Tuesday link round-up
Late afternoon on Tuesday, with so much to do before the end of the week, I can only hope actually to read these articles that have passed through my inbox today:New Republic's Josephine Livingstone...
View ArticleWe're #11?
Crain's reported yesterday on the latest business-school rankings from US News and World Report. University of Chicago tied with Harvard at the top spot and Northwestern landed at #6:The magazine...
View ArticleWhat really was the Cuban sonic weapon?
About a year ago, a number of American diplomats and their families in Cuba were injured by what our military speculated might be a sonic weapon. A sonic weapon directs sonic energy at a target to...
View ArticleNot that this is news
In addition to crapping on the norms of office that have kept our Republic functioning for centuries, the Trump Administration has lowered the bar for standard written English in politics:Amid all the...
View ArticleConstruction complication in Dunning
No, not the Dunning of Kruger fame; Dunning, the community area on the far northwest side of Chicago.Workers building a new school in the neighborhood discovered that not only was it the former site of...
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F is for F#
We're up to day 6 of Blogging A-to-Z challenge, FFS.The last few days I've written about the two main object-oriented languages that come with Visual Studio and .NET: C# and VB.NET. Today I want to...
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G is for Generics
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...
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H is for Human Factors
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...
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I is for Interface
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."...
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J is for JetBrains
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...
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K is for Key-Value Pairs
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...
View ArticleDisappearing Midwestern accents
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,...
View ArticleIn other Chicago news...
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...
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L is for LINQ
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...
View ArticleWhat happened to the brand?
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...
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M is for Method
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...
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N is for Namespace
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...
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O is for O(n) Notation
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...
View ArticleQuick links
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...
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Q is for Querying
Posting day 17 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge just a little late because of stuff (see next post). Apologies.Today's topic is querying, which .NET makes relatively easy through the magic of LINQ....
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