Events

Last note for now. Josh Marshall makes an excellent point: What would make a real difference would be a society where there were radically fewer guns, where buying a gun meant getting a license, needing to follow specific safety guidelines, where you couldn't build your own armory, where you had to carry insurance to own a weapon (like you do with a car and most everything else), etc. Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start...

These crossed my various news feeds today: Top story in my professional life: The EU's top court struck down Safe Harbor certification, leaving data privacy rules up to individual countries. An year-old video from ABC News demonstrating the ineffectiveness of concealed-carry (hint: you'll be shot with your own gun). The Illinois Technology Association, of which my employer is a member, is stepping up recruiting for Illinois companies in L.A. and New York. Geologists have found evidence of a huge tsunami...

Larry Wilmore gives a primer on how the right change the conversation:

Whatever I've been fighting the past few days is taking a really good whack at me today. I may post more substantially later; right now, not so much. Saturday, though, I had five hours of Bach, and it rocked, as much as a harpsichord, piano, and organ can rock.

Welcome to the Shining Beacon on a Hill, the example to the rest of the world, where we've had 294 mass shootings in 274 days so far this year: We've gone no more than eight days without one of these incidents this year. On six days in September, there were 3 mass shootings or more. If the initial casualty figures in Oregon hold up, that would bring the total of deaths by mass shooting this year to 380 so far, with well over one thousand injured. And of course, there's the broader universe of nearly...

Canadian Julia Cordray created an app described as a "Yelp for people," and apparently failed to predict the future: Except of course it took the rest of the world about two seconds to figure out that filtering the world to only include those with positive feelings was not exactly realistic, and all the app was likely to do was invite an endless stream of abuse, bullying, and stalking. It wasn't long before people were posting Cordray's personal details online – seemingly culled from the Whois...

I noted earlier that this code base I'm working with assumes all file stores look like a disk-based file system. This has forced me to do something totally ugly. All requests for files get pre-pended with a hard-coded string somewhere in the base classes—i.e., the crap I didn't write. So when I want to use the Azure storage container "myfiles", some (but not all) requests for files will use ~/App_Data/files/myfiles (or whatever is configured) as the container name. Therefore, the Azure provider has to...

I've been playing around with BlogEngine.NET, and I've hit a snag making it work with Microsoft Azure. BlogEngine.NET was built to store files inside the application's own file system. So if you install the engine in, say, c:\inetpub\wwwroot\blogEngine, by default the files will be in ~/App_Data/files, which maps to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\blogEngine\App_Data\files. All of the file-handling code, even the abstractions, assume that your files will have some kind of file name that looks like that. You must...

The Firefly alumnus (and Joss Whedon favorite) and Nathan Fillion have released the first four episodes of a Web series that can't be entirely fictional: I look forward to watching it.

Daily WTF editor Remy Porter has a (rare) rant up today about software development processes. I'd like all my project management friends to read it: [L]et’s just say the actual truth: Process is important, and it doesn’t have to suck. And let’s add onto that: process is never a cure for a problem, but it might be a treatment. Let’s be honest, managing developers is like herding cats, and you need to point them all in the same direction by giving them some sort of guidance and organizing principle....