Events

A couple stories of interest: CityLab has a good explanation about why New York stopped building subways 80 years ago, and how that has caused epic transit problems today. Developers plan to build a new skyscraper in Chicago for $1 bn. At 433 m, it would be the second-tallest building in Chicago, just 9 m shorter than Willis Tower. Credit-card signatures are finally going away in the U.S. OK, back to being really too busy to breathe this week...

For day 15 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge I want to talk about something that computer scientists use but application developers typically don't. Longtime readers of the Daily Parker know that I put a lot of stock in having a liberal arts education in general, and having one in my profession in specific. I have a disclosed bias against hiring people with computer science (CS) degrees unless they come from universities with rigorous liberal arts core requirements. Distilled down to the essence, I...

Day 14 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to namespaces. Simply put, a namespace puts logical scope around a group of types. In .NET and in other languages, types typically belong to namespaces two or three levels down. Look at the sample code for this series. You'll notice that all of the types have a scope around them something like this: namespace InnerDrive.Application.Module { } (In some languages it's customary to use the complete domain name of the organization creating the code as part...

Two weeks ago I started writing my A-to-Z posts and got all the way to today's before my life became nuts—as I knew it would—with 4 chorus-related events and a huge increase in my work responsibilities. And with the Apollo After Hours benefit this coming Friday, this weekend will be pretty full as well. I use my email inbox as a to-do list, and right now it has 35 messages, 30 of which relate to the benefit. I'm very glad the A-to-Z Challenge gives us Sundays off, because I don't know how I'm going to...

Alphabetical order doesn't actually put topics in the best sequence for learning, so we've had to wait until Day 13 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge to talk about one of the most basic parts of an object-oriented program: methods. A method takes a message from an object and does something with it. It's the behavior part of the behavior-plus-data pairing that orients your objects in the OO universe. In .NET, even though you define fields, events, properties, and methods on your classes, under the hood...

Of 19 Trump-branded product lines available in 2015, only 2 remain on the market. One wonders why: In recent weeks, only two said they are still selling Trump-branded goods. One is a Panamanian company selling Trump bed linens and home goods. The other is a Turkish companyselling Trump furniture. Of the rest, some Trump partners quit in reaction to campaign-trail rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. Others said their licensing agreements had expired. Others said nothing beyond confirming that they’d...

We had an absolutely beautiful day in Chicago yesterday. I ate lunch outside after going for a walk to obtain it. Birds sang. Trees started budding. The sun shone. And then, suddenly, the sun didn't shine anymore: Chicago lies in the transition zone between cold air to the north and mild, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and where the boundary passes a point in its gradual southward push, the temperature drop is remarkable. On Thursday afternoon the boundary, actually a sharp cold front...

Day 12 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge will introduce you to LINQ, another way .NET makes your life easier. LINQ stands for Language INtegrated Query, which Microsoft describes as follows: Traditionally, queries against data are expressed as simple strings without type checking at compile time or IntelliSense support. Furthermore, you have to learn a different query language for each type of data source: SQL databases, XML documents, various Web services, and so on. With LINQ, a query is a first-class...

Eddie Lampert's reign of terror against Sears continued today when the chain announced the closing of their very last store in Chicago: Sears, founded in Chicago and facing mounting troubles, is closing its last store in the city. Employees at the store at Six Corners in the Old Irving Park neighborhood were told of the closure Thursday morning, spokesman Howard Riefs said in an email. The store will close in mid-July after a liquidation sale set to begin April 27. The Sears Auto Center will close in...

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...