The Daily Parker

I'm uploading a couple of fixes to Inner-Drive.com right now, so I have a few minutes to read things people have sent me. It takes a while to deploy the site fully, because the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ documentation (reg.req.) is quite large—about 3,000 HTML pages. I'd like to web-deploy the changes, but the way Azure cloud services work, any changes deployed that way get overwritten as soon as the instance reboots.

All of the changes to Inner-Drive.com are under the hood. In fact, I didn't change anything at all in the website. But I made a bunch of changes to the Azure support classes, including a much better approach to logging inspired by a conversation I had with my colleague Igor Popirov a couple of weeks ago. I'll go into more details later, but suffice it to say, there are some people who can give you more ideas in one sentence than you can get in a year of reading blogs, and he's one of them.

So, while sitting here at my remote office waiting for bits to upload, I encountered these things:

• The bartender's iPod played "Bette Davis Eyes" which immediately sent me back to this.
• Andrew Sullivan pointed me (and everyone else who reads his blog) towards the ultimate Boomer fantasy, the live-foreverists. (At some point in the near future I'm going to write about how much X-ers hate picking up after both Boomers and Millennials, and how this fits right in. Just, not right now.)
• Slate's Jamelle Bouie belives Wisconsin's voter rights decision is a win for our cause. ("Our" in this case includes those who believe retail voter fraud is so rare as to be a laughable excuse for denying a sizable portion of the population their voting rights, especially when the people denied voting rights tend to be the exact people who Republicans would prefer not to vote.)

OK, the software is deployed, and I need to walk Parker now. Maybe I'll read all these things after Game of Thrones.

The Chicago Tribune has an infographic this weekend with the final statistics of the past winter. After defining the "cold season" as the "period from the first freeze of the fall to the last freeze of spring," and asserting we've had our last freeze (I'll let that float for now), then the 2013-14 winter looked like this:

It would have been helpful, I think, had they included some comparison data. It still encapsulates a really crappy winter, which now, finally, seems over.

Their super-hero mayor had a fun night in March, apparently:

Loaded behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade, high on his Jimmy Kimmel interview, Mayor Rob Ford is winding through the streets of his city.

It’s two days after Ford’s celebrated appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, two months before rehab.

In the course of this March 5 night, Ford will bring together two of his closest felon friends, beating one and accepting drugs from another; go on a racist tirade; and boast that he often has sex with “girls” in front of his wife, according to an account of the evening. He will suggest one man could have sex with her, a source has told the Star, recalling Ford’s words.

And yet, he remains in office, and Toronto has no recall laws. Fun times, fun times...

At 1pm, the official temperature at O'Hare was 28°C. It has not been this warm in Chicago since November 7th, six months ago. The last time we had weather warmer than that was September 28th (29°C).

Good thing I'm inside...working...

Update: The official 2pm temperature of 30°C has not occurred in Chicago since September 11th, 239 days ago.

I may come back to these again:

• Sullivan on America's dynasties, and how they're bad for us.
• One of the better blog comments I've read: Codethulu. (The article commented on is also a good read.)
• Gulliver wonders whether a new sensing technology could end the ban on liquids aboard airplanes.
• Elsewhere at the Economist, a writer speculates on the reductio ad absurdam of Putin's language doctrine.

Publishing the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ to NuGet is still coming up...just not this weekend.

I almost forgot, even though Illinois Climatologist Jim Angel blogged it earlier today. The new NCA is here. Highlights—with a distinctly Illinois-centered view—via Angel:

• In the next few decades, longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels will increase yields of some crops, though those benefits will be progressively offset by extreme weather events. Though adaptation options can reduce some of the detrimental effects, in the long term, the combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity.
• Increased heat wave intensity and frequency, increased humidity, degraded air quality, and reduced water quality will increase public health risks.
• Climate change will exacerbate a range of risks to the Great Lakes, including changes in the range and distribution of certain fish species, increased invasive species and harmful blooms of algae, and declining beach health. Ice cover declines will lengthen the commercial navigation season [this winter was the exception to the rule - Jim].

If you don't mind using 170 megabytes of bandwidth, you can download the whole thing (or just the parts you want).

Actually, it's a live feed from the ISS:

IFLS explains:

One of the latest missions from the ISS is kind of amazing. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached outside of the ISS. Though temperature is controlled, the cameras are exposed to the radiation from the sun, which will allow astronauts to understand how radiation affects the instruments.

The cameras point down at Earth at all times, which makes for some breathtaking images. The feed will sometimes go down as the signal switches between the cameras, and it is hard to see when the ISS is on the dark side of the planet. If the cameras are down, the screen will be grey.

As I'm posting this, the ISS was just past the morning terminator, near the Philippines. It should fly almost directly over Chicago in 20 minutes or so. (The ISS orbits once every 92 minutes.)

I want to try this:

In less than an hour [my website] went from a small prototype in a data center in Chicago and then scaled it out to datacenters globally and added SSL.

The step-by-step explanation is worth a read if you do anything in .NET.

Via Sullivan, a great example of someone committing journalism on a politician:

Sullivan comments:

Over the weekend, Washington’s journalistic class was hobnobbing with the people they cover. Bob Woodward has helped pioneer access-journalism in which favored courtiers in The Village act as stenographers for the powerful – their skills deployed merely to figuring out which of their exclusive sources is telling the truth (a wrinkle unknown, it seems, to the access-journo of the day, Jo Becker). The idea that they would wreck their access by asking a politician questions that he really doesn’t want to answer – “Isn’t your wife German?” (see above), “Can you give us evidence for your crazy pregnancy stories?” – is preposterous.

So I give you the above video, by the intrepid BBC political reporter, Nick Robinson. Watch him go for the jugular, and watch him not release his grip until the prey is whimpering, near-lifeless on the ground. A joy to watch, and Hitch, I suspect, would approve.

Brilliant. "Was your wife taking someone else's job?"

...these:

• An infographic series explaining Game of Thrones.
• How much Cliven Bundy benefited from the government.
• Yet another 5-4 Supreme Court decision, this one allowing prayers at public meetings.
• Aircraft traffic-avoidance software got confused when a U-2 spy plane flew over Los Angeles.
• Since arguing with creationists is pointless, how can we preserve science education in vulnerable regions?
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing VP Selena Meyer, teams up with real VP Joe Biden in this introduction to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

More later.