Events

This is alarming: A new and worrisome benchmark has been reached with the announcement Tuesday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Lakes Michigan and Huron have dipped to new record lows. It’s been a 14 year journey. That’s how long water levels have been below historic averages--the most extended run of below normal water levels in the 95 year record of Great Lakes dating back to 1918. The numbers are as stunning as they are disturbing with serious implications to shipping interests, all manner of...

More things I gotta read later: The New York Times has a thorough look at their recent security problems, and security writer Nick Selby takes Symantec to task for its response. The Atlantic posted photos of Grand Central Station commemorating its 100th birthday this month. Sarah Goodyear imagines drone-proof cities in the Middle East. Now, back to rewriting an authentication provider...

The UK's Conservative government has passed a marriage equality bill by 400 to 175: [UK Prime Minister David] Cameron, who described gay marriage as “an important step forward for our country”, smiled broadly as the result was revealed. [Deputy PM] Nick Clegg called the vote “a landmark for equality in Britain”. [Opposition leader] Ed Miliband said it was “a proud day”. However, the details of the vote quickly showed that Mr Cameron’s decision to push through the legislation has left him in a minority...

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read: The Atlantic Cities blog has an analysis of class in Chicago by census tract. Seth Godin doesn't like airports, because they're organizationally horrible. Best bit: "There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones." Liz Keogh advocates Behavior-Driven Development as a new way of looking at Test-Driven Development. I will get to them...soon...

Ho did the accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen LLP miss that Dixon, Ill., comptroller Rita Crundwell embezzled $53 million? CliftonLarson in 2005 resigned as auditor for Dixon in order to keep other city assignments such as ledger-keeping after an influx of federal funds required the town to hire an independent auditor. In its lawsuit, however, Dixon contends that CliftonLarson continued to do the annual audit and get paid for it, while hiring a sole-practitioner CPA from nearby Sterling to sign off on...

My my most recent post mentioned finishing the GetWeather component of Weather Now, my demo project that provides near-real-time aviation weather for most of the world. I thought some readers might be interested to know how it works. The GetWeather component has three principal tasks: Get the raw data from the National Aeronautics and Atmospheric Administration (or, in future, any other source); Parse the data; and Store the data for the web application to use. In the Inner Drive Technology world, an...

Five years ago, on 6 January 2008, I opened a FogBugz case (#528) to "Create NOAA Downloader". The NOAA downloader goes out to the National Weather Service, retrieves raw weather data files, and stores the files and some metadata in Windows Azure storage. Marking this work item "resolved" Well, I just finished it, and therefore I have finished all of the pieces of the GetWeather application. And with that, I've finished the last significant piece of the Weather Now 4.0 rewrite. Total time to rewrite...

Via Fallows, a software designer explains how a simple feature isn't: This isn’t off the shelf, but that’s OK — we’ll just build it, it’s not rocket science. And it’s a feature that’s nice, not one that’s essential. Lot’s of people won’t use these tabs. So, what do we need to think about when adding a bar of tabs like this? The whole point is to have a view state that summarizes what you’re looking at and how it’s presented. You want to switch between view states. So we need a new object that...

Why? Because it's too cold for clouds. Actually, this is one of those correlation-causation issues: cold days like today (it's -15°C right now) are usually clear and sunny because both conditions result from a high-pressure system floating over the area. Still, it's pretty cold: A February hasn’t opened this cold here in the 17 years since 1996. The combination of bitterly cold temperatures, hovering at daybreak Friday near or below zero [Fahrenheit] in many corners of the metro area, plus the biting...

The Cranky Flier wants to know: Now the latest “news” of the day is that American CEO Tom Horton may end up being the Chairman of the combined entities. There is some good and some bad to this kind of thing. The good is pretty simple to explain. If Horton is willing to settle for a Tilton-esque agreement where he can just sit in a fancy office and collect a huge paycheck for a couple of years, then that finally removes the last real barrier to a merger – the fight being put up by management. On the...