Events

The day started like this: Then it became this: And returned to this: But because of this: It is now this: As for the horses and goats on the ranch, I had some challenges introducing Cassie to them. The principal challenge was Cassie barking her head off at all of them, which two of the horses and both of the goats wanted nothing to do with, but one of the horses looked ready to teach Cassie the formula F=ma in a direct and possibly painful way. Now that I've downloaded 12 hours of email and figured out...

Cassie and I are at a lovely ranch in Kentucky where tomorrow she'll meet goats and tonight I've met a 1990s-era Internet connection. Well, I didn't come here to surf the Web, so I'll just deal. Meanwhile, I'm sitting outside listening to frogs. Lots of frogs. And a hound somewhere down the road.

I'm about 18 hours from taking Cassie on a long road trip, and I have two problems that may cause headaches (one of them literally). First, trees and grasses all over Chicago have started having lots of sex, causing really uncomfortable stuffiness and sinus congestion for me. Second, one of the tires of my car has a slow leak. The first one will work itself out naturally, with the help of several boxes of tissues. The second one requires a trip to the local tire center, which I'm glad to report is about...

Via Bruce Schneier, a developer who maintains one of the most important NPM packages in the world got pissed off at Russia recently, without perhaps thinking through the long-term consequences: A developer has been caught adding malicious code to a popular open-source package that wiped files on computers located in Russia and Belarus as part of a protest that has enraged many users and raised concerns about the safety of free and open source software. The application, node-ipc, adds remote interprocess...

This weekend, I built the Production assets for Weather Now v5, which means that the production app exists. I haven't switched over the domain name yet, for reasons I will explain. But I've created the Production Deploy pipeline in Azure DevOps and it has pushed all of the bits up to the Production workloads. Everything works, but a couple of features don't work perfectly. Specifically, the Search feature will happily find everything in the database, but right now, the database only has about 31,000...

Josh Barro and Saray Fay get to the heart of the time-change issue: The first thing I want to note is something I’m amazed many participants in this debate don’t seem to know: We have tried this policy before. In January 1974, the US entered what was supposed to be a two-year “experiment” with permanent daylight saving time. Unfortunately, daylight saving time does not add daylight to the day, it only shifts the daylight into the afternoon from the morning. And once people realized that — that daylight...

I just finished upgrading an old, old, old Windows service to .NET 6 and a completely different back end. It took 6.4 hours, soup to nuts, and now the .NET 6 service is happily communicating with Azure and the old .NET Framework 4.6 service is off. Meanwhile, the Post published a map (using a pretty lazy algorithm) describing county-by-county what sunrise times will look like in January 2024 if daylight saving time becomes permanent. I'd have actually used a curve tool but, hey, the jagged edges look...

I mentioned yesterday that I purged a lot of utterly useless archival data from Weather Now. It sometimes takes a while for the Azure Portal to update its statistics, so I didn't know until this afternoon exactly how much I dumped: 325 GB. Version 5 already has a bi-monthly function to move archival data to cool storage after 14 days and purge it after 3 months. I'm going to extend that to purging year-old logs as well. It may only reduce my Azure bill by $20 a month, but hey, that's a couple of beers....

The Tech Forum goes on. Tomorrow, though, I don't need my work laptop, and so will bring my personal one, enabling me to post a little more. I've also thought about finally writing my own blog engine. Or, at least, forking an existing one (maybe even this one?) and going to town on it. During some downtime today I purged a lot of crap from my Microsoft Azure subscriptions, but I still have old applications (like this blog) running in old workloads. Tonight: the Fun Dinner. Oh, boy.

As if from nowhere, the US Senate yesterday unanimously voted to pass S.623 (the "Sunshine Protection Act of 2021"), which would end daylight saving time by making that the new standard time, effective 5 November 2023. This blew up the Time Zone Committee mailing list, mostly with the implementation problems around time zone abbreviations. One of the maintainers listed four separate options, in fact, including moving everyone to a new time zone (Chicago on EST? New York on AST?), or possibly just...