Mokka mit Schlag

It’s sometimes easy to forget that New York is a coastal city, but it is; and yesterday Peter Dorosh led the Brooklyn Bird Club on an excursion to three of our local coastal sites.

We started the day at Calvert Vaux Park (nee Dreier-Offerman Park), one of the most underbirded sites in the borough. This park is nestled between Coney Island and the Verazzano Narrows Bridge on Gravesend Bay where Coney Island Creek enters. It’s mostly built on rock excavated during the construction of the Verazzano Narrows Bridge. It’s small, about 70 acres, but very productive, especially in Fall. We arrived their about 7:30 and spent 3 and a half hours there racking up almost 60 species, including two new ones for my Kings County list: Northern Pintail and Eastern Bluebird. That last one is particularly hard to find in the city limits. I’ve only seen it once before in New York City, and that was on Staten Island. Pintails are rare here everywhere except Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

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The town council of Pahrump, Nevada trampled all over the American flag this week and spit on the graves of everyone who ever fought to defend freedom of speech, voting 3-2 to ban flying any foreign flag above the U.S. flag or alone.

I hereby declare the three idiots who voted for this measure to be un-American and unpatriotic. I’m grateful I don’t live there, but if I did I think I’d be ordering a Mexican flag about now.

I downloaded the javac sources and gave them a whirl with ant on my PowerBook. No success. They wouldn’t compile. I’m not sure whether this is because I’m using a Mac or because I’m using Java 5, and they want Java 6. There seem to be several missing or incompatible classes.
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Apparently XOM and JDOM aren’t the only projects to consider interfaces to be more trouble than they’re worth. I just noticed that JAXB 2.0 now uses singles classes for its generated files rather than separate interfaces and implementation classes like version 1.0 did. Given that these are generated code that should not be directly modified or extended by the programmer, this seems an obvious choice.

From the Apache Harmony bug tracker:

In Processing XML with Java, I used an example of plain text, XML-RPC, and SOAP clients that communicate with a Fibonacci number server I run here on www.elharo.com. Originally I wrote the servers in Java using the Java Servlet API. However, problems with Tomcat meant that the server went down every few months. When I moved this server from Linux to a Mac I didn’t even bother to reinstall Tomcat, and instead decided to port the servers to PHP 5. PHP has its own idiosyncrasies, but I use it for other things on this server (including this blog), and it didn’t seem worth keeping Tomcat running just for a few simple scripts.
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