Events

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional on equal-protection grounds: This is a really big deal. [George H.W. Bush-appointed Chief Judge Dennis] Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against...

Yes, one more entry of nothing but links, as my creativity is completely directed at the three five work projects currently on my agenda. But tomorrow afternoon I start a mini-vacation that will include a good, solid 22 hours of being in planes and trains, which I actually find relaxing. (I am not kidding.) For now, here's what I'm saving to my Kindle reader: The President is having an election-night (victory!) rally at McCormick Place; I will try to attend. Newsweek will cease print publication with...

A quorum: With tonight's debate at my alma mater, Hofstra, everyone needs to hear this again. The BBC reports that creativity is linked to mental illness. Or, put differently, people who lack creativity have no other way of explaining it. Five Thirty Eight has an interactive graphic showing how state-level politics has shifted since WWII. Discover interviews physicist Geoffrey West about urban planning. The New Republic thinks Ben Affleck's Argo is brilliant. The Economist's Gulliver blog examines Qatar...

Well, that was a fun demo. Fortunately we have four more Agile iterations before we're done. So, now that I have precisely thirteen minutes to catch up on my email and the news of the day, I will note this lede that could only come from a left-leaning British newspaper: BAA is to drop its name in favour of plain Heathrow after concluding that the initials, derived from the old British Airports Authority, no longer fit a foreign-owned company with no authority that has been forced to sell off half its...

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...

So far this month, I've worked about 110 hours (no exaggeration), in part preparing for a pair of software demos on Monday. Normal blogging will likely return tomorrow or Monday. Meanwhile, here's a picture of Parker: That's from six years ago this week. Everyone together, now: "Awwwwwwww."

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...