding this bird at about 1 in 100,000 (maybe slightly better if you allow for possible escapees); but it would be a really spectacular find if it were there, and it was a nice day anyway, so this morning at 7:00 A.M. I headed out to scan the edges of the garden and see what I could see.
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While reviewing an upcoming article of mine, a friend mentioned that some of his students are having trouble creating root directories in Windows; for example a directory such as C:\project. This certainly isn’t the case on any Windows system I own, but they’re all running Windows 2000.

Has anyone heard of anything like this? Do recent versions of XP or Vista require that all user created files be placed in C:\Documents and Settings\Username or some such? Can anyone confirm or deny this? Maybe it depends on whether or not you’re running as Administrator?