There was a Red-Shouldered Hawk!

There was a kestrel (though I didn’t get a good angle on it)…

And lots of kinds of smaller birds, such as black phoebes.

The cool thing is the location where I managed to see all these great birds. Where was it? These were all in the parking lot at my new job!

By the way, here’s a peek at the building, while a nice sunset is going on to light it up.

And if you use the taskbar icon to adjust the volume, it makes a loud blatt in your ear as soon as you let go of it.  That’s not much good either.

I decided I wanted a quick keyboard-shortcut way to go play/pause, and to increase or decrease the volume.  Only problem was, at work I’m not allowed to install any outside software.  So it had to be done with nothing but a script.  Turns out the Windows Script Host can emulate the special media-player keys on a multimedia keyboard, like so:

/*
To use, create a desktop shortcut with command line argument V+n, V-n, or P,
and give that shortcut a hotkey.  That hotkey will then be a quick way to
operate the media player, emulating a keyboard with built-in multimedia keys.
*/

// CONSTANTS:  (I wish JScript actually had such a thing...)
var VOLUME_MUTE  = "\xAD";
var VOLUME_DOWN  = "\xAE";
var VOLUME_UP    = "\xAF";
var NEXT_TRACK   = "\xB0";
var PREV_TRACK   = "\xB1";
var STOP         = "\xB2";
var PAUSE_RESUME = "\xB3";

var wshell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
if (WScript.Arguments.Length == 0)
{
    WScript.Echo("Usage: V+n to increase volume, V-n to decrease, P to Play/Pause");
}
else
{
    var arg = WScript.Arguments(0).toUpperCase();
    if (arg.charAt(0) == 'V')
    {
        var bump = parseInt(arg.substring(1));
        if (bump > 0)
            for (var i = 0; i < Math.min(bump, 30); i++)
                wshell.SendKeys(VOLUME_UP);        // bumps it about 4%
        else if (bump < 0)
            for (var i = 0; i > Math.max(bump, -30); i--)
                wshell.SendKeys(VOLUME_DOWN);    // about 4%
        else
            WScript.Echo("V must be followed by a positive or negative number");
    }
    else if (arg.charAt(0) == 'P')
        wshell.SendKeys(PAUSE_RESUME);
    else
        WScript.Echo("Command '" + arg + "' not recognized");
}

So this script can, with command-line arguments, do the things we need.  Now all you need to to to make hotkeys do the job is to create a shortcut to the script on your desktop.  I created three: “Volume Up”, “Volume Down”, and “Pause ~ Resume”.  The first has a command-line argument of V+2 and a shortcut key of Ctrl+Alt+Numeric-pad Plus.  The second has an argument of V-3 and shortcut key of Ctrl+Alt_Numeric-pad Minus.  The third has an argument of P on the command line and a shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+Numeric-pad Asterisk.  (I tried to use the Windows key but the desktop keyboard-shortcut thing won’t support it.)

The reason I had the volume go down by three but up by two is firstly, because I usually need to decrease the volume more urgently than I need to increase it, and secondly, having them differ by one allows me to fine-tune a desired level by going back and forth a bit.

[Update] Eek — under Windows XP, when I tried hitting the key a few times while the computer was a bit busy, the desktop locked up until I used ctrl-alt-del.

There were also plenty of black-necked stilts, which I’d seen before but not photographed.  I even got one flying and landing, though the only really sharp picture of that group was after it was standing still.

There were avocets and godwits and ruddy ducks and goldeneyes… and a gray fox snoozing on the deck of an unoccupied building.

Here are some dunlins.  There were hundreds of them out past the low-tide mud, and hundreds of godwits a bit further out.  There were a couple of avocets, a black-bellied plover, and a great egret.

A solitary snow goose flew overhead!  They normally like to congregate in the northern central valley.

In the grassier areas, there were kildeers, canada geese, house finches, song sparrows, black phoebes, american pipits, and another new species for me: western meadowlarks.  Unfortunately almost none of them would let me get within a hundred feet of them for a picture, especially not the meadowlarks.  Hence the terrible picture quality here.

And check out this handsome tom turkey.

Also seen today: acorn woodpecker, steller’s jay, house finches (they’re back!), lesser goldfinches, hermit thrushes, a mourning dove, lots and lots of robins, and some cedar waxwings.

What, you were in our nation’s capitol?  Yes, my brother lives there, or rather in a Maryland suburb, and he hosted Christmas this year for me and our parents.  Supersonic Woman was going to go, but got sick and had to stay home.  There’s a whole story I could tell about how he’s starting a new self-employment business…

Anyway, while there I rather hoped to see some common birds that are not common here.  Like black-capped chickadees instead of chestnut-backed chickadees, or cardinals instead of scrub jays.  But because it’s winter (though as yet mild and without snow), there were hardly any birds.  About the only one in the yard that was new to me because of different location was the Blue Jay.  (We commonly call our local jays “bluejays”, but they’re actually western scrub-jays and steller’s jays.)

There were three of them.  Later we went to an arboretum on the Anacostia River.  My mom saw a cardinal there but I didn’t.  We saw downy woodpeckers, cedar waxwings, a red-bellied woodpecker:

…and a pair of bald eagles.

Then a great blue heron flew by.  Usually they fly with their necks folded up, but this one decided to unfold it for a little while.

Then we go around a corner, and look who’s sitting in the top of a pine tree.

UPDATE: That’s a Cooper’s hawk.  Here’s another shot.

First, let’s list the states whose names have definite unambiguous European origins.

California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Montana
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia

That’s 21 names. Now, the ones with names of definite native origin:

Alabama
Alaska
Arkansas
Connecticut
Hawaii
Illinois
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Wisconsin
Wyoming

That’s 24 names.  This list is ahead… but it doesn’t have a clear majority.  To settle the question, we have to look at the five remaining states.

Arizona
Idaho
Indiana
New Mexico
Oregon

Turns out, all of these five are debatable.  What about the name Indiana?  It’s from a term used in European languages, but the term refers to the native people.  How do you count it?  That’s a philosophical question.

What about New Mexico?  The name “México” is of native origin, but the state is named after a country with a European-derived language and culture.  Do you count it as native?

Arizona.  The origin of the name is said to be a Spanish corruption of an Aztec word.  Should you count that as native?  But others say it’s a Spanish corruption of an O’odham name, still others say it comes from Basque, and finally, it might just be short for “árida zona”, meaning dry zone, though you’d expect the adjective in that phrase to be placed after the noun.  So the fact is, no one actually knows whether the name is native or not.

The case of Oregon is even worse.  The name came into use long before there was a United States of America, among people who knew almost nothing about the area, and nobody knows where it came from at all.  There are various theories but they’re basically all guessing and hoping.

Idaho may be the one case where a land speculator just went and made a name up.  He at first claimed it was a Shoshone name, then that he just invented to sound Indianish, but then later someone argued that he got it from the Comanche term for “enemy”, because that’s how they saw the people who lived in that direction.  Again, no one actually knows.

So the odds are that there are probably more state names of native origin than of European or colonial origin, since if you count only two of these five as native that gives them the majority… but we can’t say for certain.

What we probably can do is link the cases of Indiana and New Mexico, since whatever principle you use to decide one of them will tend to place the other on the opposite side.  If you count New Mexico as native then Indiana looks colonial.  So that would make the balance 25 to 22 for the native side, giving them at least a tie, and they have the majority if any one of the three unknowns is actually native.  But it still isn’t settled.

So I installed it, and then I checked to see whether my Silverligth (argh, I keep typing it that way!) projects in Visual Stupido would still build correctly.  Nope — the solution load stops in the middle as soon as it hits a Silverlight project.  After about a minute of wondering why it wasn’t progressing, I discovered that VS had opened an error message dialog, and helpfully put it behind the window it was reporting an error in.  (Always a helpful touch, that.)  It said that it needed an up to date version of the developer runtime installed.  It included a link for the download… a link that pointed to the wrong version.  So after finding out that that didn’t work, I tried googling for the right version.  I came up with Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Stupido.  33 megabytes… okay, I thought, that’s not too heavyweight…

It took over ten minutes for their server to download it, and then when I ran the install, it thrashed my system drive for fifteen minutes solid, so hard that my desktop would repeatedly get bogged down into near immobility.  Firefox would repeatedly go “not responding” while this installer was running, just because the system was so bogged down.  For extra fun, the last five minutes of this disk thrashing took place after the progress bar reached 100%.

And then it turned out to be the wrong download.  Though maybe one I would have needed anyway as a next step, I dunno.  Anyway, I then managed to carefully find the correct one, and it installed easily and Visual Studio worked and the projects seem to run the same as ever.

At the end of this, I find it has added three new folders to my start menu.  One of them containing nothing but a single URL.

So Silverlight is now ready to go, I guess, though I have not yet seen whether it cured my issue with Netflix Instant.

[update: it's not cured, at least not in Firefox, but it seems to be not as bad.  But what about 64-bit IE?  For the first time, both the browser and the plugin are native... hm, it's better than in 32-bit Firefox, but still not perfect.   AW CRAP, it's smoother, but now the sound is out of sync!  Back to Firefox... no, the sound is the same there.  Not a browser issue, I guess.]

–

Now, Java.  I probably wouldn’t have nearly as much trouble with this if I’d just done things the way Sun, I mean Oracle, wanted me to.  The trouble began, I believe, when I installed Java Development Kit 1.6.29.  I had a Java Runtime Environment 1.6.22 sitting around, and since the JDK comes with a perfectly good new updated JRE, I got rid of the outdated one.  This, apparently, is what broke the browser plugin.  Now, whenever I try to view a a page with an applet, it either fails silently with no indication that a plugin is needed (you’re not supposed to do it that way, Firefox!) or it tries to get me to download and install a complete JRE.  I already have a JRE, and furthermore, I do not want two of them.  I don’t want to have different versions, and not know which one is being used, and have random problems that come from the two being out of sync.  I already encountered one bug which had to be resolved by updating from 6.22 to 6.29 — I don’t want more.

So I googled and googled and googled for how you install a browser plugin from the JDK.  Nothing.  All I got was people saying that the JDK includes the JRE and the plugin, so it should work.  (Maybe back in the day, it did.)  I ran the JDK installer again, to refresh the files… and it accidentally wiped out my existing install and created a new one in the wrong directory.  (A process which caused as much burden on the system, and Firefox freezing, as the Silverlight install did, but not for as long.)  The browser still had no plugin.

Annoyed, I deleted the misplaced install and ran the installer again.  And now I find that it won’t work anymore.  It says it’s already installed, and if I say install again, it goes “Error 1723.  There is a problem with the Windows Installer package.  A DLL required for this install to complete could not be found.”

I found that there were three versions in the control panel list of installed programs to remove.  At this point, none of them actually existed on disk, so I just removed the entries.  The installer still insisted the product was already on disk, and had the same error.  Even though all it does with the old installation, apparently, is to delete it.

Oh, and the initial dialog that the JDK installer pops up has two lines of text drawn on top of each other so neither is legible.

I already emptied the recycle bin, so I can’t just put back the bad install that I deleted the wrong way.  I have to try to find where this thing is keeping its “knowledge” that the JDK is already installed.  It’s not the environment variables — they still point to the original correct location that it blitzed.  It’s not the installed programs list.  Is it the registry?  I found quite a bit of relevant stuff… there’s litter from three different installs in here.  (And a bunch of crap from a long deleted test install of OpenWatcom, which happened to fit the search string I used.)  I cleaned a bunch of it out.  I deleted an entire subtree named JavaSoft, which I note had a plugin reference.

So a couple of hours after I started all this, I was able to finally get a correct install of the JDK.  Yay, my registry cleanout worked — it doesn’t think it’s already installed anymore.  (But it does still write text on top of other text in the installation dialogs.)

Oh, this is fun — it has an option in the installer for “Demos and Samples”, but then does not make it optional.  Why would I need to have that mandatorily?  But below that, it does now show an option that wasn’t visible before: “Public JRE”.  I read the explanatory text and it says that the one that comes with the JDK is a “private JRE”, which means it might be unusable with browsers.  It also says the public JRE can be uninstalled separately.  So the two really are independent.  Or are they?  It shows the public JRE using the same install directory as the rest.

Does this mean my whole quest to not have two JREs was in vain?  I dunno… let’s try not installing the public JRE.  It does say it adds 170 megs of crap to the 300 that the JDK already includes.  (Despite which, this time the install was quick and painless… this probably is because this time it was going to my “slow” mechanical disk drive instead of my “fast” solid state drive — the SSD being the one that brings the rest of the computer to its knees whenever it gets highly active.)

No Java in the browser.  Guess it needs that public JRE.  Let’s rerun the installer and activate the public JRE option…

Gah, the only way it can adjust or repair an installation is to delete the old one first!  Stupid.  And yes, I verified that it physically deletes everything before it begins reinstallation.  And this deletion process somehow ties up my desktop much worse than the original installation did.  Thankfully, it did preserve a couple of added jars I’d thrown in there at various times.

I expected that at this point, it would uninstall and reinstall smoothly.  But no!  “Another version of this product is already installed.  Installation of this version cannot continue.”  It suggests using Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.  (And then goes to the software registration page as if it had installed successfully.)

Okay, let’s see how the Control Panel uninstaller works after the official installer has already destroyed the installation….  Huh, it didn’t fail.

Back to the installer.  Seems to be working.  I’ve put in my installation choices about six times now.  NO, it failed again!  Same error message.  Back to the Registry Editor.  The JavaSoft key was the only trace I could find — the rest of the crap did not reappear.

The installer still fails with the same error after that’s removed.  Back to Add/Remove Programs, back to the registry editor again… this time all it added there are user and system JavaSoft folders with no contents.  But hey — a little deeper digging reveals the existence of an AppData\LocalLow folder.  Let’s clean those out.

Looks like we got past that one, finally.  Okay, now I see how it handles the separation of public and private JREs: it’s prompting for where to put the public one, with a different default from where it put the private one.  So the thingy before that appeared to let you choose the folder of the public JRE was lying.

I’m going to put it as a sibling of the private JRE folder, and then compare the two.  Maybe I can just use a junction to make the same files appear in two places.

Huh — it turns out the two JREs have subsantial differences.  Almost 90 files are different in content between the two, and another 11 are present in one and not the other.  (About 540 files match.)  So the moral of the story, for me, is that you do need to have two JREs.

But the real moral for everyone is: don’t you EVER dare to delete any Java crap by any means other than the official uninstaller.  (And even then, be prepared to clean up after it.)

–

So who wins, Java or Silverlight?  I’m going to give Silverlight the prize for being the worst, even though Java took more of my time, because there’s much less in that case which can be excused as being because I did it wrong.