Bird Days

Yesterday I went out with my daughter Zoe for a walk round the Reading University lakes.  The pair of Egyptian geese that had 7 chicks back in early February have only 3 surviving but these seem to be fairly healthy.  They were stood preening themselves on the shore near Foxhill House.

Near the middle lake we came across the younger pair of Egyptian geese, the ones that had failed to bring up any chicks in the previous two years, partly because the male had a damaged leg.  However, this time the male had been usurped by an aggressive grey-morph male and was reduced to skulking in the long grass 20 or 30 metres away.  Whenever he tried to approach his ex-mate, the grey male would fly at him and chase him off.  The grey male must have arrived on the scene in only the past few days: it wasn't there last weekend.  There also seems to have been quite a bit of fighting between the two males: there were red patches of blood on the leading edges of the grey male's wings (the blood is not visible in the above photo); we didn't get close enough to see state of the rufous male.

 Right at the top of the middle lake a swan was sitting on a nest and while we were watching it laid this egg.

This afternoon, Zoe and I caught a train to Pangbourne and walked back the 5 miles to Reading.  Along the way we saw at least 4 buzzards, 3 red kites and 3 kestrels.  I tried to photograph them but they were either too high or in the direction of the sun, so all I came back with was this photo of a dunnock.

Update on Fri 2008-04-18 by Tristram Brelstaff

Zoe tells me that the the local bird expert says the grey-rufous pair actually arrived together and that the lone rufous male was by itself when they arrived.   So there was no usurpation; at least not here.

Egyptian Gosling

Bertrand Meyer SCOOP Video

Here is a video from 3 years ago in which Bertrand Meyer explains his SCOOP mechanism for concurrent object-oriented programming (unfortunately the video only works in Internet Explorer).

Installing BizTalk Server 2006 Trial Version on Windows XP

I had recently been fiddling with BizTalk at work and thought it might be nice to have the trial version to play with on my Windows XP Pro PC at home.  This turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I had expected.  What follows is an outline of how I finally managed to do it.  This is not a complete how-to (you will probably need to refer to Google, MSDN, and the MS document "Installing and Configuring Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 on Windows XP" for details) but it could save you many hours of frustration.

1. Biztalk 2006 requires a non-express version of Visual Studio 2005 to be installed first (Visual Studio 2008 won't do, neither will the Express version of 2005).  I downloaded the 90-day trial Professional version from here  (requires registration).
2. This is a 2.7GB DVD image in ISO-13346 format. This format is apparently currently only used by Windows Vista, which I don't have access to, so I couldn't write it to a DVD.  Instead I downloaded the unsupported Microsoft tool Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel from here  (under More Information) and mounted the image as a virtual CD drive (see the readme file). Then I was able to install Visual Studio 2005 by going into the \vs\setup directory on the virtual drive and running setup.exe.
3. Visual Studio 2005 also installs SQL Server 2005 Express.  Biztalk 2006 requires the SP2 version of the latter (though it doesn't tell you until near the end of its install). I uninstalled all the existing SQL Server 2005 packages (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs) and  then downloaded and installed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express SP2 from here.
4. BizTalk requires Internet Information Services (IIS).  I installed them through Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Windows Components (requires Windows XP installation CD).
5. BizTalk also requires the MS Management Console (Windows XP Update KB 907265).  I downloaded and installed it from here.
6. The BizTalk install needs to be run in the Windows XP System account.  If it isn't you get COM+ errors near the end of the install. I downloaded the Microsoft Sysinternals utility psexec.exe from here.
7. I downloaded the 120-day trial version of BizTalk Server R2 from here  (requires registration), unzipped it to C:\build,  copied psexec.exe into C:\build.  I then ran the Biztalk install in the System account as follows: Start -> Run -> C:\build\psexec.exe -s -i c:\build\setup.exe.  
8. I chose the default options at all stages (I think!) and where it asked for a username and password I gave the same administrator account and password each time (clicking Yes at the warning messages).  Eventually I got it so the BizTalk Server Configuration console showed that Enterprise SSO, Group, BizTalk Runtime and Business Rules Engine were enabled and only the HWS, BAM and EDI/AS2 components were disabled.  That was good enough for what I wanted to do, I hadn't expected the latter to work anyway.
9. I was then able to use Visual Studio and the Biztalk Server Admin console to create, deploy and test a simple BizTalk application.

Sparrowhawk Attack?

Went for a walk round the Reading University lakes with Zoe this evening.  Just as we were walking past Foxhill House there was a frantic fluttering in the bushes at ground level and then a dark grey bird flew up and away.   On the ground there was a circular patch of  grey feathers and a pigeon limping off to hide in the bushes.  I reckon that we had disturbed a sparrowhawk in the process of trying to kill the pigeon.