Mokka mit Schlag

For birders the most important part of the solstice season is not presents under the tree or turkey (at least not domestic turkey) but rather the bird counts that end one year and start the next and that have done so for 110 years now. The annual Christmas Bird Count takes place globally for a couple of weeks around Christmas. You can usually find one near pretty much any significant human habitation. This year I did the Brooklyn count on the Saturday before Christmas, the Central Park count on the Sunday before Christmas, and then flew to New Orleans for the New Orleans East count on the Saturday after Christmas (and also to visit family, I feel compelled to mention). It’s especially fun to do bird counts in areas you don’t know all that well, because you’re virtually guaranteed to find something interesting and new.

On Saturday the interesting and new bird for me was an Inca Dove, or rather four of them I spotted in a Live Oak tree in a vacant lot along Hayne Boulevard across the street from Lake Pontchartrain. No photos I’m afraid. On bird counts I usually don’t bring a camera so I can concentrate on finding and counting the birds rather than on photographing them.
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Three regexps for the Python-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Ruby lords on their Rails of stone,
Nine for C++ doomed to die,
One for Larry Wall on his dark throne
In the Land of Perl where Obfuscation lies.

One regex to match them all
One regex to find them
One regex to replace them all and in the text file bind them
In the Land of Perl where Obfuscation lies.
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A recent crash of Firefox 3.6 B3 Namoroka led to an unusual and annoying situation. My main Mac is a MacBook laptop connected to a large external monitor. When docked, I use the larger externally display is my main monitor. The menubar goes there and most of my attention goes there. However, Firefox started opening windows on the smaller laptop display that’s off to my left, and that I have to crane my neck to see.

This seems to be a regular problem, or at least it used to be circa Firefox 3.0. However, the solution I found on the Web — deleting the localstore.rdf file —had no effect. Various other things I tried were equally ineffectual. What eventually worked, was the following:
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Here’s a troubleshooting tips it took me a few days to figure out. If Windows Vista reports your network printer as off-line and won’t print anything, but the printer will print just fine from other computers on the network, especially Macs, check to see if the printer picked up a new IP address from the DHCP server. Macs are smart enough to still recognize and find the printer even when its IP address has changed. Windows Vista PCs aren’t, and get seriously confused when a printer moves from one IP to another.

If this is indeed what happened, you’ll need to delete the old printer from the printer control panel and add the printer as if it’s a completely new printer. I don’t happen to know how to retrieve or reassign any jobs still pending for the off-line printer.

Minor user interface inconsistencies still annoy me, even in otherwise excellent products. Usually the problems I notice are GUI problems. However, recently I’ve noticed an audio user interface problem, this time in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Why, oh why, do you put the microphone to sleep by saying, “Stop listening” but wake it up by saying, “Listen to me”? Obviously, the correct, parallel command is “Start listening”. And while I’m on the subject of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, why can I say, “Cap that”, but not “Capitalize that”?

Don’t forget to update the time in your digital camera to account for the recent Daylight Savings Time shift. Cameras are not as smart as our modern computers and cable boxes. They don’t automatically update for changing to and from Daylight Savings Time. you also need to remember to change the time settings in your camera when you move between time zones. Otherwise, a few months later you can find yourself puzzling over photos of diurnal raptors that seem to have been taken at 3 AM in the morning.