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I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 14-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2019, and the world has changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 20 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

The Cloud—known to us in the industry as "someone else's computers"—takes a lot of power to run. Which is why our local electric utility, ComEd, is beefing up their service to the O'Hare area: Last month, it broke ground to expand its substation in northwest suburban Itasca to increase its output by about 180 megawatts by the end of 2019. Large data centers with multiple users often consume about 24 megawatts. For scale, 1 megawatt is enough to supply as many as 285 homes. ComEd also has acquired land...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 10-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in April 2016, and a couple have things have changed (not least of which, all the internal links changed when the blog moved to BlogEngine 3 last October). So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've...

I've just spent a few minutes going through all my company's technology expenses to figure out which ones are subject to the completely daft rental tax that Chicago has extended to cover computing services. The City theorizes that rental tax is payable whenever you pay to use a piece of equipment that belongs to someone else for a period of time. This makes a lot of sense when you go to Hertz, but less when you use Microsoft Azure. My understanding of the tax and the City's might not be completely...

As I mentioned yesterday, the European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the US-EU Safe Harbor pact is illegal under European law: The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, said the so-called safe harbor agreement was flawed because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans’ online information. The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost...

After last night's Killers and Foo Fighters concert-slash-corporate-party—and the free Sierra and Lagunitas Salesforce provided, more to the point—today's agenda has been a bit lighter than the rest of the week. Today's 10:30 panel was hands-down my favorite. Authors David Brin and Ramez Naam spoke and took questions for an hour about the future. Pretty cool stuff, and now I have a bunch more books on my to-be-read list. At the moment, I'm sitting at an uncomfortably low table in the exhibit hall along...

I haven't traveled nearly as much this year as I did the past few, but only a week after my last trip, I'm away from home again. For a few days I'll be in San Francisco for Dreamforce '15, where the Force is with me dreams are forced upon you I'll learn about Salesforce and hobnob with other nerds. Unfortunately, I left all of my laptop power supplies in Chicago. And, having had the same basic Dell model for the last five computers, I have quite a few. Fortunately, my office is sending me one. So...

Because Microsoft has deprecated 2011-era database servers, my weather demo Weather Now needed a new database. And now it has one. Migrating all 8 million records (7.2 million places included) took about 36 hours on an Azure VM. Since I migrated entirely within the U.S. East data center, there were no data transfer charges, but having a couple of VMs running for the weekend probably will cost me a few dollars more this month. While I was at it, I upgraded the app to the latest Azure and Inner Drive...

Since development of DasBlog petered out in 2012, and since I have an entire (size A1) Azure VM dedicated solely to hosting The Daily Parker, I've been looking for a new blog engine for this blog. The requirements are pretty broad: Written in .NET Open source or source code available for download Can use SQL Server as a data source (instead of the local file system, like DasBlog) Can deploy to an Azure Web App (to get it off the VM) Still in active development Modern appearance and user experience See?...

It's just past 9am on Monday and already I'm reduced to this kind of blog post. Tomorrow I may have some more time to read these things: Cranky Flier analyzes Malaysia Airlines' struggles. Microsoft is building subsea fibre cables between the U.S. and Europe and Asia. TPM explains exactly what Jade Helm 15 really is. Missed Microsoft Ignite this year? Here's the Channel 9 page. We're starting to set up JetBrains TeamCity to handle our continuous integration needs. Explain, however, why the user manual...

The Redmond giant stunned the software development world this week by opening up several core technologies, including the entire .NET platform, to the public: We are building a .NET Core CLR for Windows, Mac and Linux and it will be both open source and it will be supported by Microsoft. It'll all happen at https://github.com/dotnet. Much of the .NET Core Framework 4.6 and its Reference Source source is going on GitHub. It's being relicensed under the MIT license, so Mono (and you!) can use that source...

I mentioned over a month ago that, given some free time, I would fix the search feature on Weather Now. Well, I just deployed the fix, and it's kind of cool. I used Lucene.NET as the search engine, incorporating it into the Inner Drive Gazetteer that underlies the geographic information for Weather Now. I won't go into too many details about it right now, except that I was surprised at how much the index writer was able to crunch and store (in Azure blobs). The entire index takes up 815 MB of blob...

I have to dash off to a meeting in a few minutes, then to Wrigley. So this is more of a note to myself. Lucene.NET will be coming to Weather Now, I hope in a few weeks. This will massively improve its piss-poor searching, and allow me to do a few other things as well given Lucene's amazing search capabilities. Unfortunately, Weather Now ranks third in development priorities behind my employer and my long-suffering freelance client. At least it kind of runs itself these days.

For the last couple of days, I've had trouble getting to Microsoft's Azure blog. From my office in downtown Chicago, clicking the link gives me an error message: The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. However, going to the same URL from a virtual machine on Azure takes me to the blog. So what's going on here? It took a little detective work, but I think Microsoft has a configuration error one of a set of geographically-distributed Azure...

A Comcast installer showed up this morning within the appointed time frame, and in about an hour had taken my apartment the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters from this: To this: I almost want to dance around singing "A Whole New World" but that would be very disturbing to my self image. Instead I'll head into the office, getting in a little earlier than I expected, and come home to real Internet speeds. In fact, I think right now I'll watch something on YouTube just because I can. Goodbye, AT&T....

No, not aviation routing; IP routing. From the Terminal 2 American Airlines club, I am unable to hit most *.cloudapp.net IP addresses. This is significant because it's basically all of Microsoft Azure, including logon.microsoft.net, Weather Now, and a bunch of other sites I use or have some responsibility for. I've just spent a few minutes testing DNS (everything is fine there) and then using tracert and pathping, and it looks like the entire 168.62.0.0/16 and 168.61.0.0/16 ranges are just not visible...

We've been using Microsoft Azure virtual machines for development for a while. This means we run our Visual Studio instances in the cloud up on special virtual machines that have nothing on them except the bare minimum required for writing software. This keeps different projects separate from each other, and also speeds up network access, which is useful for network-intensive applications. We started noticing, however, that going to MSDN or Google or other big sites became...challenging. All of these...

The deployment, I mean. Everything works, at least on the browsers I've used to test it. I ran the deployment three times in Test first, starting from a copy of the Production database each time, so I was as confident as I could be when I finally ran it against the Production database itself. And, I made sure I can swap everything back to the old version in about 15 minutes. Also, I snuck away to shoot publicity photos for Spectralia again, same as last year. I'll have some up by the end of the week...

Jez Humble, who wrote the book on continuous delivery, believes deployments should be boring. I totally agree; it's one of the biggest reasons I like working with Microsoft Azure. Occasionally, however, deploying software is not at all boring. Today, for example. Because Microsoft has ended support for Windows Server 2008 as of next week, I've upgraded an old application that I first released to Azure in August 2012. Well, actually, I updated it back in March, so I could get ahead of the game, and the...

Short answer: You can't. So don't try. Back in 2007, when I wrote a scheduling application for a (still ongoing!) client, Azure was a frustrating research project at Microsoft. Every bit of data the application stored went into SQL Server tables including field-level auditing and event logs. The application migrated to Azure in August 2012, still logging every audit record and event to SQL tables, which are something like 10x more expensive per byte than Azure Table Storage. Recently, I completed an...

I want to try this: In less than an hour [my website] went from a small prototype in a data center in Chicago and then scaled it out to datacenters globally and added SSL. The step-by-step explanation is worth a read if you do anything in .NET.

Yesterday I migrated this blog and four other ASP.NET websites from a Windows 2008 Microsoft Azure virtual machine (VM) to a brand-new Windows 2012 R2 VM. I did this because Microsoft has announced the end-of-life for Windows 2008 VMs on June 1st, so I thought I'd get a jump on it. VMs usually mean never having to say "reinstall." Unfortunately, since this involved upgrading three steps at once, I decided it would be simpler just to launch a new VM and migrate the applications using FTP. Seven hours and...

The repercussions from Monday's data-recovery debacle continued through yesterday. By the time business started Tuesday morning, I had restored the client's application and database to the state it had at the moment of the upgrade, and I'd entered most of their appointments, including all of them through tomorrow (Thursday). When the client started their day, everything seemed to be all right, except for one thing I also didn't know about their business: some of their customers pay them based on the...

At 8:16 this morning, a long-time client sent me an email saying that one of his customers couldn't was getting a strange bug in their scheduling application. They could see everything except for the tabbed UI control they needed to use. In other words, there was a hole in the screen where the data entry should have been. Here's how the rest of the day went around this issue. It's the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an engineer, in the same way the guys who built Galloping Gertie were proud. It...

If I have time, I'll read these articles today: Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things, which is actually just his version of this kind of link round-up; Cranky Flier on American Airlines fare changes following the merger; The Daily WTF's CodeSOD of the Day; Now that Windows Azure SQL Database has launched page compression, a review of best practices around the technology; and Confirmation that the meterological winter ending last Friday was the third coldest and third snowiest in recroded history....

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in September 2011, more than 1,300 posts back, so it's time for a refresh. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 13 years. That site deals with raw data and objective...

I spent 4½ hours today upgrading three low-traffic websites in order to shut down an Azure database that cost me $10 per month. The problem is this: I continually improve the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture as I learn better techniques for doing my craft. The IDEA began in 2002, and the industry changes rapidly, so every so often it changes significantly enough that things using earlier versions break when they're upgraded. About a year ago, version 2 ended and version 3 came out, breaking...

I remember, back in .NET prehistory (2001), that one of .NET's biggest benefits was to be the end of DLL hell. Yet I spent half an hour this afternoon trying to get a common package (Entity Framework 6) to install in a project that never had that package in the first place—because of a version conflict with .NET itself. When I tried to install EF6, the NuGet package installer failed the installation with the message "This operation would create an incorrectly structured document". A quick check of...

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...

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...

A co-worker sent around this post from Iris Classon explaining how to set up continuous deployment in Azure. She used Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server. I spent about two hours this morning doing it with Visual Studio 2013 and Bitbucket. There are a couple of gotchas the way I did it: First, I made a mistake, and started with the Visual Studio 2012 MVC template. There's actually a VS2013 MVC template that has better authentication features, but, well, sometimes you miss things, right?...

Just getting a server rack out of one's apartment is only half the battle. Disposal takes a little effort, too. Fortunately there's Craigslist. Unfortunately, people are flaky. So on the second attempt, the former Inner Drive Technology International Data Center found a new home in a small Loop family law firm. I actually felt a little twinge. The rack, the servers, the peripherals...they're actually gone. But: Inner Drive Technology is now 100% Cloud.

This is a big deal for shops like 10th Magnitude, my employer, especially given that we developed the API for Arrow Payments. PCI compliance means banks—who have skin in the game—have certified Azure is secure enough for credit-card processing: The PCI DSS is the global standard that any organization of any size must adhere to in order to accept payment cards, and to store, process, and/or transmit cardholder data. By providing PCI DSS validated infrastructure and platform services, Windows Azure...

Right before Christmas I removed the four dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center (IDTIDC), vowing to complete the job posthaste. Well, haste was Wednesday, so now, post that, I've finally finished. There are no more servers in my apartment. The only computers running right now are my laptop and the new NAS. (The old switch, hidden under a chair, still has a whirring fan. I may replace it with a smaller, non-fanned switch at some point.) Here's before: And here's the...

Right before Christmas I removed all the long-dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center. Today I'd planned to shut off the last two live devices, my domain controller and my TeraStation network attached storage (NAS) appliance, replacing the first with nothing and the second with a new NAS. (The NAS is the little black box on the floor to the right; the domain controller is the thin rack-mounted server at the top.) It turns out, today was a good day to shut down the old NAS....

I had a reasonably productive morning cleaning up the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, including removing all all the decommissioned hardware from the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center. Contrast the before with the during: Both DSL modems are still there; so is the NAS, the PDC, and the switch. However, the dead UPS (thank you, TrippLite, for creating a UPS whose battery you can't replace), four decommissioned servers (including one in the back you can't really see), and a whole...

The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center (IDTWDC) will shortly be decommissioned. I first wrote about this in June 2012, when it looked like I could migrate all the apps running on my servers to Azure quickly. (It actually took until March.) Now, however, I'm done. And now I have about 100 kg of equipment to remove from my apartment. So: does anyone want some equipment? Here's the inventory: Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U servers with 1.6 GHz Xeon dual-core processors. One has 4GB of RAM, the other...

Oh, you betcha: On a year-over-year basis, average connection speeds grew by 25 percent. South Korea had an average speed of 14 Mbps while Japan came in second with 10.8 Mbps and the U.S. came in the eighth spot with 7.4 Mbps. Year-over-year, global average peak connection speeds once again demonstrated significant improvement, rising 35 percent. Hong Kong came in first with peak speed of 57.5 Mbps while South Korea came in at 49.3 Mbps. The United States came in 13th at 31.5 Mbps. Yes, South Korea has...

Aw, buggre alle this for a Larke. I'm all in favor of upgrades, but for Foucault's sake, don't break things. I'm trying to upgrade a .NET project to Entity Framework 6, and I want to smack the developers. Under previous versions, you could set the retry manager through configuration. This was really helpful for unit testing, when you might want to change the configuration and have the application block load a transient fault handler automatically. With Entity Framework 6 (EF6 — yes, this is blatant...

Programming languages have come a long way since I banged out my first BASIC "Hello, World" in 1977. We have great compilers, wonderful editors, and strong typing. In the past few years, jQuery and JSON, both based on JavaScript, have become ubiquitous. I use them all the time now. jQuery and JSON are weakly-typed and late-bound. The practical effect of these characteristics is that you can introduce subtle, maddening bugs merely by changing the letter case of a single variable (e.g., from "ID" to...

Once again, here's a list of things I'm sending straight to Kindle (on my Android tablet) to read after work: The Republican committeeman who made boneheaded comments earlier this week on The Daily Show, and who subsequently got fired, doesn't get it; WBEZ takes us back to the 1893 World's Fair; What is Chicago getting from US Airways and American after the merger?; Economist Tyler Cowan says don't go to restaurants with long waits; Microsoft makes Azure easier to buy (and thus harder to avoid); A...

I've got about an hour to prepare for a Meet-Up I'm presenting. While I'm doing that, you read these: Sarah Lawrence College professor Nicholaus Mills compares Ted Cruz to Huey Long; Zack Beauchamp at ThinkProgress says racism caused the shutdown (but more broadly than you think); Mimi Cowan has put up a history of the Chicago fire, which started 140 years ago yesterday; and David Auerbach at Slate explains why the ACA website sucks, but not as badly as you think, and probably not for much longer. OK...

I have a new post up on the 10th Magnitude developers' blog.

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman has published one: IAAS Infrastructure as a Service. This means, I want the computers in my closet to go away. All that infrastructure, boxes, network switches, even software licenses are a headache. I want to put them somewhere where I can't see them (we'll call it, The Cloud) and I'll pay pennies an hours. Worst case, it costs me about the same but it's less trouble. Best case, it can scale (get bigger) if some company gets popular and it will cost less than it does now....

Yes, I know the weather's beautiful in Chicago this weekend, but sometimes you just have to run with things. So that's what I did the last day and a half. A few things collided in my head yesterday morning, and this afternoon my computing landscape looks completely different. First, for a couple of weeks I've led my company's efforts to consolidate and upgrade our tools. That means I've seen a few head-to-head comparisons between FogBugz, Atlassian tools, and a couple other products. Second, in the...

I've started playing around with Orchard, an open-source content-management system, as a replacement for this blog's infrastructure (and as a replacement for other things, like inner-drive.com. It hasn't been all skittles and beer: Orchard has serious issues running on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, though it runs fine on Azure Web sites. It turns out, my employer is moving to Umbraco, a different open-source CMS. So it makes sense to try that out, too, as I'll have to support Umbraco at work...

Observer columnist John Naughton explains how the practices Edward Snowden revealed have hurt us: [H]ere are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far. The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided...

At 10th Magnitude, we have used Beanstalk as our central code repository. We transitioned to Mercurial about a year ago, which Beanstalk supported. Today they sent around an email saying they're ceasing Mercurial support—including existing repositories—on September 30th, and would we care to switch to Git? No. No, no, no. No Git. I'm not asking people to learn another damn version control system. (Plus Git doesn't quite suit us.) But fortuitously, this forced re-evaluation of Beanstalk coincides with a...

In my profession, I get to sit at Peet's Coffee at 6:30am and watch action-packed videos like this: I know what you're thinking: "slow down, tigerblood. Slow down." I'm also pushing a new build of customer software up to production, and waiting for my coffee to kick in. At least I'm not blowing three runs in the 10th with a damned balk, like other people I could name.

Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months: And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent. ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6...

Too much going on: Paul Murphy at Financial Times thinks Cyprus will do the right thing Microsoft released figures about national security letters the FBI has sent it .NET 4 introduced the System.Numerics.Complex type Microsoft's Channel 9 posted a video about migrating applications to Azure virtual machines Jeff Atwood makes a case for the Ruby language BuzzFeed imagines Twitter's 7th anniversary promo video with the Inception theme No one really cares about LinkedIn endorsements T-Mobile has put up an...

I've fixed seven annoying bugs and added three minor features to Weather Now, including: Fixed searching from the search box so you can enter an airport code directly; Fixed the Last 24 hours page to show day and night icons properly; Added a status page so users can peek under the hood; and Tweaked a few things in the background worker process around logging and status update alerts. A minor bug fix release like this used to take a couple of hours to deploy, because I had to update the code running on...

Regular blog readers know that since moving to my current apartment in February 2008, the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center has occupied a couple square meters of my home office. I've also mentioned lower energy use since I started to move everything out of the IDTIDC and into Microsoft Azure. Something else has happened to my electricity bill. In November, we citizens of Chicago voted to pool our electricity buying to get the lowest electricity cost possible. Well, the new regime kicked...

I'm paying 90% of my attention right now to a Windows Azure online training class. I already knew a lot of the material presented so far, but not all of it. It's like re-taking a class you took as an undergraduate; the 10% you didn't know is actually really helpful. Like next week's class, which will go over Infrastructure as a service: a lot has changed in the last year, so it should be valuable. Apparently, though, my homework is to build an Azure web site this week. Not a multi-tier application with...

The Inner Drive Technology International Data Center is no more. This morning around 8:15 CDT I updated the master DNS records for Weather Now, and shut down the World Wide Web service on my Web server an hour later. All the databases are backed up and copied; all the logs are archived. More to the point, all the servers (except my domain controller, which also acts as a storage device) are off. Not just off, but unplugged. The little vampires continue to draw tens of Watts of power even when they're...

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...

I don't have time to read these must-read articles: Noam Schreiber on Aaron Swartz Marlene Zuk on our fascination with the paleolithic Sean Flynn on Pope Benedict's butler Microsoft on the Azure outage a year ago (interesting because it may be related to last week's outages Jennifer Lawrence rocks Back to the mines...

Microsoft has suffered some unfortunate outages this week, first affecting SQL databases on Monday, and then yesterday storage: On Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. This did not impact HTTP traffic. We have executed repair steps to update SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and have recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions. We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage...

Over the past two days, Microsoft Azure had two outages they're still investigating. The first, from 18:26 CST through 20:00 CST Monday (0026 to 0200 UTC Tuesday), and the second, from 13:50 to 15:27 CST (1950-2127 UTC) yesterday, affected SQL Database and related services in the Azure datacenter outside Washington, D.C. I noticed the Monday evening outage as it happened, because when a database goes down, a number of applications start sending me emails. A couple of people had minor inconveniences, but...

Last night I made the mistake of testing a deployment to Azure right before going to bed. Everything had worked beautifully in development, I'd fixed all the bugs, and I had a virgin Windows Azure affinity group complete with a pre-populated test database ready for the Weather Now worker role's first trip up to the Big Time. The first complete and total failure of the worker role I should have predicted. Just as I do in the brick-and-mortar development world, I create low-privilege SQL accounts for...

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...

I'm sitting at my remote office working on a conundrum: how to balance human usability against good software design. The problem is: how can I create an Azure table partitioning scheme that uses Azure efficiently and still allows the user (me) efficiently to troubleshoot problems with the feature in question. This is a direct consequence of the issues I worked on this morning. The feature is the component of the Weather Now parsing system that stores raw weather data from NOAA temporarily. By...

My efforts to move Weather Now up to Microsoft Azure took on some new urgency today when I noticed this: That particular error code means the RAID battery has less than 24 hours of charge in it. Fortunately, this means only that the disk will slow down if the battery dies, unless there's a sudden power failure, in which case I could lose the entire RAID volume. This is exactly the sort of thing that made me want to move all my applications to the Cloud in the first place. I just hope I can finish the...

I'm in the home stretch moving Weather Now to Azure. I've finished the data model, data retrieval code, integration with the existing UI, and the code that parses incoming weather data from NOAA, so now I'm working on inserting that data into the database. To speed up development, improve the design, and generally make my life easier, I'm using Entity Framework 5.0 with database-first modeling. The problem that consumed me yesterday afternoon and on into this morning has been how to ramp up to realistic...

As I've noted before, only one Web application still lives in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center: Weather Now. In the last few days, it's showing one more good reason that it needs to get to Windows Azure pronto. Take a look at my Google Analytics view of incoming visitors: What is going on? How do I go from 300 daily unique visitors to 1,800 in two days? Take a look at where they're coming from: Yes, that's right. Close to 40% of Weather Now's traffic came from the Yukon...

I've just spent three hours debugging something caused by a single missing line in a configuration file. At 10th Magnitude, we've recently upgraded our framework and reference applications to the latest Windows Azure SDK. Since I'd already done it once, it didn't take too desperately long to create the new versions of our stuff. However, the fact that something works in an emulator does not mean it will actually work in production. So, last night, our CTO attempted to deploy the first application we...

Well, that was fun. I've just spent the last three days organizing, upgrading, and repackaging 9,400 lines of code in umpteen objects into two separate assemblies. Plus I upgraded the assemblies to all the latest cool stuff, like Azure Storage Client 2.0 and...well, stuff. It's getting dark on the afternoon before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and I'm a little fried. Goodbye, 10th Magnitude Office, until Monday.

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...

Last month I used less electricity than ever before at my current address, mainly because two of the five servers in the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center have had their duties migrated to Microsoft Windows Azure. This past month, I used even less: It wasn't my smallest-ever bill, though, thanks to Exelon's recent rate increases. But still: here's some more concrete evidence that the Cloud can save money. And before people start pointing to the New York Times article from September about how...

Voters in the City of Chicago (including me) passed a referendum giving the city the authority to negotiate electricity prices on behalf of everyone. Implementation will be swift: The timing of the deal is important because Chicagoans stand to save the most money over Commonwealth Edison's rate between now and June 2013, when ComEd's prices are expected to drop because pricey contracts they entered into years ago will expire. The timeline has Chicagoans moving to the new supplier in February 2013....

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've had some difficulty moving the last remaining web application in the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center, Weather Now, into Microsoft Windows Azure. Actually, I have two principal difficulties: first, I need to re-write almost all of it, to end its dependency on a Database of Unusual Size; and second, I need the time to do this. Right now, the databases hold about 2 Gb of geographic information and another 20 Gb of archival weather data. Since these...

Last week, I bought an ASUS Transformer TF700, in part to help out with our seriously-cool Galahad project, and in part so I could read a bunch of heavy technical books on tonight's flight to London. And yes, I had a little tablet-envy after taking the company's iPad home overnight. It was not unlike fostering a puppy, in the sense that you want to keep it, but fortunately not in the sense of needing to keep Nature's Miracle handy. Then yesterday, Scott Hanselman pointed out a great way to get more use...

I still haven't moved everything out of the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center to Microsoft Windows Azure, because the architecture of Weather Now simply won't support the move without extensive refactoring. But this week I saw the first concrete, irrefutable evidence of cost savings from the completed migrations. First, I got a full bill for a month of Azure service. It was $94. That's actually a little less than I expected, though in fairness it doesn't include the 5–10 GB database that...

My latest entry is up on the 10th Magnitude tech blog: We've taken a little more time than we'd hoped to figure out how to deal with Azure deployment credentials and profiles properly. In an effort to save other development teams some of our pain, we present our solution. First, the general principle: Publication profiles are unique to each developer, so each developer should have her own management certificate, uploaded by hand to each relevant subscription. When you deploy a project to a Windows Azure...

Last night, around 11:30pm, the power went out in my apartment building and the ones on either side. I know this because the five UPS units around my place all started screaming immediately. There are enough of them to give me about 10 minutes to cleanly shut down the servers, which I did, but not before texting the local power company to report it. They had it on again at 1:15am, just after I'd fallen asleep. I finally got to bed around 2 after bringing all the servers back online, rebooting my desktop...

My latest 10th Magnitude blog post is up, in which I dig into Microsoft's changes to Azure Web Sites announced Monday. The biggest change is that you can now point your own domain names at Azure Web Sites, which solves a critical failing with the product that has dogged them from its June release. Since this Daily Parker post was embargoed for a day while my 10th Magnitude post got cleared with management, I've played with the new Shared tier some more. I've come to a couple of conclusions: It might...

Crain's Chicago Business yesterday ran the first part in a series about How Chicago became one of the nation's most digital cities. Did you know we have the largest datacenter in the world here? True: Inside the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. printing plant on East Cermak Road, next to McCormick Place, is the world's largest, most-connected Internet data center, according to industry website Data Center Knowledge. It's where more than 200 carriers connect their networks to the rest of the world, home...

Remember how I've spent the last three months moving stuff into the Cloud? And how, as of three weeks ago, I only had two more services to move? I saved the best for last, and I don't know for sure now whether I can move them both without some major changes. Let me explain the economics of this endeavor, and why it's now more urgent that I finish the migration. And then, as a bonus, I'll whinge a bit about why one of the services might have to go away completely. I currently have a DSL and a 20-amp...

I should really learn to estimate networking and migration tasks better. The last time I upgraded my FogBugz instance on my local web server, it took about 20 minutes. This led me to estimate the time to migrate it to a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine at 2 hours. Well, 2½ hours later, I'm a little frustrated, but possibly closer to getting this accomplished. The point of a virtual machine, of course, is that it should appear the same as any other machine anywhere. But using an Azure VM means either...

The title says it all. I've moved Hired Wrist, my dad's brochure site, up to my Azure VM, leaving only Weather Now, plus my bug tracking and source control applications, in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center. I'll move the two third-party apps next weekend. My experience moving Hired Wrist this morning suggests that moving Weather Now will be, as we say, "non-trivial" (i.e., bloody hard).

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...

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.

In every developer's life, there comes a time when he has to take all the software he's written on his laptop and put it into a testing environment. Microsoft Azure Tools make this really, really easy—every time after the first. Today I did one of those first-time deployments, sending a client's Version 2 up into the cloud for the first time. And I discovered, as predicted, a flurry of minor differences between my development environment (on my own computer) and the testing environment (in an Azure web...

I hope to finish moving my websites into the cloud by the end of the year, including a ground-up rewrite of Weather Now. Meanwhile, I've decided to try moving that site and three others to an Azure Virtual Machine rather than trying to fit them into Azure Cloud Services. For those of you just tuning in, Azure Cloud Services lets you run applications in roles that scale easily if the application grows. A virtual machine is like a standalone server, but it's actually running inside some other server. A...

Long-time readers will know how I feel about Microsoft certification exams. When it came time for 10th Magnitude to renew its Microsoft Partner designation, and that meant all of us had to take these tests again, I was not happy. So, against my will, I took exam 70-583 ("Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications") and passed it. I am once again a Microsoft Certified Professional. Fwee.

Last week I offered developers a simple way to simultaneously deploy a web application to a Microsoft Azure web site and an Azure Cloud Services web role. Today I'm going to point out a particular pain with this approach that may make you reconsider trying to deploy to both environments. Just to recap: since Azure web sites are free, or nearly so, you can save at least $15 a month by putting a demo instance of your app there rather than having a second web role for it. You'll still use a web role for...

(This is cross-posted on the 10th Magnitude blog.) In my last post, I talked about using Azure web sites to save beaucoup bucks over Azure Cloud Services web roles on nonessential, internal, and development web applications. In this post I'll go over a couple of things that bit me in the course of deploying a bunch of applications to Azure web sites in the last two weeks. First, let me acknowledge that engineering a .NET application to support both types of deployment is a pain. Azure web sites can't...

(Cross-posted to my company's blog.) If you’ve looked at Microsoft’s Azure pricing model, you’ve no doubt had some difficulty figuring out what makes the most economic sense. What size instances do I need? How many roles? How much storage? What will my monthly bill actually be? Since June 7th, Microsoft has had one price for an entry-level offering that is completely comprehensible: free. You can now run up to 10 web sites on a shared instance for free. (Well, you have to pay for data output over 165 MB...

I've just completed my fourth Windows Azure deployment this month, and this time, it's a non-trivial site. The Inner Drive Technology corporate website now lives up in the Cloud. Actually, it lives in two places: as an Azure Website for testing, and in Azure Cloud Services for production. All I have to do to complete the task is publish the "production" instance (I've successfully published the "staging" instance) and configure DNS. This deployment gave me the most trouble, mainly because it has a lot...

By Wednesday afternoon I'd migrated two Web sites from the loud and hot server rack in my home office to Microsoft Azure web sites. Then I popped off to New York for last night's game, and when I got back to my hotel room I encountered yet another reason I like the Cloud: I couldn't get to any of the sites back home. It turned out that a brief power failure had caused the firewall to reboot—I think a UPS didn't last as long as expected—and in the process it caused the Web server's network adapter to...

I've finished two complete migrations from my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center to Microsoft Windows Azure web sites. Astute readers may remember that in one case I moved to the Web site offering and then moved it to a full-fledged Web role. Well, today, I moved it back. Even though I'm still on the free trial, it turned out that the Web role would cost $15 per month, which, for a site that gets one or two visitors per day, simply wasn't worth it. Moving the second site, a...

I have successfully ported my first (existing) application to the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, and have shut down the running instance on my local Web server. I hope the second one takes less than a week. It's a funny little site called Boxer's Shorts. Dr. Bob Boxer is a local allergist who likes puns. He worked with a local illustrator, Darnell Towns, and self-published the five paperback pun compilations advertised on the site. Local web designer Lauren Johnson (née Liss) did the look and feel...

I've spent much of the past week trying to get a single, small website up into the cloud on the Windows Azure platform. Much of this effort revolved around the Azure Website product, mainly because it's free. Well, I got the application up as an Azure website...and there's a big problem with it that means I'll have to redeploy it as a Web role after all. First, let me just outline how much fun I've had today, starting from this morning when I first tried to publish the application to the cloud: For the...

In the past week, I've been "on the bench" at work, so I've take the time to get deeply familiar with Microsoft Windows Azure. My company, 10th Magnitude, is a 100% cloud-computing shop, and a Microsoft partner. I've been developing for Azure Web applications for a year, but I haven't had to deal with migrating existing sites, pricing, or configuration on my own; this is why we're a team, right? So, anyway, I've taken what I've learned at work, and: Selected a simple website to migrate; in this case...

When working with Microsoft Windows Azure, I sometimes feel like I'm back in the 1980s. They've rushed their development tools to market so that they can get us developers working on Azure projects, but they haven't yet added the kinds of error messages that one would hope to see. I've spent most of today trying to get the simplest website in my server rack up into Azure. The last hour and a half has been spent trying to figure out two related error messages that occurred when trying to debug a Web...