Events

I'm in San Diego for tonight's Cubs game. Both teams are near the bottom of their divisions, and both have had solid losing streaks lately, so this should be a fascinating game. While here, I took the advice of one of my oldest-surviving friends—really, she'd inflict violence if I said how long we've known each other—and went over to Coronado for lunch at Alexander's Pizza. Good advice; it was one of the best slices of pie I've had in years. Coming back, I couldn't help notice this passing by: That is...

If one of the developers on one of my teams had done this, I would have (a) told him to get some sleep and (b) mocked him for at least a week afterwards. Saturday night I spent four hours trying to figure out why something that worked perfectly in my local Azure emulator failed with a cryptic "One of the request inputs is out of range" message in the Cloud. I even posted to StackOverflow for help. This morning, I spent about 90 minutes building a sample Cloud application up from scratch, adding one...

While trying to move a customer's app into the cloud yesterday (and well into this morning), I encountered a problem that doesn't make any sense. I now very much want to find the guys who wrote Microsoft Azure's error handling and punch them in their faces. When you access an Azure storage container, you have to use only lower-case letters, or Azure will throw a StorageClientException with the thoroughly unhelpful message "One of the request inputs is out of range." So, in all the code I've written that...

Remember all those Azure migrations I've done over the past month? Well, I have another one that I wasn't expecting, and for a variety of reasons including a failed web server, it must be completed by Monday morning. Remember I'm going to San Diego tomorrow? Good thing the airplane has WiFi. And people wonder why I eat chalk a lot...

Sometimes things just work. Last weekend, I wrote about moving my last four web applications out of my living room the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center and into the cloud via a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine. Well, if you're reading this blog entry, then I've succeeded in moving The Daily Parker. Except for transferring files (the blog comprises 302 megabytes over 13,700 files), which happened in the background while I did other things, it only took me about 45 minutes to configure the...

Lots of interesting articles hit my inbox today, and I don't have time to plagiarize write about them: Matt Taibbi takes down Sam Weill brilliantly: "Now, what Sorkin actually meant to say here was, 'Hey, asshole, we had to repeal Glass-Steagall just to make your Citigroup merger legal, remember? And now you’re pontificating, telling us we need to bring it back? Are you joking?' " Jared Diamond wishes Romney had read his book before talking about it. WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) explains how the Kennedy...

My latest missive for my employer, "When to use Microsoft Azure’s IaaS instead of PaaS", is now available on the 10th Magnitude blog. It's similar to a post from last weekend, but with better writing and editing.

As if the 10-year-long wholesale theft of wealth from the middle class to the parasite class financial services sector weren't insult enough, it turns out Mitt Romney's tax plan would injure us even more: The study was conducted by researchers at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate. His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by...

According to Jeff Atwood, today's the day: When you're hired at Google, you only have to do the job you were hired for 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, you can work on whatever you like – provided it advances Google in some way. At least, that's the theory. Although the concept predates Google, they've done more to validate it as an actual strategy and popularize it in tech circles than anyone else. Oddly enough, I can't find any mention of the 20% time benefit listed on the current Google...

It's not just Chicago; the Illinois State Climatologist has pronounced this year hotter than hell: This year so far is the warmest and third driest on record. The statewide average temperature for January-July 2012 was 56.9 degrees, 5.5 degrees above normal. The statewide average precipitation for January-July was 357 mm, 249 mm below normal or 59 percent of normal. Statewide Average Temperature Rankings for January-July 2012: 13.8°C 1921: 13.4°C 1987: 12.3°C 1998: 12.2°C 2006: 12.1°C Statewide Average...