Events

The Economist has a new Big Mac Index out today, reflecting the gyrations in currency exchange rates that will (I hope) make my trip to Berlin next month a lot less expensive: The Economist whipped up the Big Mac index in 1986 as a bun-loving way of explaining currencies’ relative values. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity, which posits that over the long run, currencies should adjust so that a basket of identical goods costs the same everywhere. We fill our basket with just one item...

Today is the last day the CTA will run 1970s-era trains from the 2400 Series: With their traverse-style seating, return to sliding doors and bicentennial trim, Chicago Transit Authority’s 2400-series rail cars proved popular with riders when they first debuted in 1976. CTA also got more than their money’s worth from the 200 cars they ordered from Boeing-Vertol, as they were only phased out of use once CTA began adding the Bombardier 5000-series rail cars to its fleet. Over the next four decades the...

Yep. Pretty dreary today: At least it's above freezing.

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...