Events

Three more photos from Sunday's publicity shots. Shaina Summerville and Stephen McClure: Shaina Summerville and Parker, behaving for about 30 seconds: Zach Blackwell, Shaina Summerville, and Stephen McClure: My direction for that last one was, "Imagine something horrible. It's Sarah Palin. She's got a gun. She's coming toward you. And she's naked." They look truly horrified, don't they?

I went to yesterday's Cubs-Yankees game at Wrigley and was very happy in the middle of it that our seats are under the awning. The Cubs won 6-1 while a nearby thunderstorm dumped a centimeter of rain on the park in the top of the 9th: Maybe rain is Tanaka's Kryptonite. As rain started to fall at Wrigley, the Cubs were able to total as many hits in the third inning as they did against Tanaka last month. Baker singled to lead off the third, moved up on Hammel's sacrifice, and scored on Bonifacio's single....

Good advice: Rule 1: You probably shouldn't approach a stranger's dog. Well, ok, that's not exactly true. But you should never simply approach a stranger's dog without asking - from a distance - if it's ok. Some people don't want their dogs to interact with people they come across on the street. Some dogs look well-behaved but when they get around a human that is not their owner, they freak out. Even the most well-behaved dog is still an animal that acts on instinct and could flip out and attack if...

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...