Events

Cassie has spent the last two weeks creating found art out of one of my area rugs. Yesterday the "found" part got too much for me and I let the rug go. Pity, too; I won it at a silent auction for $300 only in 2016, and neither Parker nor Cassie tried to destroy it until this spring. Here's Cassie's final expression of the piece. Note not only the center section, which Cassie exfiltrated from the house a small bit at a time, but also the left edge, where she expressed a more compelling feeling of the...

I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical schedule for six weeks as the Apollo Chorus rehearses or performs about 30 times. But that's seven months off. That gives me plenty of time to listen to or read these: Time Zone Database coordinator Paul Eggert explains the TZDB, its history, and how it works. David Sedaris discusses how the US changed between...

Now that I've got a few weeks without travel, performances*, or work conferences, I can go back to not having enough time to read all the news that interests me. Like these stories: The Economist examines how Putin might be punished for war crimes in Ukraine. Max Boot wonders why Tucker Carlson still loves his old Uncle Vlad. The IPCC says we have eight years to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% or the planet will pass the 1.5°C warming threshold no matter what else we do. Welp. Via Bruce Schneier...

On Friday, I used Arithmetic™ to predict that the 162-million-row weather data transfer from Weather Now v3 to v5 would end around 7pm last night. Let's check the logs: 2022-04-04 18:48:30.7196|INFO|Clearing v3 archival records for ZYTX 2022-04-04 18:49:27.7471|INFO|Moved 157,408,921 weather archives from v3 to v5 2022-04-04 18:49:27.7471|INFO|Finished importing; duration 4.04:14:55.0952715 Nice prediction. (It logged 157 million rows because I made a performance tweak and re-started the app after 5...

I realize posting has slipped a little in the past couple of weeks. It should resume its normal frequency tomorrow, as I actually have five consecutive weeks of a routine schedule coming up. That routine includes rehearsals on Mondays, though, so nothing new today.

The Apollo Chorus performed last night at the Big Foot Arts Festival in Walworth, Wis., so I haven't done a lot of useful things today. I did take a peek at the other weather archive I have lying around, and discovered (a) it has the same schema as the one I'm currently importing into Weather Now 5, and (b) it only goes back to August 2006. Somewhere I have older archives that I need to find... But if not, NOAA might have some.

As of 17:16 CDT, the massive Weather Now v3 to v5 import had 115,441,906 records left to transfer. At 14:28 CDT yesterday, it was at 157,409,431, giving us a rate of ( 41,967,525 / 96,480 seconds = ) 435 records per second. A little more math gives us another 265,392 seconds to go, or 3 days, 1 hour, 43 minutes left. So, OK then, what's the over-under on this thing finishing before 7pm Monday? It's just finished station KCKV (Outlaw Field, Clarksville, Tenn.), with another 2,770 stations left to...

Two stories this morning seemed oddly juxtaposed. In good news, the City of Chicago announced plans to spend $15 million on 77 km of new bike and pedestrian trails over the next couple of years: Several of the projects, including plans to convert an old railroad into a trail in Englewood, are still in the planning and design phases. Others, like Sterling Bay’s planned extension of the 606 Bloomingdale Trail into Lincoln Yards, are set to come to fruition through private partnerships.  The news release...

It takes a while to transfer 162.4 million rows of data from a local SQL database to a remote Azure Tables collection. So far, after 4 hours and 20 minutes, I've transferred just over 4 million rows. That works out to about 260 rows per second, or 932,000 per hour. So, yes, the entire transfer will take 174 hours. Good thing it can run in the background. Also, because it cycles through three distinct phases (disk-intensive data read, processor-intensive data transformation, and network-intensive data...

The data transfer from Weather Now v3 to v5 continues in the background. Before running it, I did a simple SQL query to find out how many readings each station reported between September 2009 and March 2013. The results surprised me a bit: The v3 database recorded 162.4 million readings from 4,071 stations. Fully 75 of them only have one report, and digging in I can see that a lot of those don't have any data. Another 185 have fewer than 100, and a total of 573 have fewer than 10,000. At the other end...