Goldcrests, Cormorants, etc

On our Sunday morning walk around the Reading University lakes, Zoe and I saw a goldcrest.  It was in a small leafless tree only 3 metres away and it didn't seem to be bothered at all by our presence.  It fitted about from twig to twig, sometimes hanging upside down.  We watched it for about 30 seconds, and followed it when it flew to another tree nearby.  Its crest was a pale yellow colour which I take to indicate that it was a female, though I suppose it is just possible that males lose the redness in their crests in the winter.  When  we got home again I did consider the possibility that it might have been a firecrest, but discounted this when I read in BWP-CE that the British population of firecrests was only a few hundred, whereas the population of goldcrests is around a million.

We also saw four cormorants on the lake.  Two of them seemed to be paired up - when one flew off the other followed.  One of the other two was distinctly smaller than the other three - maybe it was a juvenile.  We later saw the small one fishing - swimming around with its body very low in the water and then suddenly diving below the surface.

We also saw our strange duck again, the one with the white head and the greenish black body.  Its head was more white with small dark patches, than the pure white that I implied in my earlier account.  Also, its legs were a pale buff colour rather than yellow.  It again was very forward in coming to beg for food.  It was definitely not a mallard.

Bertrand Meyer's Word Games in OOSC2

In his magnum opus, Object Oriented Software Construction (2nd Edition), Bertrand Meyer refrains from explicitly mentioning 'Eiffel', the name of the programming language he is expounding, until the very end of the Epilogue.  However, it is fairly well known within the Eiffel community that 'EIFFEL' is encoded in the first letters of the text of chapters 1 to 6.  Well, that is not the end of Meyer's word games.  After a little research, I have discovered the following:

The first letters of each of the 36 chapters are, in order:

EIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEEIFEL

That is, five EIFFEL's followed by an EEIFEL.  Presumably chapters 32-33 have been changed since the first edition.  Maybe someone could check this out for me?

Following chapter 36 there is a two-page epilogue entitled:

Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language

The first letters of this, ignoring the 'the', spell out EIFFEL.

The epilogue also consists of six paragraphs, the first letters of which spell out (yes you've guessed it) EIFFEL.

Pied Wagtails

This afternoon at 1pm, as I was walking along Station Road from Reading station towards the town centre, I saw a pair of pied wagtails (Motacilla alba yarellii) fly down onto the path in front of me. They then flew up a metre or two and then came down again onto the road.  Fortunately there were no vehicles around.  As it was lunch time, there were lots of people hurrying along the path but the wagtails seemed more interested in each other.  One of the pair was a classic pure black-and-white pied wagtail while the other had a distinctly greyish back.  Maybe the latter was actually a white wagtail (Motacilla alba alba)?

In the past few years I have most often seen pied wagtails on summer mornings in the Frimley Waitrose car park and on its approach road, Hale Way.  Back in the late 1990's I also used to regularly see some at Ascot station as I waited on platform 3 for my connection to Frimley.

Strange Duck

Zoe and I have just got back from our Sunday morning walk around the Reading University lakes. There we saw a rather unusual looking duck.  Zoe first noticed it sitting on the lake by itself in the far distance.  When Zoe started throwing bread it sedately swam up close to us so we were able to get a good look.  Its head and neck were white and the rest of its body was black with a greenish sheen.  The boundary between the white and black was not sharp, nor was it smoothly graduated, instead it was spotty.  This lead me to think the duck was a partial albino mallard or else a hybrid of some sort.  However, it was not associating with any of the other mallards on the lake. Also, the upper base of its beak was bright red, its legs were yellow, and its back also seemed rather too broad for a mallard.  Maybe it was a shelduck hybrid?

Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams

A competent biography of the founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and creator of GNU Emacs, GCC and the GNU General Public License (GPL).  Stallman comes across as a prickly, awkward man with a mission.  Of his work, the GNU EMACS editor system is now fast fading into antiquity, but the GCC compiler and the GPL are keystones of the GNU/Linux world.  I think that the GPL will probably be what he is remembered for in the long run.

Update on Thu 2004-12-16 by Tristram Brelstaff

Sam Williams has placed a version of this book on-line at http://www.faifzilla.org.  Also, Eric Raymond has some interesting things to say about this book at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/rms-bio.html.