Events

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why. Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day: Jennifer Rubin foresees years of aftershocks from the Tennessee legislature's expulsion of two Black members last week. Why are right-wingers making up conspiracy...

As happens about every other year, we woke up this morning to barely-above-freezing temperatures and this crap on the ground: After record warmth last week, April decided to balance the scales yesterday: All of the snow will melt in the next 24 hours as tomorrow's forecast calls for 11°C and sun, going up to 22°C by Thursday, but not before we get "scattered rain and snow showers" all day with winds up to 45 km/h. But then it goes back down to 2°C by Saturday...because April.

Not five minutes after my last post, I discovered a completely borked feature, caused by a change to the way Azure.Data.Tables executes queries. The Daily Temperatures feature stores data in the same table as the History feature. Each row represents a weather report, where the table partition key is the weather station identifier and the row key is the date and time of the report. So, for example, the first row of data for Chicago-O'Hare in the 2023 table has a partition key of KORD and a row key of...

It took a few weeks at odd hours, but I have finally deployed the latest version of Weather Now (5.0.8507). I didn't update anything visual, but all the plumbing got a refresh. It's now running in .NET 7 (until November, when .NET 8 comes out), and I did a top-to-bottom review of its asynchronous code. The app now runs noticeably faster, and I believe the corrections to the async bits will cure the nagging (but invisible) problem of thread exhaustion that happened from time to time. Now I can start...

The next 48 hours will take Chicago from a 28°C summer afternoon to a 1°C winter morning: We had a good run of four days over 26°C, and now spring returns. Tant pis.

On this day in 1998, I registered braverman.org, and just a few weeks later built the first draft of what became this blog. When I registered it, only about a million domain names existed, though 1998 turned out to be the year the Internet exploded worldwide. Just seven years earlier, only 100 .org names existed, so braverman.org may be one of the oldest .orgs out there. (For comparison, there are just about 350 million registered domain names today.) Of course, the 25th anniversary of braverman.org...

Chicago hit 28.3°C yesterday afternoon, breaking the record of 27.7°C set in 1887 and tied in 1941: The new high mark lasted for at least three hours Thursday and towered above typical temperatures for mid-April, weather service data showed. Standard April 13 high marks average 15°C, with lows usually [just above freezing]. But despite summer warmth waiting in the wings, the beach-worthy weather is poised to soon go away, if only temporarily, as another system brings cooler weather to Chicago. Despite...

Good dog, people, the Discord document leak isn't that dire. And between yesterday's Post and the Times just now, I think we can all relax a bit. Look, I haven't seen the leaked documents, nor have I sought to read them, because I don't believe I'm cleared to do so. But the only classification marking I've seen reported is "NOFORN," which just means that you can't share it with non-US citizens. It's unlawful to disclose that you currently have or have ever had any security clearance above "Public...

Often when I think about Elon Musk, Spike Jones' 1942 hit "Der Feuhrer's Face" comes to mind. Substack, whose links Musk recently banned from Twitter, brings us A.R. Moxon's similar thoughts: If you were the world’s smartest man, after all, you’d have turned your apartheid inheritance into the world’s largest fortune, and since you haven’t done that, you aren’t the world’s smartest man. Why, you might not even be a man, the definition of which is something the world’s smartest man seems to have some...

But for me, it was Tuesday: The Democratic National Committee has selected Chicago to host its convention next August, when (I assume) our party will nominate President Biden for a second term. We last hosted the DNC in 1996, when the party nominated President Clinton for his second term. Just a few minutes ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed suit in the Southern District of New York to enjoin US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) from interfering in the prosecution of the XPOTUS. Speaking of the...