Events

Researcher Capers Jones has examined well-known "laws" of programming against the data. The one that jumped out at me: Cunningham's Law of Technical Debt Shortcuts and carelessness during development to save money or time lead to downstream expenses called "technical debt" that may exceed the upstream savings. Empirical data supports the basic concept that early shortcuts lead to expensive downstream repairs. Ward Cunningham's technical debt concept is a great metaphor, but not such a great metric....

After getting another 100 mm of snow last night, today it's warmer than it's been since January 13. The 2pm O'Hare temperature was 6.7°C. If it hits 7.8°C, it will be warmer than any day since December 28th—which was also the last day the temperature did not fall below freezing. Already the 340 mm of snow on the ground has started to melt. And the storm drains are covered in snow and ice. So we'll all be trading in our snow boots for flippers this time tomorrow. Update: The 4pm temperature was, in fact...

In the last hour, we've gotten another 25 mm of snow, with more on the way: The initial stages of snowfall will come in bands this morning (check weather radar pic above) – moving from southwest to northeast. A few locations are observing a mix of snow and sleet and this will continue on and off for the next couple hours, but the precipitation will change over to all snow and increase in intensity late morning and afternoon. Homewood in Cook County reported an inch of snow in an hour with a mix of...

I spent 4½ hours today upgrading three low-traffic websites in order to shut down an Azure database that cost me $10 per month. The problem is this: I continually improve the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture as I learn better techniques for doing my craft. The IDEA began in 2002, and the industry changes rapidly, so every so often it changes significantly enough that things using earlier versions break when they're upgraded. About a year ago, version 2 ended and version 3 came out, breaking...

I remember, back in .NET prehistory (2001), that one of .NET's biggest benefits was to be the end of DLL hell. Yet I spent half an hour this afternoon trying to get a common package (Entity Framework 6) to install in a project that never had that package in the first place—because of a version conflict with .NET itself. When I tried to install EF6, the NuGet package installer failed the installation with the message "This operation would create an incorrectly structured document". A quick check of...

The Great Lakes have more ice cover than at any point in the last 20 years. Here's the view on the flight in last Monday morning: If you don't mind a 150 MB download, NASA took a photo of the Great Lakes (and, incidentially, me) at almost that exact moment. The ice today (also 150 MB) looks about the same.

I got gas today, which isn't that interesting in itself, except that it's only the third time I've gotten gas in the past four months. Like the last time, I decided to fill up in case it got cold (a full tank is better for your car in winter), so really I've only gotten about 2½ tanks of gas since the beginning of November. It's perfectly valid to wonder why I even own a car. I didn't for most of the time I lived in New York. Still, today I had about a half-dozen errands to run, and having a car made a...

Yesterday, Chicago Midway Airport recorded a high temperature of 1.1°C, the first time it has seen a temperature above freezing in 15 days. Unfortunately for our weather records, O'Hare is our official station, and it only got to 0°C yesterday. So officially we still have not had a day above freezing since January 30th, with a forecast for continued below-freezing weather through Monday at least. Plus, we've had measurable snow on the ground for 47 days now, and we're all frankly sick of it. That's why...

Today seemed like the right moment to recollect this short poem from Luis d'Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: Raseuse arrête, valet de Tsar bat loups, Joues gare et suite, et sot voyou. As van Rooten's commentary makes clear, the wolves were really at fault.

So how do people at Maho Beach know when planes are landing? They check the surfboard: And now my final Maho Beach photo for this trip, a US Airways A330 coming in from Charlotte: We now return to your regularly-scheduled winter, already in progress...