The Daily Parker

The Atlantic's CityLab blog, of course:

For all the monorail enthusiasts out there just now learning that New York once had its own single-track wonder, put your excitement on hold. For on this date in 1910, during its inaugural journey, the monorail lurched over, sending scores of people to the hospital.

The painful incident can be traced to the slick salesmanship of one Howard Tunis, who did so well demonstrating his novel design for an electric monorail at a 1907 exposition in Virginia that he gained the attention of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The IRT, the original operator of New York's subway line, asked Tunis if he could assemble a similar prototype for use up north. That the inventor did, and soon enough it was ready on a track stretching from a railroad station on the borough's mainland a short distance down to City Island.

Now, if I only had time to read the article...

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains why Ctrl-F doesn't "find" in Outlook, like it does in every other modern application across the universe:

It's a widespread convention that the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut initiates a Find operation. Word does it, Excel does it, Wordpad does it, Notepad does it, Internet Explorer does it. But Outlook doesn't. Why doesn't Outlook get with the program?

Rewind to 1995.

The mail team was hard at work on their mail client, known as Exchange (code name Capone, in keeping with all the Chicago-related code names from that era). Back in those days, the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut did indeed call up the Find dialog, in accordance with convention.

And then a bug report came in from a beta tester who wanted Ctrl+F to forward rather than find, because he had become accustomed to that keyboard shortcut from the email program he used before Exchange.

I'll let Chen give you the punchline.

For once I'm not ranting about politics. No, check out these spite houses:

About a century ago, a Bay Area man named Charles Froling was just learning that he wouldn't be able to build his dream house. An inheritance had gifted him a sizable chunk of land, but municipal elders in the City of Alameda had decided to appropriate most of it to extend a street. So Froling sadly rolled up his blueprints and murmured, "Ah well, that's life."

No, of course he didn't do that. Having a constitution made from equal parts righteous indignation and pickle juice, the frustrated property owner took what little land he had left and erected a stilted, utterly ridiculous abode. The house measured 54 feet long but only 10 feet wide, as if a tornado had blown away two-thirds of the original structure.

They have art. I can't tell if the houses depicted are cozy or horrifying, though.

I didn't sleep terribly well last night because, let's face it, the Cleveland Airport Sheraton is neither my own house nor the Ritz-Carlton on Park Ave. It is, however, in Cleveland, where my current client is also.

There are essentially two options for traveling: fly out the night before your meetings, or the morning of your meetings. And for me it comes down to one thing: Is the trade-off for one night at home going to be getting up at 4:30am to get a 7am flight from O'Hare?

That's not a trade-off I'm likely to make without serious counter-incentives.

So, expect lighter-than-usual posting this week. I hope nothing interesting happens in U.S. politics while I'm here...

On Friday, Paul Wildman at the Washington Post shot back at the President's critics:

Both Republicans and the media have become obsessed with the question of whether President Obama should go to the border for a photo opportunity, with the accompanying and bizarre assertion that this is “Obama’s Katrina.”

In fact, it’s just the opposite. In that case, it was Bush’s failure of competence and his inability to go beyond photo ops that resulted in so much destruction. In this case, the president’s critics are actually demanding a photo op, while refusing to take any immediate practical steps to address the problem.

Republicans actually seem to be under the impression that George W. Bush’s failure during Katrina was just one of impression management. He got photographed doing the wrong things, or gave an insufficient number of hugs to residents. But that wasn’t it at all. The problem was that his administration didn’t take the storm seriously enough, and when the horror became clear, the agency in charge of responding was led by the former Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, who couldn’t successfully manage the cleanup of a messy rec room, much less a natural disaster on the scale of Katrina, which killed somewhere between 1,400 and 3,500 people and did upward of $100 billion in damage.

But the Republicans and their allies at Fox don't want to govern; they want to rule. That's what the Right does, always. So naturally they only understand image, because that, to them, is what makes an effective leader. Not the actual policies.

I have to dash off to a meeting in a few minutes, then to Wrigley. So this is more of a note to myself.

Lucene.NET will be coming to Weather Now, I hope in a few weeks. This will massively improve its piss-poor searching, and allow me to do a few other things as well given Lucene's amazing search capabilities.

Unfortunately, Weather Now ranks third in development priorities behind my employer and my long-suffering freelance client. At least it kind of runs itself these days.

Imagine you're sitting on your front stoop, strumming your guitar, and Eric Clapton comes out of nowhere to give you some pointers.

That's about what happened to me today. Earlier this week, Jon Skeet (described by Scott Hanselman as "the world's greatest living programmer) noticed something I posted on the IANA Time Zone list, and asked me about the Inner Drive Time Zone library.

So I sent him the package.

And this afternoon, he sent me a benchmark that he wrote for it. Just like that.

Of course, the benchmark showed that my stuff was about 10% as fast as the Noda Time library, an open-source project he curates. So, having a couple of hours for "personal development time" available, I optimized it.

The specific details of the optimization are not that interesting, but I managed to more than double the library's performance by changing about ten lines of code. (It's now 20% as fast as Noda.) Along the way I exchanged about 10 emails with Skeet, because he kept making really crack suggestions and giving me valuable feedback about both my design and his.

That was cool.

Tatiana Maslany, who plays Sarah Manning (and Alison, Cosima, Helena, Rachel, etc.) on BBCA's "Orphan Black," was not nominated for an Emmy award this morning. Before hearing from the critics why this pretty much invalidates the Best Actress category this year, take a look:

The Toronto Sun leads the prosecution:

Emmy Award voters must have broken their clickers.

Had they been able to change the channel every once in a while, they might have run across a Canadian actress named Tatiana Maslany and a show called Orphan Black.

Jokes about broken clickers aside, maybe this actually is a U.S. channel problem.

In Canada, Orphan Black airs on Space, which has a far higher profile in our country, comparatively speaking, than Orphan Black's U.S. network, BBC America, does in the States.

And it also must be noted that Maslany's category – lead actress in a drama – was particularly competitive this year. Keri Russell of The Americans and Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men didn't make the cut, either.

Still, this sucks, Canada.

American critics are disappointed too. Insider daily Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman thinks this shows bigger problems in ATAS:

This is not one of those years when Emmy voters get forgiveness on their oversights simply because they seemed to be progressive in a few categories. That's because the rubber-stamping seemed especially gratuitous and the Big Mistakes seemed more prominent and damning.

Tasked with celebrating and rewarding the achievements from within its own industry, Emmy voters continue to come off as half-involved, behind-the-times clock watchers instead of guardians. It's as if the admittedly daunting task of actively sampling the ever-changing content of their own makes them crumble before even making an effort.

I mean, even by the low bar of Emmy standards, 2014 is a real omnishambles.

If you're paying attention at all, Tatiana Maslany from BBC America's Orphan Black is not a dark horse contender anymore. She should have been a slam dunk, not a snub for the second year running. Overlooking The Americans and The Good Wife as best drama is almost startling. In a world where Downton Abbey is going to get a slot, add Masters Of Sex and The Walking Dead to that list.

Part of the yearly problem with the Emmys is the institutional habit of returning an ungodly percentage of past winners into the nomination ranks despite downturns in series quality or superior acting performances from competitors.

And here are just a few things my friends are saying on Facebook:

• Tatiana Maslany was not nominated for an Emmy. ALL AWARDS ARE NOW INVALID TO THE END OF TIME.
• WHY IS TATIANA MASLANY NOT ON THIS LIST? Stupid ATAS.
• I love tofu, esp tofu tacos!

(That last one may not have been, strictly speaking, on point...)

Of course, the Emmys haven't influenced my TV viewing since...well, ever, so I'm not really sure it matters. But what a stupid omission.

The Tribune reported about half an hour ago that the Cubs have agreed to the Mayor's proposal and will scale back their signage plans:

The Cubs agreed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s requested conditions in order to present its latest renovation proposal Thursday to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, including reducing the size of signs along exterior outfield walls and to continue negotiating with rooftop owners who have said the signs will hurt their businesses, according to a City Hall source.

The changes requested by the city include reducing the size of the signs along the exterior outfield walls and increase spacing between them, as well as eliminating plans for sliding concession windows for the exterior brick wall at Waveland and Sheffield avenues. The team also agreed to drop enlarged openings in the outfield brick wall for new bullpens, a change the team previously announced.

But Crain's Joe Cahill has a snarkier view of the Ricketts' plans:

After looking over the Chicago Cubs' latest proposal for new advertising signs at Wrigley Field, I'm more convinced than ever that they're really committed to winning.

Why? Because their plan to install seven big signs at a ballpark that has been free of the visual clutter found in most big league stadiums means they won't be able to count on Wrigley Field to draw crowds win or lose. The retro charms of Wrigley Field are the reason why the Cubs have done well financially while doing poorly on the field for so many years, a rare feat for a sports franchise.

But it seems to me they're messing with a unique asset. Wrigley Field has been an annuity of sorts, generating reliable income for decades. Altering it is a risky business move.

It seems that way to us fans, too. As much as I'd like to see the Cubs in the Series, do I really have to give up historical Wrigley Field to get there? Cahill might not be joking, but only just.

For the last couple of days, I've had trouble getting to Microsoft's Azure blog. From my office in downtown Chicago, clicking the link gives me an error message:

The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

However, going to the same URL from a virtual machine on Azure takes me to the blog. So what's going on here? It took a little detective work, but I think Microsoft has a configuration error one of a set of geographically-distributed Azure web sites, they don't know about it, and there's no way to tell them.

The first step in diagnosing a problem like this is to see if it's local. Is there something about the network I'm on that prevents me from seeing the website? This is unlikely for a few big reasons: first, when a local network blocks or fails to connect to an outside site, usually nothing at all happens. This is how the Great Firewall of China works, because someone trying to get to a "forbidden" address may get there slowly, normally, or not at all—and it just looks like a glitch. Second, though, the root Azure site is completely accessible. Only the Blog directory has an error message. Finally, the error message is coming from the foreign system. Chrome confirms this; there's a HTTP 200 (OK) response with the content I see.

All right, so the Azure Blog is down. But that doesn't make a lot of sense. Thousands of people read the Azure blog every day; if it were down, surely Microsoft would have noticed, right?

So for my next test, I spun up an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and tried to connect from there. Bing! No problem. There's the blog.

Now we're onto something. So let's take a look at where my local computer thinks it's going, and where the VM thinks it's going. Here's the nslookup result for my local machine, both from my company's DNS server and from Google's 8.8.8.8 server:

Now here's what the VM sees:

Well, now, that is interesting.

From my local computer, sitting in downtown Chicago, both Google and my company's DNS servers point "azure.microsoft.com" to an Azure web site sitting in the North Central U.S. data center, right here in Chicago. But for the VM, which itself is running in the East U.S. data center in southern Virginia, both Microsoft's and Google's DNS servers point the same domain to an Azure web site also within the East U.S. data center.

It looks like both Microsoft and Google are using geographic load-balancing and some clever routing to return DNS addresses based on where the DNS request comes from. I'd bet if I spun up an Azure VM in the U.S. West data center, both would send me to the Azure blog running out there.

This is what massive load balancing looks like from the outside, by the way. If you've put your systems together correctly, users will go to the nearest servers for your content, and they'll never realize it.

Unfortunately, the North Central U.S. instance of the Microsoft Azure blog is down, has been down for several days, and won't come up again until someone at Microsoft realizes it's down. Also, Microsoft makes it practically impossible to notify them that something is broken. So those of us in Chicago will just have to read about Azure on our Azure VMs until someone in Redmond fixes their broken server. I hope they read my blog.