Events

New Republic's John Paul Rollert explains: That a flight on Spirit will occasionally cost you less than $40 highlights for its defenders the airline’s essential promise: bargain basement ticket prices. “Offering our low fares requires doing some things that some people complain about,” [Spirit’s CEO, Ben] Baldanza wrote in an email to the Dallas Morning News last April, after the paper ran a story about the egregious number of complaints his company receives. “[H]owever, these reduce costs which gives...

...and also preparing for a fundraiser at which I'm performing tomorrow: Microsoft has moved Azure Premium Storage to general availability... ...and also improved SQL backup and export services. Coincidentally, my favorite performance analysis tool just added a feature I need this week. Color me happy. The United Center, where the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks play, is getting beer robots. British photographer Marcus Lyon does not like sprawl. And his photos are kind of cool. There's also a...

I'm still trying to debug the performance of our principal application, which shouldn't be struggling the way it is. I did, however, take two minutes out of my life to watch this:

I was here until 7:30 last night and would probably stay that late tonight if I didn't have a prior commitment. At least last night I got to see this: At least I've isolated the code causing the problem. Unfortunately it's one of the most-called methods in the application. Sigh.

Chip-and-PIN cards have ruled Europe for almost 10 years, because (a) they reduce fraud that (b) customers are liable for over there. In the U.S., where banks are liable, consumers haven't pushed as hard for the security measure, so it's rare. I've had a chipped card for two years now but even my bank hasn't gone the whole way to requiring PINs for purchases with it. Chase, however, has had enough, and has decided to issue them to everyone: Chip cards have significantly cut into fraud globally. For...

I was going to write a couple of entries today on various topics, but then this happened in production: That's a production database getting overloaded. I am now going to continue debugging it.

The Trib expects noise complaints to take off: The Federal Aviation Administration is expected within the next four months to release a preliminary report based on thousands of computer-generated flight simulations involving what will become O'Hare's fifth east-west runway and a subsequent runway that the city plans to open in 2020. All this work, however, might not bring relief after a record year for O'Hare jet noise complaints. The simulations are aimed in part at finding the best way to squeeze in...