Mokka mit Schlag

I don’t usually carry my cell phone with me, but for some reason I took it with me to lunch today, and it was a good thing I did. Halfway through my pork souvlaki Peter Dorosh texted me with news of a Pine Siskin at the Breeze Hill feeders in Prospect Park. Siskins are regular in the park in the fall but they’re usually only a few each year, and I’d managed to miss them all before now.

When I arrived at the feeders I ran into Rob Jett, who had arrived fifteen minutes earlier and promptly pointed out the bird to me. It immediately became apparent why I had missed it for the last several years: a Pine Siskin looks almost exactly like a winter plumage American Goldfinch, and it was hanging out with maybe ten goldfinches so you had to look close to realize what it was. Rob’s scope helped. The upper back was somewhat striped on the Siskin and more plain on the goldfinches. The bill on the siskin was also thinner than the thick finch bills. However that wasn’t always easy to see.

Nonetheless I’m confident I did have the bird. In the future I’m going to have to pay more attention to the goldfinches in winter. Who knows how many siskins I’ve overlooked in the last four years?

Just a little Google fodder. Should you encounter this uncommon error message when trying to compile or run a Java program:

$ javac -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/ClassNotFoundException: error in opening JAR file /usr/local/java/jre/lib/rt.jar

it means that your installation of the JDK, and likely your original download is corrupt. Delete it, download again, and reinstall. This can occur with essentially any Java program: the interpreter, the compiler, jar, or a program merely written in Java such as LimeWire.

For reasons that aren’t especially clear, this bug seems to occur most frequently on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon when running in a virtualized environment such as VMWare. At least those seem to be the common factors for everyone else I found with this problem when googling it myself.

So I have an article due about Java 7 two days ago, and I discover that my Linux box has a bad Ethernet card (or port, or some such). I don’t have time to run out and buy a new one; but fortunately I have just purchased a new Intel MacBook so I grab a demo copy of VMWare Fusion and an Ubuntu 7.1 Gutsy Gibbon Image and install that. However, I don’t have the MacBook setup with all my files yet so editing, the keyboard is a little wonky, and the screen is small. I don’t really want to type on that system just yet. So instead I turn on terminal sharing in Ubuntu running in the VM and log in over the wireless network from my main desktop PowerMac using Chicken of the VNC. I’m now running Java 7 on my PowerMac G5 over the network! Shockingly this all works.

Unfortunately there’s a at least a two-second delay between when I type a character on my end and when it shows up on my screen. So install sshd on Ubuntu using Synaptic (all over the network from Chicken of the VNC). I do a quick “ifconfig -a” in an Ubuntu terminal to determine my IP address, and then login from the Mac terminal. Now I can do xtermish things from my regular monitor and keyboard, and performance is acceptable.

What a brave new world we live in. :-)

Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2007-10-21

I just ordered one of Apple’s new MacBooks. They just released them so this seemed like the best time to buy. There won’t be any new notebooks released until MacWorld in January, and if anything is released then it’s likely to be a MacBook Pro rather than a MacBook. I don’t use my laptop as a primary machine, just for traveling, so weight is more important to me than screen size. Thus I prefer the 13″ MacBook to the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros.

The Pros do have a faster graphics card, but it’s not like I’m going to be playing WarCraft on my laptop. The Pros do have an option to have a matte screen instead of a glossy one. The MacBook is glossy only. Generally, I prefer the matte screen; but that they just be what I’m accustomed to. Hopefully, after a week or two, the glossy screen will look normal to me. To clinch this one, the MacBooks have a smaller native resolution (that is, a larger pixel size) and I prefer not to squint.

A few years ago the iBooks were crippled relative to the PowerBooks–for instance they could only mirror the desktop to a second monitor, not expand the desktop across two displays–but these days the main difference seems to be screen size. The newest MacBooks use the same basic chipset as the Pros and the CPU’s only about 10% slower. All but the base model even have a dual layer SuperDrive. Possibly the speakers are a little weaker in the MacBook. The low-volume speakers have been my biggest disappointment with my old TiBook; but even if they are, the smaller size is still more important to me.

I was tempted to wait for the hypothetical, solid state, ultraportable MacBook, but I don’t really know if any such project exists, or when it will come out if it does.
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Zipcar and Flexcar have agreed to merge. This is exactly the sort of merger that I think ought to be prohibited by antitrust laws: two competitors doing exactly the same thing, even if they are both still Tiddlywink operations by Fortune 500 standards. I’d much rather see them compete in the marketplace than collude. However there will be at least one immediate benefit for ZipCar customers: more insurance.

Effective immediately, Zipcar is raising their coverage to $300,000 per incident for members 21 and over instead of the state mandated minimum. It will also soon be possible to rent Zipcars in Flexcar’s cities: Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland and Atlanta. Now if they could only find the cars they think they have in Brooklyn, everything would be hunky dory.