Events

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 4 Jul 8:30pm sunset 05:21 20:30 15:08 16 Jul 5:30am sunrise 05:30 20:24 14:54 9 Aug 8pm sunset 05:53 20:00 14:07 16 Aug 6am sunrise 06:00 19:50 13:50 29 Aug 7:30pm sunset 06:14 19:30 13:16 14 Sep 6:30am sunrise 06:30 19:02 12:32 16 Sep 7pm sunset 06:32 18:59 12:27 23 Sep Equinox, 02:50 CDT 06:39 18:47 12:07 26 Sep 12-hour day...

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 13-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in May 2017, and a couple have things have changed. So here's the update. The Daily Parker is about: Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006. Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States. The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than 16 years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations....

Here is the list of topics I wrote about for the 2019 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the topic of music theory: A is for A (April 1) B is for Bass (April 2) C is for Clef (April 3) D is for Deceptive Cadence (April 4) E is for "Ethnic" Sixth Chord (April 5) F is for Fugue (April 6) G is for Gregorian Chant (April 8) H is for Harmony (April 9) I is for Interval (April 10) J is for Jazz (April 11) K is for Key (April 12) L is for Legato (April 13) M is for Modes (April 15) N is for Notation (April 16) O is...

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2019 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:32 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:51 5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:11 20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:30 10:50 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:39 11:09 9 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 14th Earliest sunset until Oct 29th 06:13 17:51 11:37 10 Mar Daylight saving time...

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2018 3 Jul 8:30pm sunset 05:21 20:30 15:09 16 Jul 5:30am sunrise 05:30 20:24 14:54 9 Aug 8pm sunset 05:53 20:00 14:06 16 Aug 6am sunrise 06:00 19:50 13:49 29 Aug 7:30pm sunset 06:14 19:30 13:16 14 Sep 6:30am sunrise 06:30 19:02 12:32 16 Sep 7pm sunset 06:32 18:59 12:26 22 Sep Equinox, 21:54 CDT 06:39 18:48 12:09 25 Sep 12-hour...

Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#": A is for Assembly (April 1) B is for BASIC (April 2) C is for Common Language Runtime (April 3) D is for Database (April 4) E is for Encapsulation (April 5) F is for F# (April 6) G is for Generics (April 7) H is for Human Factors (April 9) I is for Interface (April 10) J is for JetBrains (April 11) K is for Key-Value Pairs (April 12) L is for LINQ (April 13) M is for Method (April...

Here's the complete list of topics in the Daily Parker's 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge on the theme "Programming in C#": A is for Assembly (April 1) B is for BASIC (April 2) C is for Common Language Runtime (April 3) D is for Database (April 4) E is for Encapsulation (April 5) F is for F# (April 6) G is for Generics (April 7) H is for Human Factors (April 9) I is for Interface (April 10) J is for JetBrains (April 11) K is for Key-Value Pairs (April 12) L is for LINQ (April 13) M is for Method (April...

Today is the last day of the 2018 Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today's topic: Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Null. The concept of "zero" only made it into Western mathematics just a few centuries ago, and still has yet to make it into many developers' brains. The problem arises in particular when dealing with arrays, and unexpected nulls. In C#, arrays are zero-based. An array's first element appears at position 0: var things = new[] { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; Console.WriteLine(things[1]); // -> 2 This causes no end...

I should have posted day 25 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. yesterday, but life happened, as it has a lot this month. I'm looking forward to June when I might not have the over-scheduling I've experienced since mid-March. We'll see. So it's appropriate that today's topic involves one of the things most programmers get wrong: dates and times. And we can start 20 years ago when the world was young... A serious problem loomed in the software world in the late 1990s: programmers, starting as far back as...

Welcome to the antepenultimate day (i.e., the 24th) of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge. Today we'll look at how communicating between foreign systems has evolved over time, leaving us with two principal formats for information interchange: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Back in the day, even before I started writing software, computer systems talked to each other using specific protocols. Memory, tape (!) and other storage, and communications had significant costs...