Events

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....

Given my priority on eating (and drinking) at Chicago Gourmet on Saturday, I didn't bring my real camera. I'm quite pleased with my phone, though. And the weather really was this gorgeous:

Local-news organization DNAinfo asked people to draw their neighborhood boundaries a while back. They now have results: After getting thousands of drawings from DNAinfo readers, we wanted to show where there was broad agreement (and disagreement) about where each begins and ends. On first glance, both Boystown and Wrigleyville residents make clear where they think their neighborhoods are. The core of Wrigleyville — appropriately around Wrigley Field — is between Grace, Racine, Sheffield and Newport...

The weather in Chicago cleared up enough that we got a great view of the total lunar eclipse last night: For comparison, here is the full moon when Earth doesn't get in the way: Note that it's a lot harder to photograph the moon when it's eclipsed. The full moon reflects 9% of the light falling on it, or about half as much as a standard gray card or green grass. So when shooting the moon, the correct exposure is surprisingly fast: about 1/250 at f/5.6 at ISO 100. Shooting the eclipse last night, I used...