Events

Corporations that have lost major cases at the Circuit Court level are settling rather than try their luck with a post-Scalia Supreme Court: Last week, Dow Chemical made headlines by opting for a $835 million settlement in a class action lawsuit rather than risk having the case heard by a Scalia-less Supreme Court. A lower court had already ruled against the company for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for industrial chemicals, and prior to the settlement, Dow had appealed to the Supreme Court to...

Technical debt occurs when you make a short-term coding decision to get something done, but in the process introduce an error or code smell you'll have to correct later. Josh Marshall thinks the Republican Party did exactly that over the years, and Donald Trump is the refactoring: This is a fairly good description of what the media is now wrongly defining as the GOP's 'Trump problem', only in this case the problem isn't programming debt. It's a build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense...

Why posting is slow today:

Hm. I'm not sure that's the best translation for "gonna fly now," but it's better than anything I had on my own... Traveling this afternoon, back Sunday. I might have a chance to post. It's not going to be a top priority.

The problem with NuGet is that installers don't always update assembly binding mappings. As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to upgrade a very large project to a new version of the ASP.NET runtime to try to solve a lingering problem. This required updating somewhere around 20 NuGet packages, only some of which make correct changes to configuration files. I've just gone through a 15-minute publish cycle that ended with an old and familiar error message for old and familiar reasons. Guys. Quit messing with...

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow: Lifehacker explains how to see everything on your home network. (It's not that hard.) The Chicago Tribune takes you inside Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook, Ill., where my grandfather worked for 30 years. A group of physicists and mathematicians has listed the 15 most-complex subway maps in the...

There's a blizzard outside, which has alarmed Parker to no end (the wind scares him), and my computer is dragging because it's running a virus scan. And I'm having yet another version conflict installing a NuGet package, which is annoying since NuGet is supposed to stop that from happening. Otherwise, just an ordinary Wednesday...

Esquire's Charles Pierce is glad Trump is looking after "shitkickers like you," but he worries that stopping Trump will take more than just a moderate Republican: The only way to stop He, Trump is not, as the Boston Globe so tragically suggests today, to have unenrolled people pick up the Republican ballot and vote for John Kasich. I can't think of a more impotent suggestion than that. In the general scheme of things, Kasich is worse off than either Cruz or Rubio and, also in the general scheme of...

Last Friday, Chicago got up to 17°C, not a record but certainly not what we expect on February 19th. Today it's a more-seasonable 3°C. Tomorrow afternoon we're going up to the same temperature, but with a covering of wet snow, gusty winds, and general unpleasantness. Saturday's forecast? 10°C and sunny. Ah, Spring.

A medium-length list this time: A Megabus exploded outside Chicago yesterday, but that shouldn't scare you away from intercity buses. Let's not forget that Antonin Scalia tried to take the country backwards, and was an intellectual phony on top of it. BBC Radio 4 has just released a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, featuring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer. While Flint, Mich., has bad things in its municipal water supply, Chicago's isn't much better. California tax offices have had to adapt...