The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Chicago to get its first scheduled 787 service

United Airlines will start flying the airplane on its Chicago to Houston route this fall:

The first 787 Chicago flights to Houston will begin Nov. 4 and end Dec. 3. That service will operate six days a week during that time, with the Chicago flight departing at 11:15 a.m. After that, daily service will restart Jan. 4 and run to March 29.

Though the initial routes are temporary, United is likely to regularly fly 787s out of O'Hare eventually, especially as it takes delivery of more planes. United will take delivery of five planes this year from its total order of 50.

United is also flying the planes from Houston to San Francisco, so if I wanted to see how the other half lives (I almost always fly American), I suppose I could book my Thanksgiving travel on United. I'll see how much tickets cost Saturday morning, when they go on sale. Even though I'd feel like I'm cheating on my airline, I'd love to get on one of the new planes before American starts flying them in 2014.

Russia and US liberalize bilateral visa regime

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow just announced sweeping changes to the visas that Americans can get to visit Russia:

Starting September 9, Russian and American travelers for business or tourism will be eligible to receive visas valid for multiple entries during a period of 36 months. The agreement also outlines other simplifications in the bilateral visa regime and eases visa processing time for travelers from both countries.

Thanks to the agreement, three-year, multiple-entry visas will become the standard “default” terms for U.S. citizens visiting Russia and Russian citizens visiting the United States. No formal invitation will be required to apply for a business or tourism visa, although applicants seeking Russian tourist visas must continue to hold advance lodging reservations and arrangements with a tour operator. Both sides have also committed to keep standard visa processing times under 15 days, although the circumstances of individual cases may require additional processing.

When I visited Russia in 2010, the visa application required the actual dates and modes of travel, and an official invitation from the hotel. Russian visas were only valid for the dates on the application, so missing a flight or train could cause serious difficulties crossing the border. (I saved a pdf of the rules in effect through September 9th.)

I'll be interested to see if Russian tourism picks up with this liberalization scheme.

Wet weekend ahead

Hurricane Isaac is about to come ashore in New Orleans (check out the current wind map for an arresting view), and by Friday night will be giving Illinois some much-needed rain:

As of noon on Monday, August 27, the track of Hurricane Isaac could pass through Illinois on Saturday. Of course, it won’t be a hurricane – just a tropical depression. Even so, large rainfall amounts are expected to fall in parts of Illinois and Missouri.

Then, for Labor Day Weekend, it looks to bake and then soak Chicago:

Post-landfall, the storm is expected to track north up the Mississippi Valley, spreading its torrential downpours into the Midwest with the heavy rain reaching the Chicago area by the weekend.

Prior to the rain, sinking air in advance of the storm should help boost Chicago temperatures into the mid-90s Thursday and Friday. That would raise the city's total of 32°C-plus days to 45, two shy of the record 47 logged in 1988. The heat is expected to solidify this summer's spot as the city's third hottest summer, behind 1955 and 1995 for the June-August meteorological summer period.

W-8 a second...

After installing Windows 8 yesterday, I discovered some interaction problems with my main tool, Visual Studio 2012. Debugging Azure has suddenly become difficult. So after installing the OS upgrade, I spent about five hours re-installing or repairing a whole bunch of other apps, and I'm not even sure I found the causes of the problems.

The next step is to install new WiFi drivers. But seriously, I'm only a few troubleshooting steps from rebuilding the computer from scratch back on Windows 7.

Cue the cursing...

W-8, W-8!

This morning I installed Microsoft Windows 8 on my laptop. As a professional geek, getting software after it's released to manufacturing but before the general public is a favorite part of my job.

It took almost no effort to set up, and I figured out the interface in just a few minutes. I like the new look, especially the active content on the Start screen. It definitely has a more mobile-computing look than previous Windows versions, with larger click targets (optimized for touch screens) and tons of integration with Windows Accounts. I haven't linked much to my LiveID yet, as I don't really want to share that much with Microsoft, but I'll need it to use SkyDrive and to rate and review the new features.

I also did laundry, vacuumed, cleaned out all my old programming books (anyone want a copy of Inside C# 2 from 2002?), and will now go shopping. And I promise never to share that level of picayune personal detail again on this blog.

God to GOP: "That was just a warning."

The Republican National Committee has cancelled the first night of their quadrennial convention because of Tropical Storm Isaac:

That move essentially postpones the activities of the first of four scheduled days of the convention. But [RNC Chair Reince] Priebus said in a conference call with reporters that the details of the revised schedule were not yet settled, and could be announced as soon as Sunday.

"The Republican National Convention is going to take place. We know that we will officially nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan," he said.

The impending hurricane aside, Republicans already did some last-minute reshuffling for their convention order, moving Ann Romney's speech to Tuesday from Monday because major television networks hadn't planned to broadcast the first night of the convention.

(Emphasis mine, impressed that the GOP can spin lemonade out of a hurricane.) Still, even though Isaac looks to brush Tampa on the cheek instead of hitting it on the nose as it appeared Friday, as an atheist I'm enjoying the theological implications of the right-wing religious party having their biggest event in four years disrupted by a weather event.

Will they moderate their views about human-caused climate change? Will they whistle past this graveyard? Will monkeys fly out of my butt while I'm typing this? I think we know the answer to all three questions.

Moving FogBugz to Azure

I should really learn to estimate networking and migration tasks better. The last time I upgraded my FogBugz instance on my local web server, it took about 20 minutes. This led me to estimate the time to migrate it to a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine at 2 hours.

Well, 2½ hours later, I'm a little frustrated, but possibly closer to getting this accomplished.

The point of a virtual machine, of course, is that it should appear the same as any other machine anywhere. But using an Azure VM means either using an Azure SQL Database or installing SQL Server right on the VM. Obviously you'd want to do the former, unless you really like pain. Unfortunately, FogBugz doesn't make it easy to do this, and in fact puts up roadblocks you'll need to get around.

Here, then, are the steps I went through trying to get FogBugz moved to an Azure VM:

0. First, before anything else, I copied my FogBugz database in its entirety up to a new Azure SQL Database using the incredibly useful SQL Azure Migration Wizard tool.

1. Ran the FogBugz installer on the VM. It didn't accept my database connection because SQL in Azure doesn't have the xp_msver extended stored procedure that lets FogBugz know what version of SQL it uses.

2. Checked Fog Creek Software's support forum. They don't support FogBugz on Azure SQL Databases.

3. Attempted to create the xp_msver stored procedure on the SQL Azure master database; permission denied.

4. Installed SQL Server 2008 Express on the VM.

5. Re-ran the FogBugz installer. It can't connect to the IIS configuration file, and therefore thinks I don't have IIS on the machine.

6. Re-ran the FogBugz installer, this time just extracting the files to a folder under the VM's Web root.

7. Set up a new application in IIS pointing to the FogBugz folder.

That put me in the weeds, because the application has no configuration settings available. Opening the app in a browser gives me the error message: "The FogBugz database is down or could not be found." It further suggests that I need to change the registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Fog Creek Software\FogBugz\{application folder}\sConnectionString. So I did, and I got the same error.

The reason is that on 64-bit servers, the FogBugz configuration keys aren't in HKLM\Software; they're really in HKLM\Wow6432Node. I figured this out because, remember, I have a running FogBugz installation, and I was able to search the server's registry directly.

All right, moving on:

8. Copied my existing server's FogBugz registry keys (from the right registry folder) to the VM.

Nope. FogBugz still gave me the same error. I also copied the connection string to the registry key FogBugz claimed it was looking in, with the same result.

OK, I'm going to now uninstall everything and reboot the VM, then try again to install FogBugz pointing to SQL Express. Back in a flash...

(20 minutes later...)

OK, FogBugz installed cleanly, but at the moment it's pointing to the local SQL Express database. So: change the connection string to SQL Azure...and bam! It works.

Excellent. Only two applications left to move...

The goose is loose!

Goose Island beer will start distributing to all 50 states by November:

The move will continue remarkable growth for what began as a small brewpub in its current Clybourn Avenue location in 1988, and has arguably become the beer most synonymous with Chicago. But a national reach also seemed inevitable once brewery founder John Hall sold the company to AB at a time when craft beer sales were soaring and macro breweries were struggling to enter the marketplace.

Production of Goose Island's biggest-selling and highest-produced beers — 312 Urban Wheat Ale, Honker's Ale, India Pale Ale and seasonal brews like Mild Winter — will expand to AB's Ft. Collins, Colo. brewery. The beers will also continue to be made at an AB plant in Baldwinsville, N.Y., as well as in smaller amounts at the Red Hook brewery in Portsmouth, N.H. and Chicago.

Colorado water? I don't think Colorado has the right amount of lead, arsenic, or radon to give it the proper flavor.

Fortunately, the high-end beers like Sofie will stay in Chicago, and presumably the brewpubs on Clybourn and in Wrigleyville will continue to make beer with proper Chicago water. We'll see.