Events

Yesterday, the Nielsen Norman Group released groundbreaking research on user interface design for dogs: There are several key usability guidelines that help dogs to have the most usable experience on modern websites and apps, particularly on mobile, tablet, and other touch-based interfaces: Consistency is critical. While consistency in any user experience is important, with dogs, it’s even more so. Experienced dog trainers will tell you that, for dogs to learn proper behavior, consistency in enforcing...

For day 2 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going to talk about the first computer language I learned, which is still alive and kicking in the .NET universe decades after it first appeared on a MS-DOS 1.0 system disk: BASIC. BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." The original specification came from John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. Today it's one of the core .NET languages included with Visual Studio as "VB.NET" (for "Visual BASIC," Microsoft's...

Welcome to the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge! We're starting today with a fundamental concept in Microsoft .NET software development: the Assembly. Microsoft defines the assembly as "a .dll or .exe file that can contain a collection of APIs that can be called by apps or other assemblies." In other words, an assembly is the basic unit of delivering .NET software to the rest of the world. An assembly "fully describe[s] and contain[s] .NET programs." When you compile .NET source code, the...

The A-to-Z Challenge starts tomorrow, and I'm all set to go with a list of 26 topics on programming with Microsoft .NET. Now I just need to write the actual posts. It's interesting to me how vacations don't actually lend themselves to much productivity, even when that's the explicit purpose of the vacation. Anyway, if I do my job today, the first post will hit at noon UTC tomorrow. If I don't do my job today, it'll hit sometime later than that.

On the one hand, I've been really productive on my staycation, having checked off 38 to-do items including a few that came from my need to get Parker repaired. On the other hand, I've done none of the reading and writing I set out to do. With the A-to-Z challenge starting in two days, I really need to get on that. But, you know, it's still a vacation. So why not vacate a bit?

In a column last summer, UC Berkeley professor Ned Resnikoff saw Armando Ianucci's British sitcom The Thick of It as a warning: As scathing as The Thick of It can be in its depiction of craven, self-interested political behavior, it’s difficult to imagine any of its protagonists engaging in criminality on a scale equal to what Trump’s inner circle may have committed. Nor can The Thick of It capture the dizzying instability of American politics in 2017, though it has occasionally gotten close. The...

The Chicago City Council on Wednesday approved a massive package to restore O'Hare to its former glory as the busiest airport in the world: With legal approvals in hand and O'Hare's tenant airlines scheduled to formally sign new lease deals later today, the path appears clear to implementing a plan that, if all goes as scheduled, will add 3 million square feet of terminal space and 30 to 35 additional gates for planes to load passengers, up from 185 now, by 2026. City aviation officials say doing...

We met with the surgeon this morning. She confirmed the initial diagnosis of a right cruciate ligament tear, and said it's likely completely detached from the bone. She also suspects additional damage to the opposing ligament and possibly to his meniscus. Parker will have surgery next Tuesday, which unfortunately was the earliest he could get in. He'll have a right tibial leveling osteotomy, in which she will carve out a piece of bone and turn it so the damaged ligament no longer supports his weight....

I mentioned yesterday that Parker stopped putting weight on one of his legs after hurting himself running up the stairs Saturday night. Turns out, it's pretty bad. His primary vet says my aging mutt tore his ACL and meniscus, which will require surgery. He's getting X-rays on Monday to confirm the injury but she has very high confidence in the diagnosis. Surgery is scheduled for Tuesday. He doesn't seem to be in any pain when he's lying down (which, as an old dog, he does 20 hours a day). Walking up and...

Longtime readers know how much I loathe Eddie Lampert, who represents to me everything that is wrong with the adolescent philosophy emitted years ago by Ayn Rand. Well, in next month's Vanity Fair, William Cohan sits down with the child king of hedge funds and hears him out: [Lampert's] triumphs are largely obscured by his worst mistake: the 2005 merging of Sears, the iconic retailer whose doorstop mail-order catalogue was once a fixture in nearly every American home, with the downmarket Kmart chain...