Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » March

So far this year I’ve had little time to bird anywhere other than Prospect Park, which, while pretty, gets a little repetitive. (I did get a life bird there a couple of weeks ago though.) Thus I’m really looking forward to getting out and doing some California birding in the upcoming week while I’m in Santa Clara for Software Development 2007 West. Looking at my schedule I have three full days open, and maybe a little extra time here and there.

Here are my tentative plans. Schedule will be adjusted to fit the weather, tides, wind conditions, and such. If any locals would like to guide/escort/tag along please drop me e-mail. It’s always nice to have company. Also if anyone has suggestions for sites I’m missing, or information about tides, best viewing spots, local mailing lists and rare bird alerts, etc. please leave a comment.

Also it would be helpful to know which of my target species are hopeless at this time of year. I will be back in May so I can try for some of these later.

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I’m now working on the accessibility chapter of Refactoring HTML. I’d like to mention some automated tools for checking accessibility. The W3C lists a couple of dozen. Which are the best? If you had to pick just two or three, which would you choose?
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Personally I listen to hardly any Internet radio, or much radio at all for that matter except when I’m driving; and being a New Yorker that’s almost never. However people who do listen to the radio seem incensed over a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to dramatically increase fees Internet radio station pay for broadcasting music. Some are even calling it a death sentence. I’m not so pessimistic, and here’s why.
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Paul S. R. Chisholm points out a new reason virtual machine based languages such as Java may sometimes outperform statically optimized languages such as C:

Portability depends on architecture (for example, x86 vs. PowerPC), but high performance depends on microarchitecture (for example, Pentium M vs. Athlon 64 X2). Today’s Core 2 chips have many high performance features missing from the 1993 original Pentiums. A good compiler like gcc can take advantage of those additional features. This is bad news if you’re using a binary Linux distribution, compiled to a lowest common denominator. It’s good news if you’re building and installing Linux from source, with something like Linux From Scratch or Gentoo/Portage. It’s also good news for just-in-time compilers (think Java, .NET, and Mono); they’re compiling on the “target” machine, so they can generate code tailored for the machine’s exact microarchitecture.

This sounds plausible in theory. What I don’t know is whether Java takes advantage of this in practice. Has anyone looked at the JIT source code lately? Can anyone say whether it makes any microarchitecture-specific optimizations?

C|Net accuses Apple of favoring iTunes songs over CD-ripped songs in iTunes random playlists. Unfortunately they don’t have the statistical chops to prove anything or do any real analysis:

It’s obviously difficult to tell whether back-room marketing deals or just dumb luck were responsible for the results we saw, but it appears that we can safely lend credence to the suspicions of myriad iPod users around the world. When it comes to choosing songs, ‘random’ clearly is relative.

Actually folks, it’s totally possible to figure out whether your results are random luck or not. For one thing, try repeating the experiment. But what you really need are better statistics. In particular try calculating the chance your results would occur by pure randomness. You haven’t published the raw data, so I can’t do it for you; but this should be well within the reach of anyone whose taken a couple of undergraduate courses in statistics. In fact, it would make a very nice final project for a statistics course. I don’t think it quite rises to the level of an undergraduate thesis though.
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I’m about 99% certain that the various problems I’ve been having on my main desktop Mac lately can all be traced to a misbehaving LaCie d2 external hard drive. (I leave 1% open for the possibility it’s the FireWire cable or controller, but I really don’t think so.)

Partially I blame LaCie for this, and perhaps EMC, but mostly I blame Apple. There is no excuse for allowing a misbehaving external hard drive, from which I have not booted, to affect the operation of the rest of the system. Mac OS X should be robust against any signal, valid or otherwise, from external devices. It should be equally prepared to handle the case where a device does not respond within the expected time frame.
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