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As of just a few moments ago, I passed 1.5 billion seconds old. Yes, this is a thing most people don't really think about, but as someone who works in software, this actually has some significance—and another Y2K problem that will occur just a few months before I get to 2.0 Gigaseconds (Gs) in 2038. The problem is a thing called the Unix epoch. Computers can only count as high as they have bits to count. Unix computers, which include Macs and most of the infrastructure of the Internet, count time in...

Saturday and Sunday, the Apollo Chorus sang Verdi's "Requiem" three times in its entirety (one dress rehearsal, two performances), not including going back over specific passages before Sunday's performance to clean up some bits. So I'm a little tired. Here are some of the things I haven't had time to read yet: I always read Andrew Sullivan's weekly column but I haven't had a chance yet. Democratic candidate Conor Lamb might win in a heavily-Republican district in Pennsylvania. (Disclosure: I have...

I had a meeting this morning to bring a new developer onto a maintenance-mode project. In doing so I went over some code I wrote 4 years ago. Yikes. We're doing a deep-dive on Monday...

I'm working from home today because I had a cable guy here for two hours, and because winter has finally arrived. The rain and sleet is also a problem because my Fitbit numbers have been off for four straight days. I did get a lot of sleep this past weekend—but that also could be a factor today, according to new research into weekend lie-ins. (tl;dr: sleeping in on Sunday makes it harder to wake up on Monday.) I'll have more later today. Now I have to figure out how to get a custom Microsoft Dynamics...

After upgrading to the Azure SDK 2.8.1 yesterday, I'm unable to debug this application locally without an uncomfortable contortion. The application is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVC website set up to run using IIS Express. It uses some Azure components, in particular the evil msshrtmi.dll that has caused so many versioning headaches in the past. The symptoms are these: when starting to debug the application in Visual Studio 2015, the application compiles but immediately causes a system toast message to appear...

I just upgraded my system to the Azure SDK 2.8.1, released earlier today, and also merged the latest code from the BlogEngine.NET master repo into my custom codebase. Do you see where I'm heading? Once I "solved" the version issue with msshrtmi.dll (a perennial bête noir [not to be confused with this bête noir]), then published the changes, and promptly killed the blog for an hour. It looks better now, but I'm still having trouble debugging it locally. Tomorrow, after I finish fixing a bug for work...