Events

Pity the South. They really can't deal with winter weather: In Atlanta, however, at 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning (well after the snowfall had stopped), [Mayor Kasim] Reed was talking about people still needing to get home. Many of these people wound up passing the night at a grocery store or a stranger's home because the alternative was spending it on the highway, stuck in traffic that was barely moving, if at all. And people who didn't leave work soon enough – or schools that may not have sent children...

"Mister Speaker, the President of the United States." 21:00 EST: I switched to CNN because Paul Krugman said he'd be on. He is not in evidence. Over to NPR, because the CNN commentators are so annoying. 21:03: I love NPR, and Mara Liasson in particular, but wow. Nobody knows anything. 21:05: The Republicans have had training on how to talk to women. That says everything you need to know about American politics these days. Fortunately, only men who own property can vote, so it doesn't really matter in...

Via Sullivan, Washington Post staffer Max Fisher explains how Ukraine's divisions are about more than one politician: Ukrainian is the majority and official language of Ukraine. But, as a legacy of of the country's subjugation by Russia, many Ukrainians speak Russian, which is the native language for about one-third of the population. The Russian speakers are clustered in the south and east. A significant chunk of them are ethnic Russian, as well. In some regions, more than three-quarters of the...

My day became a non-stop parade of context shifts and meetings, so now that the temperature has dropped to -20°C (with a wind chill of -31°C), I'm wondering just how important having cream in my coffee will be tomorrow morning. Two other thoughts: First, I lived through the winters of 1983-84 and 1984-85, the first notable for giving us 100 hours of sub--18°C temperatures ending Christmas morning, the second for giving us the all-time-lowest temperature in Chicago (-33°C). I didn't go to school on that...

The temperature tumble that began yesterday evening seems to have leveled off. From 6pm yesterday to 6am today we had the steepest decline (17°C) with an abrupt plateau at sunrise this morning, now holding at -19°C. I might have to leave the house this afternoon to pick up a couple of necessities, like cream. (Yes, it's worth braving the Arctic to get cream for my coffee tomorrow.) Otherwise, my office is closed for two days, and Parker's at day camp, so until his 9pm walk tonight I really have no...

I'm torn. Or I'm a dinosaur. Or I'm a Perceiver. Or I'm a senior software development manager who's sick of changing technologies. My current drama is between continuing to use Mercurial on one hand, and switching to Git on the other. Both are distributed version control systems, so both enable a load of flexibility in single- or multi-developer workflows. I know that sounds like jargon, so let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up: If you don't have to share every little change you make to a...

Yesterday I wrote that I'd spend this morning setting up the Inner Drive Website as a continuous-delivery application running in Windows Azure cloud services. Well, that was a bit optimistic. Here's what I did instead: Shook my head sadly that the last time I published the site at all was last March. That's a little dis-continuous, I think. Upgraded the application to .NET 4.51, the Azure SDK 2.2, Azure Storage 3.0, and the latest Inner Drive Extensible Architecture build. Moved the master code...

The worst winter in 30 years continues in Chicago. This morning we woke up to another 50 mm of snow on the ground (fortunately light and fluffy) and -12°C cold. The good news: today the forecast calls for a seasonable -3°C. Then, starting around 3pm, this happens (click to expand): If you compare that forecast to the one on January 4th, you will see that today's has a lower bottom. Yes, not content to give us the coldest temperatures recorded in Chicago since 1995 already, this winter is about to give...

This is just a note to myself, really. Last weekend I spent an hour setting up continuous deployment of an Azure website using Git. At work, we're moving towards doing the same thing with Azure cloud services, which has a different set of problems to solve. I'll have more to say about this once we've done it. Meanwhile, here are a few of the resources we're reading to get started: Martin Fowler's paper on continuous integration. Microsoft's own overview of continuous delivery on ASP.NET. Food Fight's...

Briefly, overnight, the temperature at O'Hare hit 1°C before beginning its slow slide to -9°C just now. And it's getting colder, with a forecast -18°C tonight, then a spurt up to -2°C tomorrow afternoon, then an inexorable slide all day Monday to the depths of hell. Between dawn Monday and noon Wednesday—60 straight hours—we'll have temperatures below -18°C just like two weeks ago. Of course, two weeks ago, it got a little bit warmer on Tuesday. Not this time. And yet, it still won't be as bad as...