Monthly Archives: February 2007

Weekend update

I’ve been lazy with the blog again and it’s only because I’ve been too busy at and outside of work 🙂 Some interesting tidbits from my life over the past few weeks:

  • I wrote a little app called the Seattle Rain-O-Meter a couple of weekends back. The app gives you the probability of rain in Seattle on any given day based on historical rain data from the past 113 years. The tool was even featured on the Seattle Metroblog who said:

This being Seattle and all, it’s not unlikely that there might be some rain during the day. Just how likely it is can be hard to say, but thanks to Umesh Unnikrishnan and the Seattle Rain-o-meter [site] all the work has been taken out of your guesswork for you! Simply select a month and date and you’ll be given the odds of rain that particular day, along with a couple of predictive stats.

So, check it out: http://umeshunni.com/rainometer.aspx

  • I’ve picked up skiing pretty well this year – thanks to the lessons at the Summit and some well meaning friends. I’ve average atleast two ski trips a month and have moved up from the Green to the Blue trails at Summit Central. My updated goal is to atleast try out the black slopes before the end of the year. Sadly, I’ve never carried a camera to the slopes, so I don’t have photos of my adventures. Cameraphone pics just don’t do justice…

 

  • On the flip side, I’ve done almost no travelling since my India trip in winter. Weekends have been spent skiing, playing boardgames and other sports, planning surprise birthday partieswatching sports and other mundane activities. I’m looking forward to our Bahamas cruise in May, but I’ll probably get sick of staying within the Puget Sound region by then. As the weather clears up, I hope to do some local day/overnight trips, especially in Spring.

PowerShell tricks

Soo… PowerShell seriously rocks! I just downloaded the 1.0 release for Vista today and was playing around with it. Here’re my top 2 features in the couple of hours that I’ve been playing with it…

Cool feature #1: You have the entire .net framework at your disposal from the command line. So, you can instantiate any .net class and call methods on it with no compiler or anything.

Cool feature #2: It natively understands xml. Which means that you can get an xml blob and play around with it at the command line.

Combine the two together and what do you get?

A shell script that prints out the latest woot.com sale item and price:

PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://www.woot.com/Blog/Rss.aspx”)).rss.channel.item[0].title

Philips GoGear 2GB MP3 Player w/ FM Tuner – $49.99

Or how about the latest headlines from Slashdot:

PS C:Usersumeshu> ([xml] (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(“http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot”)).RDF.Item| select title

Brain Scanner Can Read People’s Intentions

Is Interoperable DRM Really Less Secure?

MIT’s Millimeter Turbine to be Ready This Year

Microsoft Not Dropping Hotmail Name

Mice Cured of Autism

Cisco to Open Source CTA

Windows Expert Jumps Ship

University Professor Chastised For Using Tor

FAA To Free Aircraft Hobbled By IP Laws

Apple’s Windows Apps Not Ready For Vista

Yahoo Pipes

Canonical and Linspire Make a Deal

Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples

Did Gates Fib About H1-B Salaries?

To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt

Neat, huh 🙂 More to follow in the weeks ahead I suppose…

PS: Holy @!%*&, it’s been over two months since I last blogged! There’s been too much happening in life and work over the past few months that’s kept me busy, but I hope to blog more frequently in the New Year.