Events

Edward McClelland essays on the decline of the white blue-collar Midwest, as expressed linguistically: The “classic Chicago” accent, with its elongated vowels and its tendency to substitute “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those,” or “chree” for “three,” was the voice of the city’s white working class. “Dese, Dem, and Dose Guy,” in fact, is a term for a certain type of down-to-earth Chicagoan, usually from a white South Side neighborhood or an inner-ring suburb. The classic accent was most...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge continues on Day 11 with key-value pairs and simple tuples. A tuple is a finite ordered list of elements. In mathematics, you usually see them surrounded by parentheses and delineated with commas, like so: (2, 3, 5, 8, 13). .NET has several generic Tuple classes with 2 through 7 items in the sequence, plus a KeyValuePair structure that is the equivalent of Tuple. I'm actually not a fan of the Tuple class, though I get why it exists. I prefer naming...

House Speaker and Sophomore Class President Paul Ryan has decided he won't run for re-election this year: The latest and most high-profile departure from Congress, he joins dozens of Republicans who have resigned or retired ahead of the 2018 midterms,according to a Congressional Casualty List. According to an NBC News count, Ryan is the 24th House Republican who has decided not to seek re-election this cycle. His departure had been rumored for months. Back home in his Wisconsin district, there are...

For day 10 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'd like to give a shout out to a Czech company that has made my life so much easier over the past five years: JetBrains. Specifically, their flagship .NET accelerator tool ReSharper makes .NET development so much easier I can't even remember life without it. (If you've downloaded the code samples for this challenge, you may have seen either in the code or in the Git log references to ReSharper, usually when I turned off an inspection for a line or two.) I'm...

Day 9 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings up one of the key concepts in object-oriented design: the interface. In object-oriented design, rule #1 is "program to interfaces, not to implementation." In other words, when interacting with an object in your system, you should care about what behaviors and data you need to use, not what the object actually does with them. Going back to last week's room-and-window example: the original problem was that I want to close all the windows in the house with one...

For the first time in the institution's 229 years, a sitting U.S. Senator—from my own state, no less—has given birth: Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) gave birth Monday to a baby girl, the first time a sitting senator has delivered a child and one of just 10 female lawmakers to bear a child while serving in Congress. Duckworth, 50, and her husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, named their daughter Maile Pearl Bowlsbey after Bowlsbey’s great aunt. Pearl Bowlseby Johnson was an Army nurse during World War II. Duckworth...

It's the 99th day of 2018, and I'm looking out my office window at 25 mm of snow on the ground. It was -7°C on Saturday and -6°C last night. This isn't April; it's February. Come on, Chicago. The Cubs' home opener originally scheduled for today will be played tomorrow. This is the second time in my memory that the home opener got snowed out. I didn't have tickets to today's game, but I did have tickets to the game on 15 April 1994, which also got snowed out. (Cubs official photo.) Because it's Chicago....

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge enters its second week with a note about you, the human. Last week I discussed several topics that you probably thought were about computers. They weren't. They were about how you interact with computers. Computers don't need programming languages. This is a perfectly runnable program for the 6502 microprocessor: 0600: a9 01 8d 00 02 a9 05 8d 01 02 a9 08 8d 02 02 The human-readable version looks like this: $0600 a9 01 LDA #$01 $0602 8d 00 02 STA $0200 $0605 a9 05 LDA #$05...

Yesterday Parker got fitted for a new E-collar after I discovered that his long nose and long tongue were just long enough to lick his sutures. Fortunately the incision doesn't seem irritated or infected, probably owing to the massive doses of antibiotics we've got him on. As for the primary injury, that seems to have healed remarkably well in the few days since his surgery. He's putting more weight on the leg, and has less trouble standing up. He still seems a little shaky in some postures...

For day 7 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going totally generic. A generic in C# allows your code to "defer the specification of one or more types until the class or method is declared and instantiated by client code." In other words, you can declare a class that takes a type to be named later. Imagine you have a program that represents a house. Your house has rooms, and the rooms have windows, doors, and in some cases, fireplaces. They also have furniture. And sometimes headless corpses. (Don't...