The Daily Parker

Better switch to JSON...

We had a wild ride in March, with the temperature range here at Inner Drive Technology WHQ between 23.3° on the 14th and -5.4°C on the 2nd—not to mention 22.6°C on Friday and 2.3°C on Sunday.

Actually, everyone in the US had a wild ride last month, for reasons outside the weather, and it looks like it will continue for a while:

• US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) spent the night haranguing the OAFPOTUS from the Senate floor.
• Jennifer Rubin is not tired of winning against the OAFPOTUS, who has lost every single court case brought against his administration's actions.
• David French points at the decrepit Russian Army to remind us that a politicized military is an ineffective military.
• Anne Applebaum frets about "the corruption and stagnation in our future" if the OAFPOTUS keeps behaving like Viktor Orbán.
• ProPublica takes us along with the flight attendants on those illegal ICE deportation flights.
• Mother Jones' editor in chief Kiera Butler spent last weekend with the deeply weird Christianists who want more Christian babies.
• Midland, Texas-based writer Carrie McKean explains that people in her part of the world aren't actually superstitious bumpkins who want the freedom to let their children die of measles instead of vaccinating them, no matter how much that duck quacks.

Finally, the Dunning-Krueger poster children working for the Clown Prince of X have announced plans to replace the 60 million lines of COBOL code running the Social Security Administration with an LLM-generated pile of spaghetti in some other language (Python? Ruby? Logo?) before the end of the year. As this will only cost a few million dollars and will keep the children away from the sharp objects for a while, I say it's money well spent for software that will never see the light of day. There are only two possibilities here, not mutually-exclusive: they are too dumb to know why this is stupid, or they don't care because they actually want to kill Social Security by any means they can. I believe it's both.

I've added a bunch of small but useful features to Weather Now:

• Users can now set their preferred measurement system (metric, Imperial, default) and time/date formats.
• On Nearby Weather and Nearby Places, users can double-click the map to re-center and load new info.
• Moved the Weather Score column on lists to increase usability.
• Tweaked the Weather Score formula.
• Several other bug fixes and feature tweaks.

So if you set up a profile, which you can do simply by logging in with any Microsoft ID, you can customize the app in a bunch of ways. (There's no cost, but I'd appreciate it if you'd subscribe on Patreon.)

Have fun with it. I'm probably going to slow down on Weather Now updates for a bit as I change focus to replacing BlogEngine.NET.

In just a few hours, though, I'm going to a work conference in Nashville, Tenn., where I will have the opportunity to visit at least three breweries. Stay tuned!

Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you?

• Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous!
• Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry.
• Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL), the last sane Republican, calls the "desperate, weak, and ultimately meaningless bluff" that the OAFPOTUS won't honor President Biden's pardons.
• James Fallows steps through the "correlation of forces" that defines the struggle between the OAFPOTUS and the Constitution.
• Jennifer Rubin interviews Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), "a man refreshingly candid about his disgust with the current administration's policies and its lack of humane leadership."
• Yascha Mounk thinks "the World Happiness Report is a scam," just a pile of elite misinformation.
• A sophisticated supply-chain attack may have put 20,000 GitHub projects at risk of subtle but far-reaching security problems.

Finally, the snow that covered Chicago and parts north and west has indeed melted in the past few hours, even though we've barely gotten above 2°C:

Ten years ago today, a bunch of these arrived at work:

The Microsoft Surface 3 tablet (shown with optional detachable keyboard) had really great features for its time, with 128 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM. When I left the company, they let me keep mine, so for the last 10 years it's been the personal device I use at work and the lightweight but fully-functional device I take on the road. My little blue Surface has been all over the world.

It was therefore no small irony that on my Surface's 10th birthday, I got an email from Microsoft:

End of support for Windows 10 is approaching

What does this mean for me?
After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide free software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10.

What can I do with my old computer?
Trade it in or recycle it with local organizations.

Will my Windows 10 PC stop working?
No. Your PC will continue to work, but support will be discontinued.

Well, that's disappointing. Inevitable, though. I don't really want to buy a new tablet right now, so I'll just have to keep this one limping along until autumn and get a Surface Pro 11 in October or November. Who knows, maybe the 12s will be out by then?

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the Brews & Choos Project's high-water mark before the pandemic. On 7 March 2020, I went farther than I'd ever gone before in search of breweries to add to the list, visiting Penrose and Stockholm's in Geneva, then More and Lunar in Villa Park on the way back. A few days later the world stopped for a while. It would be almost three months before I visited another brewery.

Yesterday, I took a half-day of PTO, braved some crappy early-spring weather, and met up with my Brews & Choos buddy at a relatively new place in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. We managed to visit five South Side breweries, and—here's the science part—consumed no more than 3 pints of beer over 5 hours. It was a marathon, not a sprint, after all.

In any event, I've got a lot of photos to go through and a lot of reviews to write, so look for them to come out over the next few days.

And hey, if you want to see more Brews & Choos reviews, contribute to The Daily Parker! Your $5 contribution keeps the site running for a day—or buys a tasing-size beer.

Another reason to contribute: I've started re-developing The Daily Parker's code from scratch. I changed direction slightly on an existing project to make it a blog on steroids, and I think it'll be super-cool when complete. So how about throwing in another $5 a month to support that, too?

As threatened promised, I'm starting to beg for money to help support The Daily Parker and Weather Now. You can go to Patreon and sign up to help us, with special member benefits as you contribute more.

The Daily Parker costs about $5 a day to run (though I hope to reduce that significantly this fall), and Weather Now costs another $10. They're not entirely labors of love, as I have used Weather Now as a demo project to land new work. But after more than five years with the same full-time employer, those days might be behind me—even though the weather never stops.

So, hey, buy me a coffee. I'll put your name in lights!

It's entirely possible that I will have something to post about the OAFPOTUS's self-dealing almost every one of the next 1,417 days. One hopes not, however. I mean, we only have 608 more days until the next election!

Jeff Maurer starts today's update with his take on the laughable proposal for the United States Government to buy cryptocurrency:

The president wants to spend taxpayer dollars to buy fake non-money that Twitch streamers use to buy drugs. And he’s not limiting the government to the less-laughable cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin — if Bitcoin is Coca-Cola, Trump wants to also buy Jittery Jimmy’s High-Fructose Fizz Drink. Trump has mused that buying cryptocurrency could get the government out of debt, which sounds like the plan a degenerate gambler makes right before his body turns up in a New Jersey landfill.

This plan clearly benefits someone — the value of the cryptocurrencies Trump mentioned spiked after the announcement — but because cryptocurrencies are anonymous, we don’t know who got rich. It could be donors, foreign interests, or Trump family members — the only thing we know is that it was somebody terrible. Plus, someone placed a highly leveraged $200 million purchase right before Trump’s announcement, so there’s probably an old-timey insider trading scam happening alongside this Digital Age scam-of-the-future.

Another likely beneficiary is the guy who told Trump to do this: David Sacks. You may know Sacks as the ardent Trump backer and frequent repeater of Kremlin talking points whom Trump named as his “Crypto Czar”, with the “Czar” part really making sense given Sacks’ beliefs. Sacks says that he sold all of his cryptocurrency before Trump took office, but we can’t verify that, because crypto is anonymous. We do know that Sacks’ venture capital firm — the stake in which Sacks has not said that he sold — invests in a crypto fund whose top five holdings are exactly the five cryptocurrencies that Trump wants the government to buy. Sacks is a really lucky dude! It’s like if I was named Blog Czar and then got the government to buy a billion I Might Be Wrong subscriptions, and to be clear: President Trump, that offer is very much on the table.

Molly White also has a few things to say on the subject, with less satire and more technical expertise.

Given the raging corruption coming from the top of the party, is it any surprise that US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) has cozy relationships with the military contractors her committee regulates?

Meanwhile...

• The S&P 500 index of large stocks fell 2% yesterday and 3.5% over the last week as the OAFPOTUS started the stupidest trade war in history with our three biggest trading partners.
• Who could have guessed that China's and Russia's foreign-intelligence services have ramped up efforts to recruit US government workers, now that so many of them are legitimately disgruntled? Who indeed.
• American Airlines has cut hundreds of flights from its summer schedule because of the Clown Prince of X illegally firing thousands of government employees.
• Yascha Mounk does not completely understand the new world order yet, but it seems clear to him that we're in a truly historical transition.
• Paul Krugman interviews Nathan Tankus, an expert on the COBOL code that runs the Federal Reserve and Treasury.
• Charles Marohn is infuriated by the OAFPOTUS rescinding Federal approval for the New York City congestion pricing plan, even though he found flaws in its implementation.

Finally, I was pleased to see that Amazon and MGM Studios have started development of a TV series based on the first novel in Iain M Banks' Culture series, Consider Phlebas. It's a fun novel, and a good introduction to the series—which makes sense as it's the first one he wrote. I hope it gets to production.

Weather Now v5.0.9194 just hit the hardware, with a new feature that allows you to browse the Gazetteer by finding all the places near a point. (Registration required.) I also added a couple of admin features that I will propagate to every other app I have in production, and made a few minor bug fixes.

Only one minor hiccup: I forgot to add a spatial index to the Gazetteer, which caused searches around a point to take minutes instead of seconds in production. I added the index to the database definition, and after about an hour it had indexed all 15 million locations in the database. So the Nearby Places feature should work perfectly now.

This is one of those things you don't notice in a dev-test environment. The dev-test database only has about 200,000 records in it, so even without the index it only took a moment to find all the places around a point. Nothing like testing in production to find a huge performance miss!

A longtime Daily Parker reader asked this about yesterday's post:

"The Daily Parker costs $4.87 per day" -- I'm really hoping that's a misprint, because that's almost $150 a month, which is ten times what I pay for my web hosting package which comes with unlimited domains, a full email service (IMAP+SMTP over TLS), click-to-install WordPress and MySQL database creation, SSH access to the back-end Linux machine, and excellent customer support.

Also -- and I *really* hate to say this to a fellow IT professional -- your web site often seems rather slow. So much so that I'd built a mental image of it running on an old PC in a corner of your apartment, and I'd put the slow response times down to the latency of a hard disk spinning up from idle.

So, he's not wrong: The Daily Parker right now is slow and buggy. And expensive*. (Ironically, when it was literally running on a PC in the corner of my apartment prior to 2013, it ran like Jesse Owens.)

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to October 2015, when I deployed the current version of this blog. From the blog's separation from braverman.org in 2005 until 2015, it ran on DasBlog, a .NET 1.1 blog engine that worked most of the time and had a few features I liked. I dragged it kicking and screaming up to .NET 2.0 and later .NET 4.0, and there it stayed.

After 10 years and dozens of tweaks, I decided to modernize by moving to BlogEngine.NET, which I also forked and modified. This engine runs on .NET 4.8, which I had to shoehorn into an Azure App Service when Cloud Services went away a couple of years ago. BlogEngine.NET had modest performance problems when it had a nice virtual machine all to itself, as Cloud Services weren't too different from on-premises hardware. But Azure App Services don't quite work the same way, such that many of the performance optimizations in the BlogEngine.NET code actually cause performance headaches in App Services. For example, at app start, the engine loads the entire blog history into memory, because in 2007, when the project began, memory was fast and disks were slow. (NB: The Daily Parker has over 9,700 posts spanning 27 years.) Also, the code runs entirely synchronously, so under load it spins up more and more threads until it just collapses from exhaustion.

So here we are: running a very old blog engine on a nearing-end-of-life version of .NET that everyone is tired of.

But, aha! There is a solution, which I've been kicking around for almost as long as I've had a blog, and which I finally have the skills and time to work on. I'll simply build my own. It'll be idiosyncratic, sure, but it'll be fast and it'll be cool.

Or maybe I'll go back to DasBlog, now that someone has rebuilt it in .NET Core.

Nah. I'm going to write my own. Target date: October 15th, ten years after I released this version.

* It's actually now around $3.34 per day after a Microsoft Azure pricing change on February 12th which just showed up in the cost management tool today. The costs break down as follows: App Service type B2, $2.49; storage (media and event log), 52¢; database (serverless type B), 33¢. So, around $100 per month.