Events

Interesting things to read: Climate change deniers, take note: even though 2014 was really cold in part of the U.S., it was still the warmest year ever worldwide. Two posts on the Microsoft Azure blog: how to add auto-complete suggestions using Azure Search, and how to tune Azure DocumentDB performance. Could airlines start giving landing preference to their own high-value flights? Chicagoist has their best brunches list up. Yum. We might start using JetBrains TeamCity for continuous integration. More...

Via Chicagoist, a compilation of Super-8 movies showing Chicago more than 45 years ago:

If you're a frequent flier in the U.S., test your knowledge of terminal layouts. I got 10.

Tuesday: Friday: This morning: Home in just a couple of hours.

I'm taking a quick trip to New York this weekend so The Daily Parker may be a little quiet. Here's what I'll be reading about on the flights: Microsoft has added Application Insights to Azure websites. Krugman is smacking his forehead about Switzerland's abandonment of the euro peg. The Times' Joshua Davis thinks we're wasting our tech talent. Via Sullivan, a video map showing how Europeans took over the North American continent. One more bug to fix before I can do a test deployment...

If you have a set of unit tests for a large application, and not every one of them passes, then you don't know whether the application works correctly. In fact, failing unit tests are evidence that it isn't working. Also, marking them with the [Ignore] attribute doesn't count as fixing them. Also, deleting the part of the unit test that fails doesn't count either. An empty test method is not a passing test unless the method being tested is also empty. And an empty test method should not ever be...

Toystory, a Holstein bull with surprising stamina, died in November. Toystory was ...a titan of artificial insemination who sired an estimated 500,000 offspring in more than 50 countries. Over nearly a decade, Toystory shattered the record for sales of the slender straws that hold about 1/20th of a teaspoon and are shipped using liquid nitrogen to farmers around the world. A unit fetches anywhere from a few dollars to several hundred. When he died on Thanksgiving Day, Toystory had surpassed 2.4 million...

One more quick note: despite the cold and rain (and traffic), three of us had dinner last night at The Oval Room in the District. Fantastic. We all would recommend it. After dinner we walked two blocks to my friend Barry's house: We didn't knock on the door, but one of my colleagues swears someone waved to her from the North Portico.

I had nothing to do with this: It was a commuter’s worst nightmare: a Metro train abruptly stops, goes dark and fills with smoke in a tunnel in downtown Washington. Before it was over, one woman was killed and more than 80 passengers were suffering from respiratory problems and other health issues. [A]uthorities now believe they know why the train, which had just left the L’Enfant Plaza station, came to a halt about 800 feet into the tunnel. The National Transportation Safety Board said “an electrical...

Yesterday I only logged 4,447 steps for 22.4 kg, my least-active day ever since getting a Fitbit on October 23rd. It's galling, too, because at this writing I have 994,008 lifetime steps—which would have gone over 1 million yesterday had circumstances been different. Today I should hit that mark, if only because I'll have to navigate to and from the DC Metro, around Reagan and O'Hare, and...huh. No, it's not a sure thing. At least it's not raining in either DC or Chicago today. That will help. But wow...