Events

I had planned to post some photos tonight showing the evolution of digital cameras, using a local landmark, but there's a snag. The CF card reader I brought along isn't showing up on my computer, even though the computer acknowledges that something is attached through a USB port. As I'm visiting one of the most sophisticated and technological cities in the world, I have no doubt I can fix this tomorrow. Still, it's always irritating when technology that worked a few days ago simply stops working. For...

I believe I made record time from my house to my final stopping point in the Ancestral Homeland. Most importantly: I got here before all the curry places closed. More later.

The repercussions from Monday's data-recovery debacle continued through yesterday. By the time business started Tuesday morning, I had restored the client's application and database to the state it had at the moment of the upgrade, and I'd entered most of their appointments, including all of them through tomorrow (Thursday). When the client started their day, everything seemed to be all right, except for one thing I also didn't know about their business: some of their customers pay them based on the...

At 8:16 this morning, a long-time client sent me an email saying that one of his customers couldn't was getting a strange bug in their scheduling application. They could see everything except for the tabbed UI control they needed to use. In other words, there was a hole in the screen where the data entry should have been. Here's how the rest of the day went around this issue. It's the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an engineer, in the same way the guys who built Galloping Gertie were proud. It...

Here are about 30 reasons, just from the last 48 hours: CWB estimates that 21 people were taken into police custody during Wrigleyville's Saturday-into-Sunday St. Patrick's binge. But there was only one tazing. (Rats!) 28 batteries were witnessed or otherwise confirmed by police. Few were formalized with police reports. Ambulances took at least 17 people to area hospitals and officers were tied up with at least 19 calls from cab drivers who had disputes with their passengers over payment. Here, now, are...

Some asshole with a gun and an arrest warrant has blocked the entire length of North Lake Shore Drive as every cop in Illinois tries to prise him from his car: A car chase through the South Side and downtown involving a man wanted in connection with a murder in Georgia ended with a standoff between the man and police after the vehicle crashed on Lake Shore Drive on the Near North Side, officials and witnesses said. According to Harvey Police Department spokeswoman Sandra Alvarado, the man in the vehicle...

As predicted last week in private Kremlin memoranda, today's referendum in Crimea has determined that more people on the peninsula support union with Russia than actually live on the peninsula. As someone once said more eloquently than I: But here's the BBC: Some 95.5% of voters in Crimea have supported joining Russia, officials say. after half the votes have been counted in a disputed referendum. Crimea's leader says he will apply to join Russia on Monday. Russia's Vladimir Putin has said he will...

The news recently and Krugman this morning have brought Tennyson to mind: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death   Rode the six hundred. Heroism has its place, but not when it takes everyone else through hell.

I've just picked up Bob Martin's The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers. I'm just a couple chapters in, and I find myself agreeing with him vehemently. So far, he's reinforcing the professional aspects of the profession. Next chapters will TDD, testing, estimation, and a bunch of other parts of the profession that are more difficult than the actual coding part. More later.

All four are dead: Quiznos, the Denver-based sandwich chain, said Friday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, the second quick-service restaurant chain in a week to do so. Quizno's bankruptcy filing comes just days after Sbarro, the New York-based pizza chain, filed for court protection in Manhattan on Monday, the second time in three years. Hot Dog on a Stick, another purveyor of quick-service food, in February also filed for bankruptcy protection. This is unfortunate especially for...