Events

Via Chicagoist, astronaut Tim Kopra snapped this from aboard the International Space Station earlier this week: The city's borders show up brilliantly because unlike most of the surrounding suburbs, Chicago uses sodium-vapor lamps, which glow yellow-orange. But that's changing (including right in my own alley): The Chicago Infrastructure Trust will replace the city's 348,500 outdoor lights with energy-efficient LED technology, according to a statement from City Hall. The Smart Lighting Project is aimed...

The Ph.D. psychologist at Deeply Trivial is participating in the A-Z Blog Challenge this month. She's six posts into a great primer on social psychology, starting with last Friday's Attribution through today's Festinger. The Daily Parker is not doing the A-Z challenge this year because I'm not nearly as disciplined as Deeply Trivial. That, and I'm not clear on a topic that would interest anyone else. Maybe next year.

After a much-warmer-than-normal early March, we've had typical Chicago weather for the first week of April. The Climate Prediction Center still says April might be warmer and drier than normal, but the 6-10 day outlook is just cold. Today it doesn't know what to do. Walking from the train I got sun, snow, pellets, and mist. And it's barely 3°C. So, it really is spring in Chicago, but I'd very much like the week we get (usually in May) when it's warm and sunny. Like we had at the beginning of March.

The new computer has arrived, and I am now setting it up. This used to be a total pain in the ass. Copy files, install from disks, copy more files, find passwords... And by "used to" I mean in 2012. Today my working files are all in OneDrive, my frequently-used, unimportant Web passwords* are in Chrome, and my apps are all in the cloud. This pretty much means the only things I have to do are (a) log into my Microsoft account, (b) download Chrome, and (c) copy a portable hard disk onto my local. So much...

Over the last few days we've had ridiculous weather in Chicago. I will now ridicule it. Friday it rained and didn't. All day. From moment to moment it was unclear whether we'd get rained on or not. Saturday was similar, but we walked from sun to snow and back, block for block. Then Sunday it was 22°C at one point, and -3°C at another. The Tribune has a graphic about it. I walked around with, at one point, my jacket, sweater, and outer shirt in my backpack. Yesterday? Snow, of course. Today? Sunny and...

On Thursday I merged in the latest Github code from the BlogEngine.NET project and published it to Azure. I didn't realize at the time that the update contained a new widget called "newsletter" that let anyone sign up to receive a notification for each post on the blog. By the time I got my weekly email report with its hundreds of bounces, apparently every robot from here to Vladivostok had signed up. So annoying. Well, I now know the widget code a lot better, and I've killed the thing. I hope my bounce...

This little box here contains 32 gigabytes of RAM, and cost me $1 per 162,842,362 bytes. As I mentioned Thursday, this is considerably more RAM for considerably less money than the RAM I bought in January 1993 to upgrade my 4 MB ZEOS computer to an 8 MB computer. Those 4 megabytes cost about the same as these 32 gigabytes in total. But back then, I got only 20,972 bytes per dollar. Put it another way: this RAM is approximately 8,000 times less expensive than the RAM I bought in 1993. It's also somewhere...

Reddit recently published their 2015 Transparency Report, in which they tell how many times they received official requests for user information. However, NSA letters often require that the companies receiving them keep the letters themselves secret. So how to let the world know you've received one? Kill a canary: At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence...

Again, the post Friday was not an April Fool's joke. And since then I've had non-stop things going on, including today going over the silent auction donations for our coming Apollo After Hours fundraiser. Tomorrow should be a little calmer.

The driving reason behind ordering a new kick-ass development computer is that I am no longer the CTO of Holden LLC. The company and I worked together over the past two months to shift their technology support to a new partner organization and eliminate the CTO role entirely. After leading the development of their flagship software product, I joined Holden, with the goal of transforming the technology side of the business into an quasi-independent product-development center. But over the past year, we...