Events

Over the last two days I've spent almost every working minute redesigning the 10th Magnitude framework and reference application. Not new code, really, just upgrading them to the latest Azure bits and putting them into a NuGet package. That hasn't left much time for blogging. Or for Words With Friends. And I'm using a lot of Instapaper. Without Instapaper, I'd never get to read Wired editor Mat Honan drawing lessons from his epic hack last summer.

Chicago is enjoying its 14th consecutive month of above-average sunshine, along with some unseasonable warmth leading into Thanksgiving (13°C right now, 17°C on Thursday). Earlier today the NWS Climate Prediction Center released a new 90-day forecast predicting normal temperatures and precipitation in Chicago through February: This is all fine by us. Though we do hope for a mild winter...

I've spent a good bit of free time lately working on migrating Weather Now to Azure. Part of this includes rewriting its Gazetteer, or catalog of places that it uses to find weather stations for users. For this version I'm using Entity Framework 5.0, which in turn allows me to use LINQ extensively. I always try to avoid duplicating code, and I always try to write sufficient unit tests to prevent (and fix) any coding errors I make. (I also use ReSharper and Visual Studio Code Analysis to keep me honest.)...

Oh, Azure Storage team, why did you break everything? I love upgrades. I really do. So when Microsoft released the new version of the Windows Azure SDK (October 2012, v1.8) along with a full upgrade of the Storage Client (to 2.0), I found a little side project to upgrade, and went straight to the NuGet Package Manager for my prize. I should say that part of my interest came from wanting to use some of the .NET 4.5 features, including the asynchronous helper methods, HTML 5, and native support for SQL...

Texas-based Hostess Brands has shut down in preparation for liquidation: Hostess said a strike by members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union that began last week had crippled its ability to produce and deliver products at several facilities, and it had no choice but to give up its effort to emerge intact from bankruptcy court. The Irving, Texas-based company said the liquidation would mean that most of its 18,500 employees would lose their jobs. In the...

Starting before 8am with an international conference call usually means I'll have a full day. Fortunately there's Instapaper, which lets me shove all the interesting things I find during the day onto my Android pad for tomorrow's bus ride to work. So far today: The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald worries more about surveillance than any other part of the Petreaus scandal. Wunderground's Jeff Masters explains all the superlatives around Hurricane Sandy. Philip Bump, writing at Gristmill, thinks politicians...

James Fallows, reacting to the Patreaus debacle, reminds everyone of the obvious: Here is the secret plan: Never put anything in an email message, to anyone, that would cause you serious problems if it fell into the wrong hands. That's the plan™. All of it. Never do this. Ever. Yep. This is the advice security experts have given for, well, ever.

Because you might learn things neatly summed up in the headline "Petraeus Apparently Most Mentally Balanced Individual in His Own Scandal" "(From the Times …)": Ms. Kelley, a volunteer with wounded veterans and military families, brought her complaint to a rank-and-file agent she knew from a previous encounter with the F.B.I. office, the official also said. That agent, who had previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley and had earlier sent her shirtless photographs of himself, was “just a conduit”...

Talking Points Memo has some smart readers. One of them crystallized the debate about whether the Romney campaign's shock after losing was genuine, or a ploy to inoculate themselves against the wrath of their donors: There’s an old rule of political research: never ascribe to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by stupidity. Was the Romney campaign brilliant masterminds of a coordinated PR strategy to make themselves look stupid? Or we’re they just stupid? Occam’s razor says the latter. For...

Two Chicago businesses find themselves on the ropes this afternoon, according to the Tribune. The first company, Groupon, has problems many people predicted long before their IPO: Groupon and its compatriots in the much-hyped daily deals business were supposed to change the very nature of small-business advertising. Instead, it is the daily deal vendors that are racing to change as evidence mounts that their business model is fundamentally flawed. Critics say the torrid growth that enabled Groupon to go...