Events

Someone forwarded me a year-old short story by Neil Gaiman the Guardian published last spring. It begins: The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion. It is...

Yesterday Chicago got warm enough to melt almost all the snow. We had just 50 mm on the ground at O'Hare (not including the waist-high drifts along all our major streets) when the cold front hit overnight. We woke up this morning to another "dusting" covering every surface of the city, just enough below freezing to make us ask "why?" The Weather Service promises 12°C on Monday, which should end our 10-week ordeal of boots and salty paws temporarily. But I won't believe we're through winter until we have...

The test configuration earlier today wasn't the problem. It turned out that MSBuild simply didn't know it had to pull in the System.Web.Providers assembly. Fortunately, this guy suggested a way to do it. I created a new file called AssemblyInit that looks like this: using System.Diagnostics; using System.Web.Providers; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; namespace MyApp { public class AssemblyInit { [AssemblyInitialize] public void Initialize() { Trace.WriteLine("Initializing...

One of my tasks at my day job today is to get continuous integration running on a Jenkins server. It didn't take too long to wrestle MSBuild to the ground and get the build working properly, but when I added an MSTest task, a bunch of unit tests failed with this error: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. The...

We still have snow on the ground, and now we've got a "hostage situation" counter up in our office about it. Sixty eight days ago, Chicago was snow-free. Since December 29th, we've worn boots every day, wiped our dogs' feet every day, squished across streets every day, and squelched down sidewalks every day. There's a glimmer of hope. The temperature is up to -0.6°C, very nearly freezing. It might even get up to 7°C tomorrow and even stay above freezing for two days early next week. And yet, we'll still...

First-term Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza introduced an ordinance last month that would require pet stores to get dogs and cats from city pounds and shelters. The council will vote on it today: “This ordinance cuts off the pipeline of animals coming into our city from the horrendous puppy mill industry and opens up a new opportunity for animals already in shelters who need a loving home to be adopted into,” Mendoza said. It would, however, affect 16 businesses across the city, including Pocket...

Just because we've had snow on the ground for 66 days (since December 29th) doesn't mean we didn't all want to see this on our morning commutes today: We got another 50 mm overnight, on top of the piles already on the ground, and it's not forecast to get above freezing until late tomorrow. We'd better have a cool frickin' summer or I'm going to write a very strongly-worded letter to the climate. Update: Today is our 45th measurable snowfall this season—a new record. Yay.

It's killing invasive insects: "This winter has been a godsend for the hemlock. Overnight temperatures dipped to minus 15 [Fahrenheit, or -26°C] here in Amherst [Massachusetts], and that’s cold enough to guarantee almost complete adelgid die-off," Joseph Elkington, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told the Worcester Telegram. Elkington says that in some parts of North Carolina, subzero temperatures have killed 100 percent of the adelgids. In Massachusetts, around 80 percent of...

If I have time, I'll read these articles today: Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things, which is actually just his version of this kind of link round-up; Cranky Flier on American Airlines fare changes following the merger; The Daily WTF's CodeSOD of the Day; Now that Windows Azure SQL Database has launched page compression, a review of best practices around the technology; and Confirmation that the meterological winter ending last Friday was the third coldest and third snowiest in recroded history....

The sun rises in the Crimean Peninsula in just over an hour, at 6:16 local time. A rumor circulating earlier today was that Russian commanders occupying the region had threatened to attack unless the Ukrainian military surrendered by 0300 UTC this evening—20 minutes ago. The Russian navy has denied this. We'll see. Russia, of course, has the power to take and hold the peninsula, and it seems to have support from a sizable portion of Crimean residents. But at what cost? Again, we'll see. One thing is...