Events

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday: The blue line is average posts per...

When I read this, I couldn't help thinking of this: The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,When Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise." In other burials of Caesar, former University of Chicago law students have had some unkind things to say about how Scalia treated minorities: Ben Streeter, now an...

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...