Weather Now is all new.
We're ecstatic to roll out a completely new visual design by Katie Zoellner. It's actually been lurking as a Beta site for several months. We didn't roll it out because not all of the features from our old site (see http://old.wx-now.com/) are complete. But today is the first day of a new year, which we thought an appropriate moment to finally give Katie's design some exposure.
(Nearly-)Total Internationalization
Notice the flags along the left side of this page. Is one of those flags from your country? Click on it. Almost everything on the site will automagically show up in your country's main language.
We're still working on a lot of the translations, and some of them are tragicomically wrong. If you find a mistranslation, please let us know. We have plans to add a few more languages (does anyone speak Japanese, Mandarin, or Hindi?), as well as to make the site better at guessing your preference.
Also notice that you can now change easily between International System (metric) and English measurements. The site will get better at guessing each visitor's initial preference here, as well.
Vastly improved flexibility
All of the data pages use XML and XSL to provide the data you're looking for. This gives us much more flexibility, and allows us to vary the content much more than we've done in the past.
Take the home page, for example. Each of the sections is independent of the others. Soon, you'll be able to mix and match them as you'd like, or choose from one of the themes that we'll offer.
Lots more under the hood
The Site now uses the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ throughout. The Idea™ underpins all Inner Drive Technology applications, of which this is our biggest demonstration.
Stay tuned
We have a lot more cool tools planned for the site, including a massive upgrade of the geographical gazetteer that holds all of our place information and some neat things to do with your mobile PC.
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen takes on the remarkable UIs that appear in film:
Break into a company—possibly in a foreign country or on an alien planet—and step up to the computer. How long does it take you to figure out the UI and use the new applications for the first time? Less than a minute if you're a movie star.
...
Countless scenes involve unauthorized access to some system. Invariably, several passwords are tried, resulting in a giant "Access Denied" dialog box. Finally, a few seconds before disaster strikes, the hero enters the correct password and is greeted by an equally huge "Access Granted" dialog box.
At least we no longer have large bipedal robots shouting "Danger! Danger!"
A member of the Windows Vista team explains (via Joel Spolsky):
I worked on the "Windows Mobile PC User Experience" team. This team was part of Longhorn from a feature standpoint but was organizationally part of the Tablet PC group. To find a common manager to other people I needed to work with required walking 6 or 7 steps up the org chart from me.
So after 12 years, you still have to go to the Start menu to stop the computer.
I'm David Braverman, and this is my blog.
This blog has actually been around for nearly a year, giving me time to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Initially, I called it "The WASP Blog," the acronym meaning "Weather, Anne, Software, and Politics." It turns out that I have more than four interests, and I post to the blog a lot, so those four categories got kind of large.
I also got kind of tired of the old colors.
And, today, I finally had the time to upgrade to das Blog 1.9, which came out just a few days ago.
I may add categories as time goes on, and I'm going to start using sub-cagetories. But at this point, here are the main topics on the Daily Parker:
- Anne. For reasons that passeth understanding, she married me, and now she's the most important part of my life. And now that I've dropped the clever acronym, she can be Topic #1.
- Biking. I ride my bikes a lot. This year I prepared for two Century rides but, alas, my gallbladder decided to explode earlier this month. I might not have a lot to say for the next few months, but next year, I have big plans.
- Jokes. All right, I admit: when I'm strapped for ideas, sometimes I just post a dumb joke.
- Parker, our dog, whom we adopted on September 1st.
- Politics. I'm a moderate-leftie by International standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. More than 848 days and 22 hours remain in the worst presidential administration in history, so I have plenty to write about.
- Software. I own a small software company in Evanston, Illinois, and I have some experience writing software. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code. Posts in this blog about software will likely be cross-posted from the blog I'm about to start, Inner Drive Software.
- The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than seven years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change under a President who's beholden to the oil industry.
This is public writing, too, so I hope to continue a standard of literacy (i.e., spelling, grammar, and diction) and fluidity of prose that makes you want to keep reading.
So thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the blog.
Over the weekend I devoured the aptly-named The Best Software Writing edited by Joe Spolsky. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in software.
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of Star Trek's debut. Live long and prosper, indeed.
I just found out about a server crash at a friend's old company. It seems one of the staff members sent a 2.7 MB graphical file (wrapped in a PDF, wrapped in a MIME email) to 900 people. For some reason, that crashed the Exchange server creating 8.5 GB of transaction logs in just under 20 hours, which overflowed the system drive, which caused the entire server to collapse. At last report, a consultant had cleaned out the transaction logs and most of the message queues, but Exchange was still re-trying some of the addresses.
This problem was, therefore, between chair and keyboard. Whose chair and whose keyboard is difficult to tell.
First, I just put a major project to bed. It was my first time out doing litigation support, meaning I wrote software to crunch a whole bunch (= about a billion) of numbers for a law firm who represent a large (= about 350,000) class of plaintiffs. They got the results just now, so unless the defendant chooses not to settle and I get subpoenaed, I believe I'm done.
Second, at least one petty little man on the South Shore Line apparently doesn't "get" the whole idea of bikes on a train:
A day trip to South Bend ended up costing a Lincoln Park man $150 in cab fare after a South Shore Line crew member told him he would have to get his bicycle off the train.
What startled Alan Forester, 34, was that he had taken the South Shore Line to South Bend earlier in the day Sunday and no one said anything to him about his bike. Even more puzzling, he said he had followed the bicycle policy that he read on the railroad's Web site.
I had a similar problem about two years ago, when, after bonking on a very long ride, I attempted to board a Union Pacific North Line train at Highland Park, and got turned away by a conductor who thought my bungee cord was too short. (I think I may have told him at least I had a bungee cord, but we won't go there right now.)
The CTA largely gets it right. All CTA buses have bike racks. This means people can get out of their cars and save the environment by biking without worrying they'll be stranded because of weather or traffic. Why is Metra so opposed to the idea?
I was going to have action shots of my new bike this morning, but I decided to take the bus to my office instead of riding for some reason:
I'll have more on the bike later, including the results of my first real ride on it (whee!), but right now I have to crunch a few million data points. I'm also suffering from the after-effects of a midnight inspiration last night, which (a) led to two hours of coding starting at 1:00 am, and (b) got the total speed of the application up 40%.
First, I picked up my new bike yesterday. But that's not the subject of this post.
No, the unfortunate real subject of this post is, "I am stupid."
I had to import about 3.5 million data points recently, and now that I'm using the data, I discovered that this quick-and-dirty construct was dirtier than it was quick. See if you can spot the problem:
const string sqlTemplate =
"INSERT INTO data_points (foreign_key_id,year_num,payment,cost) VALUES ({0},{1},{2},{3})";
...
foreach (CustomStruct item in someObject.someList.Values)
{
string sql = string.Format(sqlTemplate, parent.RowId, item.Year, item.Cost, item.Payment);
...
}
That is why I am now executing SQL statements that look like this:
ALTER TABLE items ADD swap decimal(10,2)
GO
UPDATE items SET swap = cost
GO
UPDATE items SET cost = payment
GO
etc.
I am now waiting for the SQL to run.