The Daily Parker

If, as expected, Chicago gets no measurable snow by 6pm tonight, we will set a new record for the latest measurable snowfall of the cold season (July 1st to June 30th, believe it or not), and the second-longest stretch without snow in recorded history:

On Monday...Chicago tied the record, which dates back to Dec. 20, 2012.

There is no snow in the forecast until possibly well beyond Christmas.

There has been some snow so far this season. But instead of having the first typical snowfall earlier in the fall, there have only been traces.

To be measurable, there must be at least [2.5 mm]. Since November, there have been such amounts in the area, but not at O’Hare International Airport, which is the official weather recording station for Chicago.

We last had measurable snowfall on March 15th, 280 days ago. The longest period—which the 10-day forecast suggests we might tie or break—ran from 4 March to 19 December 2012, comprising 290 days.

That said, through December 21st last year we only had 18 mm of snowfall at O'Hare, before getting over a meter of snow through the end of February.

Personally, though, I'm happy with our mild and snow-free December.

Glorious Solstice to All, too.

The Washington Post breezes in with a month-by-month interactive feature:

[E]vidence increasingly shows that historic heat waves, monster rain events and ultra-intense storms are exacerbated by the warmer air and water of our overheating planet.

“The only two truisms when it comes to extremes in climate change are that almost everywhere: The hot hots are getting hotter and more frequent, and the wet wets are getting wetter and more frequent,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA who specializes in the relationship between climate change and weather.

The year began with what Swain might call a “wetter wet” against the backdrop of a year-long drought, and it just got weirder from there.

Enjoy, and here's to more climate-change craziness in 2022!

I will now take a break from my ongoing struggles to make Blazorise play nicely with Open ID authentication so I can read these:

• Block Club Chicago, which has essentially taken over from the Chicago Tribune in local news coverage as the latter is slowly strangled by a hedge fund, investigated the Amazon carryall boxes that seem to pop up everywhere these days.
• Paul Krugman spends some time explaining inflation in general and our current round of it in specific.
• Gordon Ramsay has opened his third restaurant, right here in Chicago.
• NBC digs into why Internet outages happen, and what technology can do about it.
• Yasmin Tayag advises everyone to prepare for an inevitable bout of Covid, even if you've ben vaccinated.

And finally, WGN confirms we hit back-to-back record temperatures Wednesday and Thursday, both tied for 11th warmest December day in Chicago history.

I've mentioned that Inner Drive Technology will release a new version of Weather Now pretty soon. I've finished everything except the UI and migrating the data, in fact, so I may even finish in January.

I have an odd bug, though, so I'm posting here in addition to the posts I made on Stack Overflow and on the Blazorise GitHub project.

In short, Blazorise speeds up UI development by abstracting away a lot of the formatting and layout for a .NET Blazor app. Blazor, in turn, abstracts away most of the lower-level UI code that makes websites interactive and fast. It's a long way from the XML-XSLT page construction I used in the last Weather Now UI update back in 2007. (Yes, the UI turns 15 soon—but the app itself turned 22 on November 11th.)

Without going too deeply into the issue, let me sum up. The new version will allow users to log in and customize their experience. But it still needs to work for anonymous users, who will make up probably 95% of the users.

The new site will continue the left-side navigation pane for desktop views. To do that, I built a MasterLayout.razor page that looks like the demo code in the Blazorise documentation:

<Layout Sider="true">
	<LayoutSider>
		<LayoutSiderContent>
			<Bar Breakpoint="Breakpoint.Desktop" NavigationBreakpoint="Breakpoint.Tablet" ThemeContrast="ThemeContrast.Dark"
			     Mode="BarMode.VerticalPopout" CollapseMode="BarCollapseMode.Small">
				<BarToggler />
				<BarBrand>
					<BarItem>
						<BarLink To="">
							<BarIcon IconName="_customIcon" />
							Weather Now
						</BarLink>
					</BarItem>
				</BarBrand>
				<NavMenu />
			</Bar>
		</LayoutSiderContent>
	</LayoutSider>

	<Layout>
		<LayoutHeader Fixed="true">
			<Bar @bind-Visible="@_topbarVisible" Breakpoint="Breakpoint.Desktop" Background="Background.Primary" ThemeContrast="ThemeContrast.Light">
				<BarBrand>
					<BarItem>
						<BarLink To="">
							<BarIcon IconName="FontAwesomeIcons.CloudSun" />
							Weather Now
						</BarLink>
					</BarItem>
				</BarBrand>
				<BarMenu Class="justify-content-end">
					<BarEnd>
						<AuthorizeView>
							<Authorized>
								<BarItem>
									<Blazorise.Icon Name="FontAwesomeIcons.User" Visibility="Visibility.Visible" />
									Hi, @context?.User?.Identity?.Name
								</BarItem>
							</Authorized>
						</AuthorizeView>
						<BarItem>
							<LoginDisplay />
						</BarItem>
					</BarEnd>
				</BarMenu>
			</Bar>
		</LayoutHeader>

		<LayoutContent Padding="Padding.Is4.OnX">
			@Body
		</LayoutContent>

		<LayoutFooter Fixed="true" Padding="Padding.Is4.OnX">
			Copyright ©@DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.Year Inner Drive Technology.
		</LayoutFooter>
	</Layout>
</Layout>

The issue is that when a logged-in user views a page, they see the part within the <LayoutSider> tag, which includes the navigation menu. When an anonymous user hits the page, they don't see anything in that area.

The culprit turns out to be the <Bar Mode=""> attribute. If that attribute is present with any value at all, the behavior occurs. Without that value, the behavior does not occur.

One more data point: the Program.cs startup code contains this bit:

builder.Services.AddRazorPages(options =>
{
	options.Conventions.AllowAnonymousToFolder("/");
	options.Conventions.AllowAnonymousToPage("/Index");
	options.Conventions.AllowAnonymousToFolder("/_content");
	options.Conventions.AllowAnonymousToFolder("/Pages");
	options.Conventions.AllowAnonymousToFolder("/Shared");
});

That code lets anonymous users see any content in the app that doesn't specifically require being logged in or authorized.

Anyway, I hope someone in the 'verse sees one of these posts and knows what has gone wrong. (If you do, please comment on the Stack Overflow post so we both get reputation points.)

I just started Sprint 52 in my day job, after working right up to the last possible minute yesterday to (unsuccessfully) finish one more story before ending Sprint 51. Then I went to a 3-hour movie that you absolutely must see.

Consequently a few things have backed up over at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters.

Before I get into that, take a look at this:

That 17.1°C reading at IDTWHQ comes in a shade lower than the official reading at O'Hare of 17.8°, which ties the record high maximum set in 1971. The forecast says it'll hang out here for a few hours before gale-force winds drive the temperature down to more seasonal levels overnight. I've even opened a few windows.

So what else is new?

• Carving out exceptions to filibusters in the US Senate? Not new.
• The intractability of the US Senate in general? Not new.
• The size of the US House of Representatives, which we could change at any time? Not new.
• Boris Johnson not believing rules apply to him? Not new.
• Disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's ethics problems? Not new.
• The "metaverse" idea? Not new (says the guy who first imagined it).
• Candidates to run Chicago's tourism board? Not just not new; not any.

So what really is new?

• The Log4j zero-day exploit is pretty new, and pretty serious.
• The rash of tornados, including an EF5 monster that spun for 300 kilometers in Kentucky in December is really new, and even more serious.
• Pittsburgh switching over to dark-sky streetlights over the next 5 years is new, and pretty cool.
• Most of the buildings around Orleans and Kinzie in the River North area of Chicago are new, but not pretty or cool.
• Getting whisky delivered to your house is new-ish in most places and will be new in others pretty soon.

But Sprint 52 at my office, that's incredibly new, and I must go back to it.

My outdoor thermometer has alerted me to an unusual temperature swing:

Yes, that's a 4°C rise in one hour. At least it's stopped raining. But there is a tornado warning about 100 km from here, so there's a lot of energy in the air right now.

Meanwhile, indoors, my fireplace caused a spike in CO₂:

Don't worry, 2,000 ppm won't hurt me. But I did get an alert about it.

We're all set to perform Handel's Messiah tomorrow and Sunday, which got noticed by both the local news service and local TV station. Otherwise, the week just keeps getting odder:

• Monkees singer-songwriter Michael Nesmith died today at 78.
• Consumer prices rose at an annualized rate of 6.8% in November, the highest rate in 39 years.
• Catherine Rampell wonders who would ever design a political system like ours.
• Kate Riga explains the dog-whistle Justice Amy Coney Barrett (R) used in last week's oral arguments on the Mississippi abortion ban.
• The UK has imposed an Ultra Low Emissions Zone in most of greater London, imposing an eye-watering £12.50-per-day toll on anyone who brings in a car that fails to meet their emissions standards.
• A jury convicted actor Jussie Smollett of faking his own hate crime for...reasons? Dave Chapelle has the best take on this (from 2019).
• The Writers Guild of America has released their updated list of the 101 best screenplays of the 21st Century (so far).
• The Federal Aviation Administration has issued an Airworthiness Directive on the reliability of radar altimeters near 5G mobile phone transmitters.

And to cap all that off, the National Weather Service has announced a Hazardous Weather Outlook for tonight that includes...tornados? I hope the weather gets better before our performance.

Just a few:

• What is Putin's real game with Ukraine right now? Julia Ioffe thinks it may just be R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
• After Bob Dole's death this week, Paul Krugman bemoans the disappearance of Republican grown-ups.
• A stupid-looking statute of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest finally came down.
• Germany's incoming government claims it wants to protect end-to-end encryption, a move Bruce Schneier likes.
• Bloomberg CityLab asks, why does US infrastructure cost so much?
• A rash of earthquakes shook the Pacific Ocean west of Oregon this morning.

And finally, atheist sci-fi author John Scalzi...bought a church?

The temperature bottomed out last night just under -10°C, colder than any night since I adopted Cassie. (We last got that cold on February 20th.) Even now the temperature has just gone above -6°C. Though she has two fur coats on all the time, I still think keeping her outside longer than about 20 minutes would cause her some discomfort.

Add that it's Messiah week and I barely have enough free time to give her a full hour of walks today.

Meanwhile, life goes on, even if I can only get the gist of it:

• Julia Ioffe points out that Russia itself turned NATO's attention back upon it, which doesn't really help Ukraine right now.
• Jeannie Suk Gersen sees Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health as a challenge to the Supreme Court's authority.
• The XPOTUS has set up a Special Purpose Acquisition Company that Josh Marshall calls "an open invitation to foreign bribes and payoffs."
• Chicago drivers spent more time stuck in traffic than in any other major US city this year. Yay us.

Finally, journalist Allison Robicelli missed a connection at O'Hare this past weekend, and spent the wee hours exploring the empty terminals. The last time I stared down a 12-hour stay at an airport, I hopped into the Tube and spent 8 of those hours exploring the city instead, but I'm not a professional journalist.

I'm looking ahead to two long rehearsals, three performances, and squeezing into my tuxedo, all while the temperature drops over the next six hours to a predicted -9°C. I conclude from these facts that it's the beginning of winter.

I also just spent the last hour trying to get Visual Studio to log into the correct Azure subscription. So instead of reading these things at lunch, I had to let them pile up:

• The UK High Court ruled yesterday that Uber's business model is unlawful, saying ride-hail services do fall under a 1998 law regulating car hires.
• Thieves in Canada have learned how to use Apple AirTags to target high-end cars.
• Michael Tomasky takes issue with Ron DeSantis' push to "freedom us to death."
• Pan-American Airlines ceased operations 30 years ago Saturday.
• Maybe teaching student pilots better safety habits overall would prevent the engine-out forced landings we simulate in training.

And now, back to the mines.