Events

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...

Security expert Bruce Schneier is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed: In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. We need that trust back. By weakening security, we are weakening it against all attackers. By inserting vulnerabilities, we are making everyone vulnerable. The same vulnerabilities...

Snopes just republished the legend of the E.T. game cartridges in light of the actual burial site being dug up recently. Forgetting for a moment the legend itself, the background story was a description of how Warner management killed Atari: In 1982, Warner Communications could honestly claim to own a goose that laid golden eggs. Its money-producing fowl was called Atari, a video game company it purchased for $28 million in 1976 which had since burgeoned into a $2 billion concern. In the early 1980s...

I'm uploading a couple of fixes to Inner-Drive.com right now, so I have a few minutes to read things people have sent me. It takes a while to deploy the site fully, because the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ documentation (reg.req.) is quite large—about 3,000 HTML pages. I'd like to web-deploy the changes, but the way Azure cloud services work, any changes deployed that way get overwritten as soon as the instance reboots. All of the changes to Inner-Drive.com are under the hood. In fact, I didn't...

The Chicago Tribune has an infographic this weekend with the final statistics of the past winter. After defining the "cold season" as the "period from the first freeze of the fall to the last freeze of spring," and asserting we've had our last freeze (I'll let that float for now), then the 2013-14 winter looked like this: Measurement Value First freeze Oct 22nd (-2°C) Last freeze Apr 16th (-4°C) Days below freezing 76 (Nov through Mar) Days below -18°C 26 (Dec through Mar) Total snowfall 2,082 mm It...