Events

Weather Now is fully deployed to the Cloud. As soon as the Worker Role finishes parsing the last few hours of weather, I'll cut over the DNS change, and it will be live. Actually, that's not entirely true; I'm going to cut over the DNS in the morning, after I know I fixed the bugs I found during this past week's shake-down cruise.* So if you want to see what a weather site looks like while it's back-filling its database, you can go to its alias, http://wx-now.cloudapp.net. (Because of how Azure works...

The final deployment of Weather Now encountered a hitch after loading exactly 3 million (of 7.2 million) place names. I've now kludged a response for the remaining 4.2 million rows, and a contingency plan should that upload fail. Meanwhile, I have a saturated Internet connection. So rather than sit here and watch paint dry, so to speak, I'm bringing back some of the bugs that I decided to postpone fixing. The end result, I hope, will be a better-quality application than I'd planned to release—and a...

Tomorrow morning, shortly after I have my coffee, I will finally turn off the last two production servers in my apartment the IDTIDC. The two servers in question, Cook and Kendall, have run more or less continuously since November 2006*, gobbling up power and making noise the whole time. As I write this, I'm uploading the production Weather Now deployment along with the complete Inner Drive Gazetteer, a 7.2-million row catalog of place names that the site uses for finding people's local weather. It...

The Illinois Republican Party will vote tomorrow on whether to kick out chairman Pat Brady after he took public positions contrary to the party platform: Brady, of St. Charles, could be ousted over his statements supporting same-sex marriage Saturday, with committeemen meeting in Tinley Park to decide his fate. State Sen. Jim Oberweis of Sugar Grove, 14th District Republican committeeman and a leader in the effort to remove Brady, said Brady's situation is different from committeemen who stray from the...

Glad we cleared that up: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced during Thursday’s briefing that Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) this morning regarding the administration’s policy on drone strikes targeting Americans on U.S. soil. Holder’s letter stated definitively that the U.S. would not use “weaponized” drones to targets American citizens on domestic soil. Reading directly from Holder’s letter to Paul, Carney said, “Does the President have the authority...

That's the problem. People inhale and exhale mentally, and right now, I'm exhaling. This means I get a lot of work done, but not a lot of reading. This, in turn, means more lists like this: Scott Adams ruminates on how power works. James Fallows examines threat inflation. Hugo Chávez is still dead. Bill Gates writes book reviews? American Airlines and USAirways won't expand O'Hare. Elizabeth Kolbert needs more sleep. Lunchtime!

Principally, it means not having to commute in 15 cm of snow. It also means several uninterrupted hours of working on stuff. And, unfortunately, not reading all this yet: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died, finally. Americans are weird, bringing a lot of economics research into question. SimCity 5 came out today, to some criticism. Bad Lip Reading hits SpiderMan. Now to walk Parker in the snow, and keep working...

Netsch was Illinois' first female nominee for governor and the Illinois controller in the 1990s. She died this morning at age 86 from complications from ALS: She was one of the first female law professors in the United States. A liberal Democrat, she defeated the Machine-backed incumbent state Sen. Danny O’Brien to win a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1972 that she held for 18 years. Elected comptroller in 1990, she was the first woman elected to statewide office in Illinois and, four years later, the...

Exhibit 1, yesterday at 4:58pm:

I don't know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I've just deployed the completely-redesigned Weather Now application. I feel 10 kilos lighter. Check out the preview on Windows Azure. The application started in mid-1997 as a feature of the now-defunct braverman.org, my proto-blog. The last major changes happened in 2006, when I gave it a face-lift. I've occasionally pushed some bug fixes, but really, until today it has looked and acted essentially the same way for 6 years. (The GetWeather...