TransportationToastmasters new year celebration

Last month we had a great dinner celebration to induct and welcome the new board of my Toastmasters club, celebrate the past years achievements, and have a good social time. I've been a member of Transportation Toastmasters for many years, and am sort of the granddaddy -- to guide the newer members as well as help out with any kind of special events. I took on the project to organize this party. First order of business was to get a consensus of the venue, date and time. It just happens that I had read some articles on voting theory and voting models in different countries. Most voting is a simple ballot where you pick a single choice among many. It would great if our constitution was changed to explore these other options where we can pick multiple choices, rank them or use a weighting system - I believe that gives us much better ways to achieve a collective consensus. (I must admit though, that this is way low on a scale of what is wrong with our democracy)

Anyways, I thought I would try this out something cool. I first asked people to make suggestions for restaurants, and dates. After considering all factors, we narrowed it down to three day window, and choice of 10 restaurants. I thought of writing a quick asp.net application to get online surveys, but thought to first browse around the web to see if I could use something that is already there. SurveyMonkey happens to be an asp.net app and it had what I needed. I made it so that instead of people just picking on one restaurant, can put points of several ones that they like. There were given upto 100 points. The same applied to the date selection. At the end I added up the points to come with the consensus. You can also download the data to a spreadsheet and do more data manipulation (such as give a multiplier factor for people who are bringing guests), group totals, graphs, etc.

The survey was a great success, and the members loved the idea. It was also very convenient - a simple 5 question online form. Best of all this service is free.

We had a wonderful dinner celebration. We settled on Pizza House in East Lansing which has a room in the back. We invited our Division governor Peg McComb-Elowski and some former but long time members. It was good to see Vanessa Tran and catch up with her. We ran into Jane Aldrich, a long time WLNS news anchor, who was our special guest speaker just two weeks ago. We actually had a few more people than my what I had reserved for - but Pizza House was gracious to add more tables to seat everyone together.

RegEx for extracting in HTML

Today I am at the Ann Arbor Give Camp - a weekend of coding frenzy where about 60 geeks are holed up in Washtinaw Community College developing web sites and web apps for charitible institutions and other good causes.

One of my tasks was to design a Master Page template from a mockup which was done in Publisher, and had tons of vml and office code. I needed to extract images and a rightClick-saveAs did not work (because of scripting, vml, etc.) All images were in the index_files folder, with a "image####.gif" filename. So I dumped the code in Expresso, and ran a match using the regex:
index_files\/image\d{1,4}\.gif,
Viola! I got a list of match which I copied and pasted in an HTML and downloaded the images.

.Net Certification map

Forgive me Lord for I have sinned. It's been over two weeks since my last post, and I have not posted updates to my regular expression talk. It's been ridiculously busy two weeks, so much so that I have slept very little. Wednesday night, I started cooking dinner at 11:30 pm. "Chicken Do-Pyaza" - a curried chicken recipe with generous portion of onions (Do-Pyaza translates to twice the onions). In a sleep deprived state I somehow ended up adding too much yogurt, onions, and water! So my recipe ended up becoming "Cream of Chicken 3-1/2 Pyaza e Rassam" - (Rassam is a South-Indian diluted soup.) Didn't taste bad though.

Anyway, here at MDIT we are looking to start a internal study group for .Net and other technology and I am helping launch the initiative. I was looking for certification information, and it is not well documented on the MSDN site, so I compiled it nicely in graphical format, that gives you the certification path at a glance. It shows you all the exams needed and prerequisites to get MCTS, MCPD and MCITP for .net 2.0, 3.5 and SQL Server 2008.

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