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A family of red foxes has taken up residence in Millennium Park, Chicago: The fox family “just walked right in” to the popular downtown park a couple weeks back, said Kathryn Deery, head horticulturalist at the park’s Lurie Garden. The family — two adults and four babies — typically pops out when the park is less crowded in the mornings and evenings. Deery has watched the “adorable” baby foxes, known as kits, wrestle in the garden and play with food as their parents hunt for rabbits, birds, rodents and...

Citylab's Map of the Day today comes from Northeastern University history professor Benjamin Schmidt. It visualizes population data from three data sets, one of which came from a single Wikipedia editor: This is a narrative description of the city populations dataset I’ve assembled for the Creating Data project. The headline here is: Wikipedia editors have created a much more comprehensive database of American city and town populations than historians have had to this point. I’m writing it up separately...

Via CityLab's new newsletter "MapLab:" “Vision Zero” supporters are tapping into big data in other ways. This month, Strava, the app that tracks users’ athletic activity, re-released a “Global Heatmap” tracing more than 1 billion jogs, hikes, and bike rides by millions of members around the world. (The running scene in London, in striking orange and black, is shown above.) Already, some public agencies are making use of the data to support and protect all that sweat. CityLab’s Benjamin Schneider...

...this app might be fun. CityLab explains: Floating in space among the stars and planets are more than 2,250 satellites and “space junk” traveling at up to 18,000 miles an hour. Some are large enough to be seen with the naked eye—though you’d have to first figure out which ones are within your line of sight. Luckily, there’s a map for that now, by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, a graphics engineer at Mapzen who has a knack for turning pure data into mesmerizing visuals (like this one of New York City). His...

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?...

Just some of the news stories I haven't got time to read this morning: Two men stole a puppy at knifepoint on a CTA train last night. I mean, WTF? An airplane part that could be from Malaysia Airlines 370 was found on Réunion, an island near Madagascar some 4,000 km from where searchers were looking for the missing plane. Via Schneier, an argument that it wasn't a legal limit on spying that prevented the NSA from intercepting a crucial phone call to Osama bin Laden in 2001, it was incompetence in the...

No, really. Today will have 86,401 seconds in it, as opposed to the usual 86,400 seconds that every day for the last 18 years has had. Because the earth interacts with lots of other gravity sources in the universe—most notably the moon—its rotation sometimes speeds up and sometimes slows down. Over the last 18 years or so, the planet has lost an entire second because of these perturbations, requiring us to update our most accurate clocks to compensate. Of course, when those clocks get updated, there's a...

A trio of teenagers in the UK won a science prize for their concept of condoms that change color in the presence of sexually-transmitted disease pathogens: Their idea - which is still at concept stage - involves a condom covered with antibodies that would react with the proteins in bacteria, or antigens, found in STIs. Daanyaal [Ali, 14,] explained: "Once the [bodily] fluids come into contact with the latex, if the person does have some sort of STI, it will cause a reaction through antibodies and...

Fortunately, I have a couple of long flights coming up in two weeks. Unfortunately, not all of this will be relevant then: Mike Huckabee's entry into the presidential race may mean the Christian right is deteriorating. Bourbon's popularity, and the longevity of oak trees, is a problem. Did Jeb Bush trigger an Iraq War watershed? The Southern Regional Climate Center has a new climate tool that I'm going to play with...someday. Only one more Mad Men episode. I'm sad. ICYMI: Upgrading to Windows 10 will be...

The USGS has put all of their topographic maps online. All of them. Back to 1880. Enjoy.

The ancient spreadsheet package Lotus 1-2-3 set "0 January 1900" as its day zero. Whenever you entered a date into a Lotus spreadsheet, the program actually stored the number of days before or since that mythical date. Microsoft Excel needed to maintain compatability with Lotus early on, so it set 30 December 1899 as its day zero, which worked very well except for dates between 30 December 1899 and 1 January 1900, and it added the other mythical date 29 February 1900 because Lotus had that bug as well....

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture (IDEA) is now on NuGet.org. This means anyone, anywhere can download it and install it into their own .NET project. I'll publish the Inner Drive Azure Tools at some point after I figure out a cool acronym. This was actually forced on me by a new requirement to share the code with overseas partners. They would be unable to use the software I wrote for work if I hadn't done this.

...sort of. But that's not important right now. I'm just spiking some articles to read later: Flaking out is rampant. There's free Azure DocumentDB training next Tuesday. Indiana's "religious freedom" law is worse than you thought. Actually, the right wing's whole idea "religious freedom" is worse than you thought. I need to register for Ignite. Glad I got my Apollo After Hours tickets already—especially because I'm performing in it. OK, time for a vendor phone call...

One of the biggest perks of being a CTO is that I get to roll out really fun initiatives every so often. Our CEO has a Microsoft Surface 2, and he's had such success with it that we decided to make it our official laptop replacement. I made one moderately-annoying error in rolling out Surface Pro 3 tablets to seven people who were waiting for laptops: I failed to give the less-technical users guidance on how to set up user accounts. We're fixing it, but we still have some confusion around the idea that...

One of my Canadian friends has a friend who made a shrimp cannon. No kidding:

With meetings and a new developer on the team occupying almost all my time today, I've put these things aside for the half-hour I have at 6:30 to read them: If you look at data, you see Democrats have created more jobs than Republicans, no matter what people say about Saint Ronald. Microsoft has released a major update to Azure. There's even a slick video about it. Ted Cruz is going all-in with the white male vote. Mazel tov. Who doesn't like the Daily WTF? New York's 7th Avenue Subway extension is late...

Retail genetic-research company 23 And Me analyzed the genetics of the blue dress phenomenon: For one, there was no clear genetic association with seeing either a blue and black dress versus seeing white and gold one, according to Fah Sathirapongsasuti, PhD, a computational biologist here at 23andMe. That doesn’t mean there is no association, it just means that we didn’t find one that met our threshold for a strong association. We did see a small effect size for a genetic variant in the gene ANO6. While...

Things I will read or explore more this weekend: Ryanair will apparently not fly to North America anytime soon. British economists are stuck in 2011. MapBox has very recent satellite photos to ogle. Must run.

Paul Krugman explains: [W]hat fitness devices do, at least for me, is make it harder to lie to myself. And that’s crucial. It’s all too easy to convince yourself that you’ve done enough walking, that shuffling around filing books is a pretty good workout, that you only miss exercise once a week or so — OK, maybe twice. But there’s your Fitbit telling you that you only walked 6000 steps and burned 1800 calories yesterday, that you only did serious exercise three days last week. You might say that the...

After a nearly two days with above-freezing temperatures, our sidewalks have become passable and our faces have stopped falling off from the cold. Consequently I've spent a good deal of time today walking places. Consequently, though it's just 3pm, I've gotten better Fitbit numbers (15,000 steps, 11 km) than on any day since January 3rd (16,800 steps, 12.1 km). From January 3rd you have to go all the way back to November 30th (23,500 steps, 18 km) to find better results. I'm not going to do that today...

The Kickstarter campaign I mentioned Friday (and that I've backed) has become the most-backed campaign ever with 112,250 backers raising $4.4 million. Their original goal, mind you, was $10,000. I think "Exploding Kittens" might succeed, y'know?

Interesting things to read: Climate change deniers, take note: even though 2014 was really cold in part of the U.S., it was still the warmest year ever worldwide. Two posts on the Microsoft Azure blog: how to add auto-complete suggestions using Azure Search, and how to tune Azure DocumentDB performance. Could airlines start giving landing preference to their own high-value flights? Chicagoist has their best brunches list up. Yum. We might start using JetBrains TeamCity for continuous integration. More...

Via Tech Cocktail, Jason Scott has added 2,388 MS-DOS video games to the Wayback Machine. Says Scott: The Archive introduced v2, or “the Beta Interface” late last year. It was slow, stocky, and freaked people out. But folks got the idea, mostly – it was taking a site that had only incremental changes for 13 years, shaking the whole story up, and re-imagining the whole thing as a visual and browsing collection, as well as a way to dig deep into the materials. Since last year, it’s gotten faster, slimmer...

While we're getting ready to celebrate the birth of Baby X this Xmas, links are once again stacking up in my inbox. Like these: Someone made a transit map of Westeros. Someone explained the history of Chinese food and Jewish Christmas. Someone hacked Sony, but Schneier isn't convinced it was North Korea. Someone leaked the CIA's travel guide. Someone bumped uglies with a 737 at LaGuardia. Someone convinced American and United to allow free flight changes today. That might be it for The Daily Parker today.

In a revealing post, Pomplamoose's Jack Conte says not much: Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business. In order to plan and execute our Fall tour, we had to prepare for months, slowly gathering risk and debt before selling a single ticket. We had to rent lights. And book hotel rooms. And rent a van. And assemble a crew. And buy road cases for our instruments. And rent a trailer. And…. We built the tour budget ourselves and modeled projected revenue...

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...

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman provides a list: "Knowing computers" today is more than just knowing Office, or knowing how to attach a file. Today's connected world is way more complex than any of us realize. If you're a techie, you're very likely forgetting how far you've come! The #1 thing you can do when working with a non-techie is to be empathetic. Put yourself in their shoes. Give them the tools and the base of knowledge they need. Backup everything. Is your entire company on your 10 year old...

I had planned to write today about aviation weather radar, being an accidental landlord in Chicago, or the latest plan to replace a burned-down grocery in my old neighborhood. Instead, I'm going to gush a little about my new phone. I've used a Windows HTC-8 for almost two years now, and I've been frustrated with it nearly the whole time. Today, while waiting out a thunderstorm at the local T-Mobile store, I decided to pick up a Samsung S5. Instead of complaining about the HTC-8, I'll link to a...

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...

My dad just sent me this. His comment: "This was done by somebody who either has Asperger's or way, way too much time on his hands." Yah, but it's cool, right? What is not so cool is that the Kings are up 4-3 with 17 left in the 3rd. If none of that makes any sense to you, clearly you don't care about hockey or Chicago sports.

Andrew Binstock lists things he wishes he'd learned about programming earlier. Local business owner David Borris explains that low-minimum-wage advocates are big businesses, who have different goals than small-business owners. Krugman wonders how climate science became a Marxist plot, while Alec MacGillis reminds Marco Rubio that his state is drowning. Ten days until I get a couple days off...

Actually, it's a live feed from the ISS: Live streaming video by Ustream IFLS explains: One of the latest missions from the ISS is kind of amazing. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached outside of the ISS. Though temperature is controlled, the cameras are exposed to the radiation from the sun, which will allow astronauts to understand how radiation affects the instruments. The cameras point down at Earth at all times, which makes for some...

Via WGN's weather blog, here is the coolest climate visualizer I've seen: The site also has forecast maps and animation, climate information, and (of course) a blog.

Busy day, so I'm just flagging these for later: Microsoft has released new Azure Database tiers in preview, with migration required in a year. Stephen Colbert told Jon Stewart he's leaving. Via the Atlantic Cities blog, an interactive map of London rents by Tube stop. Atlantic Cities also reports on a new opera about Jane Jacobs that tells the story of her victory in 1960 over Robert Moses. Also check out the interactive Manahatta Project map showing New York in 1609 overlaid by 2014, in block-level...

I just returned from Outer Suburbistan in record time, in under an hour, which was pure dumb luck. As soon as I change I'm going out into the 25°C afternoon. We still haven't hit the 28°C we last saw November 7th, but this is close enough for me. More later, including possibly some interesting stuff about how I've started (slowly) refactoring the 10-year-old Inner Drive Extensible Architecture to use modern inversion-of-control tools including Castle Windsor and Moq. First, I need to walk the dog. A lot.

The Chicago Transit Authority cleaned out its attic recently and put a bunch of artifacts up for auction. The auction just ended, and I'm sorry to say I did not win anything. I bid on a couple of 1990s-era station signs, one from Main and one from Davis. I didn't want to risk getting both so I dropped off the Davis auction once it hit $50. Because, rusty 30 x 45 cm sign with the paint chipping? Yeah, $50 sounds right. But I kept going on the Main St. sign, using the ancient eBay technique of waiting...

This weekend's cover story in New York Times Magazine looks in detail at Google's grand plan to map everything: Street View cars have already mapped six million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all (only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road). Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the most...

This rocks: The so-called "Starpath" is a type of solar-enhanced liquid and aggregate made by Pro-Teq Surfacing, a company headquartered southwest of London near the awesomely titled town of Staines-upon-Thames. It's in the prototype phase, with a test path running 460 feet in a Cambridge park called Christ's Pieces. (The British and their delightful names!) The material works by absorbing UV rays during the day and later releasing them as topaz light. In a weird feature, it can somehow adjust its...

I found another batch of tapes including a mix tape I made in the WRHU two-track studio in May 1990. Yes, two-track: we recorded two audio tracks onto 1/4-inch tape at 7.5 inches per second (or 15 ips if we needed to do some music editing). We then cut the tapes with razor blades and spliced them together with splicing tape. Eventually I graduated to the misnamed 4-track studio, which by then not only had a 4-track quarter inch deck but also a 1-inch, 16-track system that only the General Manager was...

Just a brief note, when I should be sound asleep. I caught up on Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom tonight, and realized that the episode ended the story. I could be wrong. I called my dad immediately, asking for some assurance that I wasn't insane about it ending all three* of the basic conflicts that make up the story, but he hadn't seen it yet, as he's two time zones west of me. So, all you've got until I get his reflections, dear readers, is an amateur opinion. But as far as I can see, the story has nowhere...

Via Sullivan, the Phoneblok:

The friend who posted this roundup said simply, "Nerdgasm:" Writing Systems of the World By Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons Take a look.

James Deen tries Google Glass and...well...don't play this at work: That has to be one of the only porn trailers I've ever laughed through.

Via TPM Media, NASA has something to make you smile. Take a ride:

Via the Atlantic Cities blog, this is pretty awesome: World domination is all well and good, but sometimes taking over a city is more than enough for one night. That's the feeling that Luke Costanza and Mackenzie Stutzman had a few years back while playing the board game Risk in Boston. So they sketched out a rough map of the metro area, split neighborhoods into six distinct regions, and laminated the pages. Then they invited over a few more friends to test it out — and discovered it was a rousing...

Via Sullivan, scholar John Suiter discovered a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" at Oregon's Reed College in 1956: It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence...

Yeah, one of those days: Has the NRA fatally over-reached? Niel deGrasse Tyson examines whether Superman can really fly. How visionary is Eric Schmidt, really? (Could it be instead survivorship bias?) Can we stop worshiping Reagan, please? What happens when a rural town dies? I'll get to these eventually...

National Public Radio has created an interactive map that uses Google Maps and new satellite images Google obtained yesterday to show 10-meter images of the Oklahoma tornado's destruction: This may be the best, most timely use of geographic information in a news presentation I've ever seen. The images are stunning. I can only imagine what life must be like in Moore right now—and with the NPR app, it's a lot easier to understand.

Odd that I'm finding this out through the Chicago Tribune: Amazon.com has introduced a way for users to quickly save and send news articles as well as other items to their Kindle devices for later, off-line reading. The new feature can be added by users in a variety of ways. Amazon has made it possible for users to send items to their Kindles through Web browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox, as a feature that can be installed on Macs or PCs, from Google Android mobile devices, or from users'...

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. From this week's news: If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of...

Via Sullivan, a catalog of strange things we do with gadgets: You’re on your cell phone, talking to a friend, pacing in circles, fidgeting with your hands, checking your cuticles–whatever it is you do while you’re on the phone. They’re odd, pointless behaviors, but we do them nonetheless, and a group of designers from the Art Center College of Design has taken it upon themselves to illustrate and document all of them (sort of like that Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology). There’s the...

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...

This is exceedingly cool: What is this This is a map of every person counted by the 2010 US and 2011 Canadian censuses. The map has 341,817,095 dots - one for each person. Why? I wanted an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies like city boundaries, arterial roads, state lines, &c. Also, it was an interesting challenge. Who is responsible for this? The US and Canadian censuses, mostly. I made the map. I'm Brandon Martin-Anderson. Kieran Huggins came to the rescue with spare server...

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.

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.)...

Air New Zealand has a hobbit of making awesome safety videos; here's the latest:

This month's Atlantic explains: "So you want to make a map," [former NASA engineer Michael] Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. "There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than...

They just launched high-resolution aerial photos of another batch of cities: Improving the availability of more high quality imagery is one of the many ways we’re continuing to bring you the most comprehensive and accurate maps of the world. In this month’s update, you’ll find another extensive refresh to our high resolution aerial and satellite imagery (viewable in both Google Maps and Google Earth), as well as new 45 degree imagery in Google Maps spanning 30 new cities. Google Maps and Earth now...

The Wind Map is one of the coolest things I've ever seen: And apparently, Isaac is going to hit Valparaiso (and, um, us):

Via Sullivan, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg is creating 3D portraits from random hairs: Collecting hairs she finds in random public places – bathrooms, libraries, and subway seats – she uses a battery of newly developing technologies to create physical, life-sized portraits of the owners of these hairs. You can see the portrait she’s made from her own hair in the photo below. While the actual likeness is a point of contention, these images bring about some creepy-yet-amazing comments; on genetic identity...

I don't know how extensive this is, but Google Maps street view now goes inside buildings: To see this for yourself, go on Google Maps to 1028 W Diversey Pkwy, Chicago, 60614. Click on the balloon over Paddy Long's Pub, and click Street View. Notice the double chevron pointing toward the sidewalk: Click that. And then explore. I can only weep that we didn't have this kind of data throughout history to see how people lived in the past. And I can only weep for what this will do to privacy. Update: It...

Via Sullivan, artist Jon Rafman has collected Street View oddities: (Yes, that's in Chicago.)

Jeff Atwood has the definitive explanation: ["Lorem ipsum"] is arbitrarily rearranged and not quite coherent Latin, extracted from a book Cicero wrote in 45 BC. Here's the complete quote, with the bits and pieces that make up Lorem Ipsum .... Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia...

I like being busy, but it does take time away from lower-priority pursuits like blogging. If I had more time, I'd pontificate on the following: Paul Krugman wonders why Paul Ryan is taken seriously, as do I; Chris Mooney and Kevin Drum wonder what about the Republican brain makes them so opposed to facts; The Atlantic Cities has a fun gallery of world subway platforms; and The Times examines the ridiculousness of taking laptops out at airport checkpoints. For now, though, it's back to the mines.

Some items that have gotten my attention: Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court's divisions, and how they may throw the health-care law into chaos Laura Miller on Game of Thrones' real-life inspirations and Charli Carpenter writing in Foreign Affairs on Game of Thrones as Realpolitik The Daily with more about craft brewing's increasing market share On Friday, schlock artist Thomas Kinkade died, joining a pantheon of artists we wish the world would forget but probably won't, a group that includes...

I found out, after too many failed download attempts for no reason I could ascertain (come on, Amazon), the 1940 Census data is also available on Ancestry.com. Their servers actually served the data correctly. And so, I found this: The apartment numbers aren't listed, and the building added an apartment to my entrance sometime in the last 70 years, but I think I can work it out. The first column shows the rent for each apartment. The three higher-rent apartments have to be the larger ones to the west....

The Census and the National Archives have released the entire 1940 enumeration quasi-digitally. I think the data drop is great. I am going to download a few specific documents based on what I know about my own family, and about some of the places I've lived that were around in April 1940. But as a software developer who works mainly with Cloud-based, large-data apps, I am puzzled by some of the National Archives' choices. I say "quasi-digitally" because the National Archives didn't enter all the...

If you're driving in San Francisco, don't block the MUNI: By early next year the city's entire fleet of 819 buses will be equipped with forward-facing cameras that take pictures of cars traveling or parked in the bus and transit-only lanes. A city employee then reviews the video to determine whether or not a violation has occurred — there are, of course, legitimate reasons a car might have to occupy a bus lane for a moment — and if so the fines range from $60 for moving vehicles to more than $100 for...

Earlier I mentioned how technology makes aviation easier. Now here's how it makes aviation cooler: For the first time in Daily Parker history, I'm writing about a flight in real time. I am approximately here: FlightAware adds the third dimension, putting me at FL360. Of course, I have actual work to do, which is really why I bought Internet access for this flight. I still think this is incredibly cool. (For the record, my flight didn't leave on time, but it did leave. At takeoff, O'Hare conditions were...

Via James Fallows, here is the FlightAware track (and the KML) for yesterday's Boeing 787 test flight: That. Is. Cool.

I remember traveling in the 1970s and 1980s, when no one could reliably answer this question until the plane actually left the runway. But today I'm at O'Hare while snow is falling, and it looks like my flight will in fact take off on time despite the snow and the lengthening list of delayed flights on the arrivals board. How do I know? First stop is the American Airlines website. Their flight status tool says my plane departs on time from gate K5. And the page has a link to "arriving flight...

New time-lapse video from the International Space Station:

My weather demo, Weather Now, is 13 years old today. I launched it as an ASP 2.0 application on 11 November 1998. The Wayback Machine first crawled the site about a year later, on 20 September 2000. Check out the site's evolution; it's trippy.

Singer Kina Grannis has released a new video that used 280,000 Jelly Bellies and took her nearly two years to make: As a plus, it's a catchy song with not one but two ear-worms in it. (Watch for the second one.)

I've now set up the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ at Digital River, a software-distribution company. You can now buy developer, commercial per-server, and non-commercial per-site licenses for reasonable prices. Check out the overview and SDK (reg.req.) pages for tons o' info. You can also check out the no-nonsense license agreement before you buy.

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ has had support for the tzinfo database for several years now. Weather Now uses it; so do a few of my clients. Like the lazy software developer I am, however, I never put up a decent demonstration of the code, which might, you know, make someone want to buy it. Well, the documentation, she is here. Licensing, you will be shocked to learn, is available for a modest fee.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title. 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...

Do you ever eat fish? If so, are you aware that many fisheries are unsustainable, that popular fish species have high incidence of contamination, and that while generally good for you, some sushi can give you heavy metals with your wasabi? For years I've carried around a pocket sustainable seafood guide the Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes semi-annually. Now they've got a smartphone app for both iPhone and Android. No more printing it out on paper! W00t!

From the World's Greatest Newspaper, aka WGN-Chicago:

Via one of my cow-orkers, a company that can tell you all about yourself at a hitherto-impossible level of detail. All you have to do is spit: 23andMe is a retail DNA testing service providing information and tools for consumers to learn about and explore their DNA. We utilize the Illumina OmniExpress Plus Research Use Only Chip which has been customized for use in all of our products and services by 23andMe. All of the laboratory testing for 23andMe is done in a CLIA-certified laboratory. How does...

Fascinating, and not bad at all. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez assembled a top-notch cast (Danny DeVito, Carla Gugino, Zachary Quinto) and put them into a watchable, funny film—only available on YouTube. If your line supports it, watch in HD. Alas, I think it's only available in the U.S. for the time being.

Every day a few minutes past midnight UTC (7pm CDT), I get a report from The Daily Parker about its health, wealth, and wisdom. And every day, someone hits the blog from somewhere through a search I never thought about before. In the last day, for example, people have hit the blog looking for: Laguhing too loud; The great flood of 1992; Chicago parking scandal; Neurology of spending (this one from Canada); One of my classmates; My high-school choir director; and The daily sunrise times in Chicago. I'm...

No, I'm not making a dig about the Republican Party. Wired has a story this month about the quiet increase in AI happening all around us: Today's AI bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers in the 1950s and '60s believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. In 1957, the AI crowd confidently predicted that machines would soon be able to replicate all kinds of human mental achievements. But that turned out to be...

I've just pushed out an interim build of the Inner Drive Technology demonstration project, Weather Now. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs, I added a significant new feature. The weather lists on the home page now can show whatever text I want for the weather station names. Before, it could only show their official designations, which made the lists harder to use. You can see how useful this is immediately. The list of NFL football games now shows you what game the weather goes with. Also...

Strange Maps finds our state mottoes through Google: Google any word, and the search engine will suggest a longer phrase, based on the popularity of current searches starting with the same word. This so-called autocomplete function (1) is, like any good advice, in equal parts helpful and annoying. Also, being a clever piece of statistics, it offers a fascinating insight into the mind(s) of the Great Online Public. The same principle of random revelation can be applied to geographic terms, which is...

The first official 2010 Census results are out today. As of April 1st there were 308,745,538 residents of the United States. California, the most populous, had 37,253,956; Wyoming, the least, had 563,626. We have a decennial census in the U.S. because our Constitution mandates it. Every 10 years, we reapportion representation. This time, very much like the last time, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are losing a seat; New York and Ohio are losing two; Washington...

Also from Sullivan: It's called the Books Ngram Viewer, and it allows you to track the plot of words and phrases through time. The service draws on the absolutely massive Google Books corpus. Google estimates they've scanned and OCR'd 10 percent of all the books ever published, so this isn't a perfect dataset. But man is it fun to play with.

The New York Times has released an application mapping key Census indicators by census tract. Seriously, you could spend hours playing with this thing.

I almost forgot: the Inner Drive demonstration site, Weather Now, got a significant upgrade this weekend, to version 3.6. I added two new features that are part of long-term plan of improvements. They don't sound like much, but they're pretty important bits that other features will depend on. First, the lists of weather stations that appear on the home page are now generated dynamically from a database table. This means that I can change them, remove them, add them, or schedule them without having to...

My demo site, Weather Now, has a feature showing weather extremes for the world. Northwest Canada right now is having unusually cold weather. What's the connection? The Calgary Herald published a story about the website yesterday and syndicated it across Canada. Jenna McMurray of the Calgary Sun also picked up the story, and called me for a quick interview. As a result, Weather Now went from a daily average 4,000 page views up to a server-smashing 337,000 yesterday. It seems traffic has tapered off a...

Via TPM, this Duke project is cool: This animated interpretation accentuates certain phenomena: the breadth and duration of support for Roosevelt, the shift from a Democratic to a Republican South, the move from an ostensibly east-west division to the contemporary coasts-versus-heartland division, and the stability of the latter. More broadly, this video is a reminder that what constitutes “politics as usual” is always in flux, shifting sometimes abruptly. The landscape of American politics is...

This is cool: Across New York, there are USB drives embedded in walls, buildings and curbs. The idea is to create an anonymous, offline file-sharing network in public space. The drives are completely public and anyone can plug in to drop and download files. Seriously, you can plug the USB drive into your laptop. ... It's part of an art project called "Dead Drops" by Aram Bartholl and I have to say, it's pretty awesomely creative. I mean, if I saw a USB stick stick out of a random wall, I'd be dying to...

Reader DW pointed me toward this blog, a salve to the tortured OCD mind: I love the blog's design, too. Very...neat.

The Daily WTF links to a set of 30 CVs created by graphic designers: Check out the rest.

Diane will understand why Wired editor Jonah Lehrer keeps his crappy GPS. Not because her GPS is crappy, but because "Jack" talks to her: I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal. Then, it couldn't find the street I was searching for. Then, it found the street but lost the satellite signal. Then, it regained the signal but sent me...

What will they think of next. Now you can get a pair of 2GB USB cufflinks in silver or gold. They're maybe a little pricey ($195), but I do have a birthday coming up...

This may be the coolest computer ever:

Good luck to Jeff and Erin: Nice. Very nice.

Randomness: Parker and I did, in fact, walk today (8 km), and it is, in fact, sunny and 16°C. Roger Ebert responds to Rush Limbaugh Via Greening Your Library, a quick and informative explanation of single-stream recycling. My books for next term only weigh 4 kg this time. I appreciate that. The 6 kg I carried to London was not fun. (This is a joke. Ha, ha.) Speaking of: "The cause of the floor's collapse remains under investigation." (I believe this is the source link.) Really. January.

Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska: Strange Maps writes: Is Nebraska Field a coincidence, then? When not being centrally irrigated, each of the mile-by-mile blocks is often divided into smaller fields, mostly rectangular but not really symmetrical. That sort of describes the shape of Nebraska – but still, chances of a field mimicking it so perfectly seem very remote indeed. Nebraska is rectangular in an oblong sort of way, with straight borders...

IBM has created a supercomputer with more cerebral capacity (as measured by neurons and synapses) than a housecat: The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and...

Via Tom Hollander comes Strange Maps, a blog I will have to read through when I get a free moment next year. The blog supports Frank Jacobs' forthcoming book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. The blog starts with "Lunatic Asylum Districts in Pennsylvania," moving through "The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World" and "Heineken's 'Eurotopia'" on its random walk through maps. Very cool blog. Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a...

Really cool slide show of alternative mass-transit maps via the Economist's Gulliver blog. One, for example shows North American systems to scale. I know I should be studying financial accounting, but this stuff is distracting.

Via The Daily Dish, the results of the American Time Use Survey, in very cool form. Background: Sunday Business analyzed new data from the American Time Use Survey to compare the 2008 weekday activities of the employed and unemployed. ... The annual time use survey, which asks thousands of residents to recall every minute of a single day, is important to economists trying to value the time spent by those not bringing home a paycheck. The chart, though, is wicked cool.

Via Andrew Sullivan, 329 hot-air balloons taking off from Chambley, France, in time lapse.

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th. Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky....

I sometimes shop at the Book Depository, a British online bookseller, because I'm a nerd. (Also because they have British editions and free shipping to the U.S.) Today, I discovered their cool Google Maps mash-up, showing who is buying what on their site. Did I mention I'm a nerd?

My cousin turned a very large round number on Wednesday, so, being cruel, I took him to the Cubs game in Detroit. I'll have a rare back-dated entry about that in a little bit, with some kvetching about Amtrak; for now, just some pictures of the game. But first, a non-sequitur: via Paul Krugman, today is the 35th anniversary of the UPC bar code. Anyway. The game. Yeah, we didn't see this coming: Unfortunately, that's what happens when you strand 13 baserunners and go 1-for-15 with runners in scoring...

Two unrelated topics in one post? Preposterous. Unacceptable. And yet. First: my previous post reflected the difficulties in typing on a tiny G1 keyboard, which magnified the annoyances in maintaining a blog in the first place. Two entries disappeared after unintentional finger sweeps, and don't even get me started on the difficulties of adding an actual hyperlink from my phone. On the other hand, I can post from my phone, which I find so cool it makes me giddy. I do feel like someone living 80 years...

I was going to post about the virtues of the Cubs and the T-Mobile G1, but the latter revealed its limitations while I used it to extol the former. Suffice to say: Cubs won, G1 tied, and it's time to go inside.

Oh, good game. Very good game. It looked grim until the bottom of the 8th, when the Sox gave up a 4-run lead as the Cubs tied it up. Then Alfonso Soriano earned his paycheck today with a game-winning RBI in the 9th. I also have to say, my new phone is so friggin' cool, it can do this:

Via Beth Filar Williams, the Douglas County, Colo., Public Library has installed a device that brings daylight into the center of the building:

I announced Friday that I deployed a complete, ground-up rewrite of Weather Now, but it looks a lot like the old version. So what's really different? The differences between the versions go all the way down to the operating system. Version 3.1, which I launched in July 2007, ran on ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and a motley collection of sub-components I wrote from 1999 to 2004. The current version runs on ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, and completely new components I re-wrote from first principles...

Weather Now 3.5 is now the official, public version of my 9½-year-old demo. I first launched the site in September 1999 as a scripted ASP application, and last deployed a major update (version 3.0) on 1 January 2007. As threatened promised, I'll have a lot more to say about it in the next few days. But I should address the first obvious question, "Why does it look almost identical to the previous version?" Simply: because my primary goal for this release was to duplicate every feature of the existing...

The new Weather Now demo is feature-complete, meaning it has all of the pieces required for release. I will push it out to production, replacing the current demo, tomorrow morning, after I make some configuration changes to the web server it's going on. But because you read this blog, you've got a sneak preview. Over the next few days I'll be writing about the demo, why it's completely new even though it looks an awful lot like the old version, and what I'll be doing in the next few months to improve it.

Quick update: The Titanic dinner at Mint Julep Bistro was wonderful. Rich's wine pairings especially rocked—as did his beef tournedos in port reduction. Mmm. Not so much fun was Metra's return schedule (featuring a 3-hour gap between 21:25 and 0:35), nor my reading of it (I did not remember this three-hour gap). The fine for taking public transit out to the suburbs (because driving to a 10-course, 9-wine-plus-apertif dinner seemed irresponsible) was $80, paid to the All-Star Taxi Service. I did, in...

All of these are true, and all of these are appropriate for April Fool's day: Punzun Ltd., my software firm, proudly announced record earnings yesterday, earning a net profit of $0 on $0 of gross revenue and ($0) expenses (all figures in millions). It's the best quarter we've ever had, 11% better than our last record in 4th quarter 2004. Mark Morford, on GM's "recovery:" "Behold this weird new Camaro. It is, in sum, exactly the wrong car at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong attitude attached...

Despite recently complaining about public transit in Chicago, I have to say I like ctabustracker.com, the Chicago Transit Authority's online bus tracker. It's a public-private venture with Google, and I think everyone benefits. In fact, I'm writing this blog entry because I have 11 minutes before my bus comes, and it only takes me 4 minutes to shut down my laptop and get to the bus stop. This, I think, is the epitome of efficient labor markets. All right, maybe not the epitome, but certainly a good...

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote this evening about his own thoughts about physical books vs. Kindle: I've always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me. ... Don't get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn't realize the book...

Having already admitted to frequent flying, and looking at an enormous amount more in 2009 and 2010, I've started thinking about getting a Kindle. So, I'm blegging for opinions. I'm almost entirely sold because you can email PDF files and Word documents to a Kindle, to go along with the up to 1,500 books it can store in its 290-gram innards. Given the volume of reading I'll have in the week before each Fuqua residency, and given that much of it will be electronic anyway, it's starting to make more...

Romi Tharakan at Henley & Partners AG, the Swiss firm who produced the visa-free travel list I mentioned before, sent me their master list of visa-free travel as of 24 July 2008. I was right: the lists for the U.S. and Canada are not completely orthogonal. Americans (but not Canadians) can travel visa-free to Côte d'Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea; Canadians don't need a visa to visit Bolivia (but Americans do). Mystery solved.

Some readers, I know, will find this as interesting as I am: the GPS track (in Google Earth format) of my very long walk around Sint Maarten. Other readers will just figure I'm waaaay too geeky. Both sets will be correct.

Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read: [I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space...

A British government study found that smarter Scottish soldiers were more likely to die than dumber ones in WWII: The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test - which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4. A previous study found a fall in intelligence among Scottish men after the war, and at the time Deary's team theorised that less intelligent men were more likely to...

Via Jeff Atwood, San Francisco-based programmer Tantek Çelik's definition of Email as "Efail:" All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather...

Via Krugman, Bernanke lolfed:

Salon has a sublime ode to the "I can haz cheezburger" crowd: By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got...

Via the Economist, a video simulation of every airplane in the world over a 24-hour period:

Via Scott Adams: Apparently, the Sumerians thought farts were funny: Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq. "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap," goes the joke. Those ancient rubes. We're much more advanced today.

Via friend RU, a blog about...well, really hideous cakes.

From Chicago Tribune weather forecaster Tom Skilling: Chicago's 2007-08 snowfall tally eased above 153 cm Thursday, making it one of only seven season to reach or exceed 60 inches. ... Thursday's 4.3 cm at O'Hare became the city's 43rd day of measurable snow. No season since 1978-79 has recorded more days of measurable (2.5 mm) snow. Skilling yesterday gave the cheery forecast that the Cubs' home opener Monday will get rained out. Finally, did you know the U.S. government patented the atomic bomb? This...

From my co-worker MG, evidence that we're one step closer to making a Cylon:

From reader TLC, I don't know where I'd put it in my apartment, but I think Parker would dig this:

I don't know how to introduce this comic, except to say that another developer sent it to me.

I've just spent a few minutes putting together a little countdown clock for my blog. (Credit goes to Kris van der Mast for the code sample.) What does it do? Well, it's driving the Dubya Clock and Other Countdown tools on the nav bar to the right.

This one from the Washington Post. Unlike the one I mentioned from WQAD, WaPo's limits you by party, and to the top 5 in each. I came up all Edwards again, mostly because of his positions on health care.

Via my dad, an interesting tool to help pick your primary-election candidate from the NBC affilliate in the Quad Cities. Apparently I'm closest to Kucinich, though of the three front-runners in my party, I'm closest to Edwards. (Which I knew anyway.) Only 65 days until the Illinois primary...and only 414 days, 21 hours and 42 minutes remain in the worst presidency the Republic has ever known.

Ordinarily I think unexpected animation on a website is distracting and irritating. Jamie sent me a very cool counter-example from a Dutch housewares retailer. That's the way to do it.

Via Joel on Software, WalkScore.com. My current apt rates 85 out of 100; my new one gets an 89; Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rates 97. Sadly, my dad lives in a walking-deprived part of the world, and gets a 29. On the other hand, he can walk to an altogether different kind of beach than I can.

Useless fact: Today was the first time since April 6th that my walk to work was below freezing. Not useless fact: the Inner Drive Webcam was temporarily off-line overnight, as I'm making some infrastructure changes and the computer it's attached to is being decommissioned. (It's back up now.) Apparently people noticed: I don't do business with you because I don't need to, however, I do look at your live camera every day to see the weather and get a look at Evanston, the town in which I was born and...

I want one of these: Obviously printed photos are so last-decade. Digital photo frames allow us to go directly from shooting to displaying our photos with no messy meatspace-based printed version needed. The eStarling 2.0 Wi-Fi Photo Frame takes this concept to the next level by connecting to your local Wi-Fi network and allowing you to send photos to it via e-mail or RSS photo feed. With full web-based access you can control exactly the photos you want on your eStarling frame at any time from anywhere...

Via PC Magazine through I Can Has Cheezburger?:

The Chicago Tribune has an interactive cicada map to plot out reports of 17-year cicadas emerging. Cool.

Via Talking Points Memo comes this gem.

I mean, come on, is he not the cutest dog? ...And as a special bonus, here's a look at spiders on drugs, via a long-time blog reader: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1734043.

Here's a great idea (via AVweb): using Microsoft® Flight Simulator as a training aid: Here's how Microsoft Flight Simulator as a Training Aid helps aviators get the most out of every hour in the air or the virtual skies: Student Pilots can use the information in this book to enhance book-learning, review specific concepts and skills, and in preparing for formal flight instruction. Certificated Pilots can complement real-world flying with additional hours in the virtual skies, upgrading flying skills and...

Anne found this really cool link to a live webcam pointed at an African watering hole. Or maybe it's CSPAN, given the number of baboons on display.