The Daily Parker

I spent today bringing two new developers up to speed on our software and architecture, and in a little bit we're going to a project kickoff dinner. So while I recognize that News have happened, I have no time to report even a single New this evening.

I just discovered that Azure App Services allows you to create one free managed certificate per App Service. For Weather Now, I spent $140 creating two certificates, when really I only cared about the one (for https://www.wx-now.com).

Microsoft explains:

The free App Service managed certificate is a turn-key solution for securing your custom DNS name in App Service. It's a TLS/SSL server certificate that's fully managed by App Service and renewed continuously and automatically in six-month increments, 45 days before expiration, as long as the prerequisites set-up remain the same without any action required from you. All the associated bindings will be updated with the renewed certificate. You create the certificate and bind it to a custom domain, and let App Service do the rest.

The free certificate comes with the following limitations:

• Does not support wildcard certificates.
• Does not support usage as a client certificate by using certificate thumbprint (removal of certificate thumbprint is planned).
• Does not support private DNS.
• Is not exportable.
• Is not supported on App Service Environment (ASE).
• Only supports alphanumeric characters, dashes (-), and periods (.).

That will make a big difference going forward, and saved me $70 for the emergency Inner-Drive.com port going on this week...

When I deployed Weather Now v5 recently, I set about deleting a lot of stuff that cost money to run in Azure but no longer served any purpose. The upgrade was always going to be a one-way trip, which is why I waited so long. (That, and the upgrade necessitated a few one-time charges that I wanted to put off.)

It appears, however, that I deleted something the Inner Drive Technology brochure site needed. Oops. And the old IDT site runs on .NET Framework 4.7, so I can't even modernize it in place.

So...let's see how fast I can port it to .NET 6, shall we?

Leading off today's afternoon roundup, The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman) announced today that Netflix has a series in production based on his game Exploding Kittens. The premise: God and Satan come to Earth—in the bodies of cats. And freakin' Tom Ellis is one of the voices, because he's already played one of those parts.

Meanwhile, in reality:

• A consumers group filed suit against Green Thumb Industries and three other Illinois-based cannabis companies under the Clayton Act, alleging collusion that has driven retail pot prices above $8,800 per kilo. For comparison, the group alleges that retail prices in California are just $660 per kilo. (Disclosure: The Daily Parker is a GTI shareholder.)
• Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), one of the indirect defendants in the pot suit, signed a $46 billion budget for the state that includes $1.8 billion in temporary tax relief. Apparently, I'll get a $50 check from the State that I can apply to the $600 increase in property taxes Cook County imposed this year, which is nice, but I think the state could have aimed a bit lower on the income cap for that rebate and given more help to other people.
• Shortly after US District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle (a 35-year-old who never tried a case and who graduated summa cum mediocrae laude from the legal powerhouse University of Florida just 8 years ago and earned a rare "not qualified" rating from the ABA upon her appointment in 2020 by the STBXPOTUS) ruled against the CDC in a case brought by an anti-masker, the DOT dropped mask mandates for public transport and air travel in the US. In related news, the Judge also said it's OK to piss in other people's swimming pools and up to the other swimmers not to drink the water.
• While the Chicago Piping Plovers organization waits for Monty and Rose to return to Montrose Beach, another one of the endangered birds has landed at Rainbow Beach on the South Side. He appears more inclined to rent than buy, but local ornithologists report the bird has a new profile on the Plōvr dating site.
• NBC breaks down the three biggest factors driving inflation right now, and yes, one of them is president of Russia. None, however, is president of the US.
• Along those lines, (sane) Republican writer Sarah Longwell, who publishes The Bulwark, found that 68% of Republicans believe the Big Lie that the XPOTUS won the 2020 election, but "the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose." Makes me proud to be an American!

And finally, via Bruce Schneier, two interesting bits. First, a new paper explains how a bad actor can introduce a backdoor into a machine learning training session to force specific outcomes (explained in plain English by Cory Doctorow). Second, an attacker used a "flash loan" to take over the Beanstalk crypto currency voting system and stole $182 million from it. Because Crypto Is The Future™.

How did it take until a year into the pandemic for someone to write this song?

Art, software, writing, anything creative. It cost that much because it took me fucking hours.

Actually, it's 5pm here. And I have a few stories queued up:

• Oklahoma has a new law making abortion a felony, because the 1950s were great for the white Christian men who wrote that law.
• Monika Bauerlein explains why authoritarians hate a free press. Not that we didn't already know.
• Jonathan Haidt explains "why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid." ("It's not just a phase.")
• Inflation in the US hit a 40-year high at 8.5% year over year, but Paul Krugman believes it will drop considerably in the next few months. Not that the result will be particularly good, mind.
• With Allstate's Northbrook campus about to become an Amazon facility (and it really being in unincorporated Cook County), the villages of Prospect Heights and Glenview are gearing up for a fight over who gets to annex it.

Finally, author John Scalzi puts Rogue One in third place on his ranked list of Star Wars films, with some good reasons.

Via Molly White, a new company called Gripnr wants to monetize your D&D campaign, and it's as horrible as it sounds:

Gripnr plans to generate 10,000 random D&D player characters (PCs), assign a “rarity” to certain aspects of each (such as ancestry and class), and mint them as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Each NFT will include character stats and a randomly-generated portrait of the PC designed in a process overseen by Gripnr’s lead artist Justin Kamerer. Additional NFTs will be minted to represent weapons and equipment.

Next, Gripnr will build a system for recording game progress on the Polygon blockchain. Players will log into the system and will play an adventure under the supervision of a Gripnr-certified Game Master. After each game session is over, the outcome will be logged on-chain, putting data back onto each NFT via a new contract protocol that allows a single NFT to become a long record of the character’s progression. Gripnr will distribute the cryptocurrency OPAL to GMs and players as in-game capital. Any loot, weapons, or items garnered in-game will be minted as new sellable NFTs on OpenSea, a popular NFT-marketplace.

As a D&D veteran who once played a character (for 5 minutes) with Gary Gygax* as DM, I can't see how any gamer would want to do this. Molly White has spent the last two years documenting the ways scammers and grifters have used "the blockchain" and "NFTs" and other Web3 buzzwords to steal (or, as I believe, launder) billions of dollars. Gripnr seems like just one more scam, but I could be wrong: Gripnr could just be a lazy get-rich-quick scheme for its creators.

When I launched the final weather archive import on Tuesday, I predicted it would finish around 1pm today. See my accuracy for yourself:

2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Moved 118,773,651 weather archives from v3 to v5
2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Finished importing; duration 3.03:41:19.2445019
2022-04-08 12:54:05.0975|INFO|Import finished

Not a bad prediction.

So Weather Now 5 now has about 260 million historical records going back to 2006, including Chicago's weather from 15 years ago this hour. And where the weather station reported climate records, we've got those too.

Microsoft Azure recalculates storage use daily around 11 am Central time, so I don't have the complete picture yet, but it looks like I transferred about 245 GB of data. I'll find out for sure tomorrow, and in 3-4 days I'll get an accurate view of the storage cost.

Whew. I'm glad that's over.

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 his 2019 and 2021 tours.
• Why have work days gotten so long for many people? Meetings.
• The recent revelation that before taking over the 2016 election campaign Steve Bannon favorably compared the XPOTUS to the German Chancellor who ruled from 1933 to 1945, led Timothy Noah to the conclusion: "We used to call people who think like Bannon sociopaths. Now we just call them Republicans."
• Paul Krugman reviews the situation and finds that declining immigration seems to have the largest effect on our labor shortage right now.
• Programmer Andrew Schmelyun connected a grocery-store receipt printer to his GitHub issues stream so he could get actual tickets in one of the most brilliant reverse-skeumorphs I have seen in years.

And finally, in compiling geographic source data for Weather Now, I discovered that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) assigned an official designator the location where the Ingenuity helicopter landed on Mars: JZRO, for Jezero Crater.

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 million.)

As I've mentioned, those 162 million rows only go back to September 2009. But v3 launched in January 2007. And it turns out I have a second archive, also containing about 25 GB of data, going back to August 2006. I had to think back to decisions I never documented to piece together why.

In August 2006, I had a single big machine that served as my domain controller, Web server, and Exchange endpoint, and a second big database server. In this photo from 31 July 2006, the Exchange/Web/DC server is the white one on the right ("DOPPELKUH") and the SQL server ("BULLE") is the big black one on the left:

Now, BULLE was a huge machine for the time, with about 200 GB of disk space and (I think) 16 GB of memory. That 200 GB expanse tempted me to turn off a data-purge feature from more parsimonious days, and apparently I deployed that change around 9am on 11 August 2006. (Sadly, the purge feature worked as designed, and I have no archival data before then.)

In October 2006, I finally bought a server rack and moved the database to an even bigger set of disks:

Everything ticked along until around the time I deployed the Weather Now v3.5 refresh and discovered that the un-purged data file had grown to 25 GB. So on 3 September 2009, I simply created a new database and changed the data connection strings to point to it. That new database kept growing until I switched the archival data store to the Cloud in 2013.

And now, I get to take advantage of the triviality of that change by making an equally trivial change to the import controller's data connection string. The 2006 data file has 118,774,028 rows covering 3,988 stations from 11 August 2006 to 3 September 2009. At 435 rows per second, the final archival import should finish around...let's see...1 pm on Friday. At that point, every single byte of data Weather Now has collected in the past 15 years will be available through the App for you to see.

More from the archives:

• The server rack in its final form.
• A note about decommissioning the server rack in March 2013, when I moved Weather Now v4 to the Cloud.