Events

I've got approval from Spectralia to post some publicity shots from Sunday. Zach Blackwell: Shaina Summerville: Stephen McClure and Shaina Summerville: More a bit later.

I've had a few minutes to go through the Spectralia photos from earlier today. We attempted to get Parker in them, to play Crab, the dog, but he is the sourest-natured dog that lives. Observe: Yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear. Eventually we got a couple good shots with him. Eventually.

The deployment, I mean. Everything works, at least on the browsers I've used to test it. I ran the deployment three times in Test first, starting from a copy of the Production database each time, so I was as confident as I could be when I finally ran it against the Production database itself. And, I made sure I can swap everything back to the old version in about 15 minutes. Also, I snuck away to shoot publicity photos for Spectralia again, same as last year. I'll have some up by the end of the week...

Jez Humble, who wrote the book on continuous delivery, believes deployments should be boring. I totally agree; it's one of the biggest reasons I like working with Microsoft Azure. Occasionally, however, deploying software is not at all boring. Today, for example. Because Microsoft has ended support for Windows Server 2008 as of next week, I've upgraded an old application that I first released to Azure in August 2012. Well, actually, I updated it back in March, so I could get ahead of the game, and the...

Short answer: You can't. So don't try. Back in 2007, when I wrote a scheduling application for a (still ongoing!) client, Azure was a frustrating research project at Microsoft. Every bit of data the application stored went into SQL Server tables including field-level auditing and event logs. The application migrated to Azure in August 2012, still logging every audit record and event to SQL tables, which are something like 10x more expensive per byte than Azure Table Storage. Recently, I completed an...

Yesterday my trip to work was cold and wet, while on the West Coast it was so warm people in San Francisco were trying to remember if their apartments had air conditioning. (They don't.) Well, it's no longer quite as hot in San Francisco, but here in Chicago it's still cold and wet: 4°C and—wait, you'll love this—snow. That's right, past the mid-point of May and only two weeks from the start of meteorological summer, it snowed in Chicago.

Last night the temperature here got down to 5°C, which feels more like early March than mid-May. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, yesterday got up to 33°C, which to them feels like the pit of hell. In fact, even in the hottest part of the year (early October), San Francisco rarely gets that warm. The Tribune explains: The North American jet stream pattern, a key driver of the country’s weather, has taken on the same incredibly “wavy”—or, as meteorologists say —“meridional”—configuration which has so often...

Actually, there are two scandals: first, red light cameras in general, and second, an alleged $2m bribe: The former City Hall manager who ran Chicago’s red-light camera program was arrested today on federal charges related to the investigation of an alleged $2 million bribery scheme involving the city’s longtime vendor, Redflex Traffic Systems. A federal complaint filed in U.S. District Court today accused John Bills of taking money and other benefits related to the contract with Redlfex. Mayor Rahm...

Andrew Binstock lists things he wishes he'd learned about programming earlier. Local business owner David Borris explains that low-minimum-wage advocates are big businesses, who have different goals than small-business owners. Krugman wonders how climate science became a Marxist plot, while Alec MacGillis reminds Marco Rubio that his state is drowning. Ten days until I get a couple days off...

The FAA facility handing arrivals and departures for Chicago's two main airports shut down earlier today: The FAA started issuing revised flight departure times to airlines Tuesday afternoon after an approximately two-hour “ground stop’’ halted all flights to and from Chicago’s two airports because of smoke in an air traffic radar facility serving northeastern Illinois, airline officials said. The ground stop was ordered as FAA workers were evacuated from the radar facility and operations transferred to...