Alex Hopmann’s Blog

This year we aren’t going on any special trips over winter break so I’ve been “at work”, although given the weather (and the fact that no one is actually on campus) I’ve been working at home.

This is a pretty slow time of the year and it can be hard to get main work items done with so few other people around to coordinate with and get feedback from. Of course this makes it ideal to ramp up on key technologies and I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about Windows PowerShell. As a counter-example to my earlier comments about this time of year at Microsoft the PowerShell team just released CTP3 of Windows PowerShell version 2.0 last week and have had a flood of posts about cool things to do with it on the PowerShell Team Blog.

PowerShell seems like a pretty key breakthrough in terms of managing computers, especially large networks of them as we need to for the SharePoint Grid project. Having said that I’m still all over the place about the right way to approach it- there are so many different ways to get a given thing done that it can be a bit difficult to decide the right approach. I’ll try to post more about some of the options and trade-offs.

We are out picking up take out Chinese food for dinner and it’s quite the scene here. Not really a riot, but close- there has been some actual pushing and people knocked over a large potted plant. Plus lots of people getting in the way of the wait staff. Be safe people!

The NY Times has an editorial about the Minnesota recount, the gist of which is that whichever way it turns out, Minnesota does a pretty good job running elections. All the ballots are on paper, with none of those punch-card chad or electronic black-box voting machine nonsense.

I’m hoping election officials across the country take the right message from this. Even when there are electronic voting machines (we have some locally, mostly as a help for disabled voters), they should print out the results onto a paper ballot that the voter can verify before handing it in. Its just not that hard, and measures like this can help ensure future elections are fair too.

Now that I have upgraded I can use the iPhone app to publish to my blog. Let’s see how it works.

I just upgraded the software for this blog. Frankly I was a bit terrified that it was going to destroy something in a big way, but so far it looks fine. This is pretty much a test post, so we will see how it goes.

This is big news- I can buy Spore and I think Mirror’s Edge now (or soon). The cool thing is that Steam has a type of DRM that doesn’t punish the customer- I can only install the games when I’m logged in, but they make it super easy when I get a new computer. I just re-download all my games to my new computer, and I’m good to go.

I can’t express in words how lame it was when other titles like BioShock were released on Steam but still containing their own potentially system-destabilizing DRM. Glad to see them moving away from that, and if I were running Steam I’d ban any other forms of DRM and keep my brand clear as the system that doesn’t screw up your computer.

So to summarize the storm so far-
It started out as way over hype. The Seattle schools started late Monday and Tuesday last week, and then were entirely canceled Wednesday. It didn’t snow Wednesday, pretty much at all. Very wacky, although typical.

Then Thursday it did snow for real. Not real by the standards of any place that gets real snow like Minneapolis or Ithaca, but Seattle just doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle snow, plus it has lots of hills (a characteristic in common with Ithaca). So 3″ is pretty much enough to shut down the city and it was not a surprise when school was canceled Friday too, effectively starting winter break 3 days early.

Now, at first this snow stuff is pretty fun. Stay inside, do some sledding in the streets, and walk everywhere without driving. Not that the amount of snow would be that much of a barrier to driving normally (both of our cars are AWD and I’ve got a reasonable amount of experience with snow driving) but the other drivers around here scare the hell out of me. There are actually a few that have a clue, but the rest tend to be folks driving really inappropriate vehicles with no snow driving skills, or people who assume that because they are driving a 4WD they can cruise along at normal speeds on icy roads .

The former group can be pretty funny sometimes. We saw a woman putting chains on the back tires of her Civic. I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of a Civic with rear wheel drive, and we tried to gently point out she might be doing the wrong tires but she was sure she had it right. Much more common are folks without chains and with cars really not meant for snow driving (think Prius). Typical behavior is getting stuck on an up-hill, and then gunning the engine, spinning the wheels, polishing the surface of the road into a nice glass-like ice. Fun.

Then on Friday the big deal was the “Mega Wind-Storm” that was supposed to hit the area Saturday night / Sunday morning. Huge headlines across all of the papers, you couldn’t watch a local news broadcast without tons of dramatic music and all that. Now, we have had some serious wind-storms before with most of the cities power being out for days, massive flooding, etc, so people had good reason to be a bit worried about the reports.

However, in this case I checked out the aviation reports (see my previous post) and the strange thing is I couldn’t really see anything that looked like a wind-storm. So to put it mildly, I was somewhat skeptical of the hype.

How did it turn out? I’m going to claim that I was at least half right. In the city we had basically nothing- maybe 20mph winds for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. However there was a dramatic difference between the winds at the surface and those 2000′ up, and apparently some of the foothills communities did get some high winds, including an unofficial report of a gust to 100mph nearby. So there were high winds, but I’m still going to claim that the press was irresponsible in not reporting the story in a way that made it clear that this was not going to impact 95% of the population of the area.

One last thought- now that its pushing a week of snow in the Seattle area, its getting a little old. Its probably hard to understand when you live in a place like Minneapolis or Ithaca where it snows in the fall, and pretty much stays around until April or later, but we just don’t have any infrastructure to deal with it. The plow some of the major roads, but not very frequently and they don’t even try to get them clear. They pile some snow in the middle of the road but the lane you drive on ends up having plenty of ice and snow anyway plus with only 1 real lane you get aggressive drivers trying to pass you in wacky ways if you are driving carefully. So it really becomes pretty hard to do any necessary errands which is cute for a day or two but gets old after a week. To be honest, I don’t blame the city for this- we don’t typically get weather like this, just a day or two, so its is pretty rare and it probably wouldn’t make sense to prepare for such rare events. After all, one of the nice things about Seattle is that you can visit snow nearby, but you (typically) don’t have to live with it every day.

So, some clarification based on the latest weather data. It looks like there WILL be some seriously high winds at higher elevations- roughly 2000 feet and above (the aviation forecasts are showing 20-30mph winds at the surface but warn of a wind shear to 65mph between the surface and 2000 feet). So folks up in the mountains are going to get blasted, but down where most of the population is, it should be a normal storm.

Meanwhile in huge letters the Everett Hearld proclaims “‘Mega-storm’ brewing”… Cue the scary music.

The other strange thing is that the winds at 2000ft will be out of the East which is a really strange pattern for our area. I just hope that the storm doesn’t cause any huge damage to the local ski area’s chair-lifts.

All the TV news are hyping up a National Weather Service advisory that we are supposed to have some crazy big wind storm with sustained winds 50-70mph, gusts to 90mph tomorrow night. If the winds really hit that big, it would be a big deal.

The thing is, from reading the weather data, I don’t see it. Check here- http://adds.aviationweather.gov/winds/. You can scroll different time periods, and of course anyone reading this weeks from now all the old data will be gone.

In any case, what I see is a low pressure front coming in off the cost tomorrow afternoon/evening. I see some 50mph surface winds off the coast, but I don’t see anything coming inland to Seattle more than 25mph. Also, while its a low, its not that strong of a low as such things go (989 mb). As it develops Sunday morning the strong winds will be to the SW of the low, well off shore. By the time the low comes on shore its 1001mb, which is hardly a low at all, and the winds are no big deal.

The only possible thing is that the pressure lines do stack up pretty tightly on the East side of the low which is right over Seattle. So while the winds forecast doesn’t show anything there, it could be disguised. But I’m still suspicious that this isn’t really that big a deal.

We will know in a couple of days- I’ll report back whether I was right or not.

This morning at about 5:30am there were two gigantic thunder-claps. Apparently the National Weather Service said Seattle had an episode of “thundersnow” around 5:30 a.m. when a storm cell moved across Puget Sound. I’ve never seen anything like it and it doesn’t seem like our weather patterns would have matched any of the normal descriptions of how it occurs.