Events

A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why: At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck. Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical...

The (new) Daily Parker is code-complete for the first launch. There are a few steps to go, like launching the production site and migrating nearly 5,000 blog entries. But maybe, just maybe, it'll launch tomorrow. (Note that the beta site only has the last six weeks of entries, and doesn't include any since yesterday, because I didn't re-run the migration for the last bits of testing.)

Yesterday I successfully ran a complete import of the entire Daily Parker, all the way back to May 1998, and promptly discovered a couple of problems. First, a recent change broke the app's ability to add or edit blog posts; and second, because BlogEngine.NET reads the entire blog into memory when it starts up, it took nearly five minutes for the home page to load on my debugging machine. That means the beta site will only have a few dozen entries up at any point, so I can actually fix the Javascript...

I'm continuing to test the new blog engine. This evening's tests, which I'm setting up with this post, will involve some of the trickier tasks in the migration: Relative links to posts within the blog itself Links to arbitrary files using absolute paths Links to files with relative paths Links to images (like the one below) with relative paths If you're reading this on the new blog engine, and all the links above work and the image below shows up, then the migration tool is complete. Deploying the new...

Cranky Flier this morning has a note about Southwest Airlines' latest ad campaign. I'll let him explain: [W]hat Southwest is trying to do is distract you from paying attention to the actual total cost of your ticket and instead trying to make you focus just on the fees. It gives examples on the website showing how Spirit can charge you up to $294 in fees while Southwest has none. But the reality is that you probably aren’t paying that much in fees, and you’re starting off a much lower base fare. Even if...

I've got a development instance of the new blog engine running on Azure: http://dailyparker-dev.azurewebsites.net/. Go ahead, take a peek. It's important to note that I'm testing the import engine right now, so the collection of entries on the development site will probably change during debugging. Also, since it's a development site, it may disappear altogether from time to time. Plus, the master source code (from which I'm merging into my custom code base from time to time) keeps changing. And merges...

Two things this weekend kept me from blogging. First, the amazing weather. It was warm and sunny both days, so I spent time picking apples and sitting outside with a book. The other thing is that the time I did spend at my computer involved working on the replacement for this blog engine. Regular blogging will continue this week.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., confirmed the phenomenon yesterday: “The ocean has warmed up a little bit more. ... It’s certainly still a strong event,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center. Halpert said this El Niño still isn’t quite as strong as the current record holder, the El Niño that developed in 1997, but it’s “still respectable. Probably the second strongest we’ve seen at this time of year.” “We certainly favor a...