#vbeers

vBeers Groningen Thursday 6 April 2017

We’re back! The third vBeers in Groningen is a fact! After two succesful vbeers in November 2016 and January 2017 the next vbeers is planned for Thursday April 6th 2017.

Mark the date in your calendar. Again we will continue our tour through the City of Groningen (a.k.a. City Of Talent), after a “normal” grand cafe and a football stadium, what could be next?

The venue for this vBeers episode is…

Columbus vBeers – Oct 15th

Columbus vBeers – Oct 15th

Fall is here and it has been almost three months since the last Columbus vBeers. Let’s get back together and catch up and see what announcements you are excited about.

We are meeting at the Seventh Son Brewing Company

  Location: Seventh Son Brewing Company Address: 1101 N. 4th St. Columbus, OH 43201 Date: Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2014 Time: 7:00pm

vBeers – Columbus, OH (Tuesday, May 6th 2014)

vBeers – Columbus, OH (Tuesday, May 6th 2014)

This will be a Citrix sponsored event! Please join us for the our first vBeers event at the World of Beer located at Easton Town Center and encourage your IT colleagues to attend as well.

Join us for an evening of creating connections and building your network in a relaxed and fun environment.

Networking is an essential aspect of your professional…

vBeers – Columbus, OH (Tuesday, October 29th 2013) | vBeers – where vGeeks come to meet

Location: Back room at Roosters Wings Address: 3370 Olentangy River Rd, Columbus, OH 43202 Date: Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2013 Time: 7:00pm

Look forward to meeting you and…

Mark your calendars for August 10th for the next Raleigh VMUG meeting.  This meeting we'll be talking Virtual Networking and Virtual Network Troubleshooting.

Jason Nash (@TheJasonNash) of Varrow [and TrainSignal fame] will be presenting on network troubleshooting and available to answer your virtual networking questions.

Registration link is here!  http://www.vmug.com/e/in/eid=544

Registration is encouraged but not required to attend!  We will also have #vBeersRaleigh after the meeting at Carolina Ale House at Brier Creek.

How Long to Wait until #vBeers ??

One of the things I'm really working on in #PowerShell / #PowerCLI is transitioning to functions.  Since I'm also a huge fan of beer you may have noticed my previous post making the Get-vBeers function to find out it if there is a vBeers event listed on the site for that location.

http://www.vtesseract.com/post/8384507555/get-vbeers-cmdlet-for-vbeers

After my last post about Get-Date cmdlet it seemed only natural to step up the function to a new level.  Now Get-vBeers will tell you how long you have to wait until the next vBeer.  Currently you have to enter the date MM/DD/YYYY format and it will tell you how many days you must wait. I hope to one day make it connect with the vbeers.org calendar but one step at a time.

Learning Goal

My learning goal for this function was to use non-mandatory parameters for conditional work within the function and exit the function once that segment was complete without running through other segments.  I hope to use this skill to create functions that can both report [-report] or remediate [-remediate] depending on what is passed to it.

I did this in this function by not making the parameter mandatory and putting an 'if' statement inside the function that checks to see if the variable is blank or null.  In this case I wanted to make it easy for the user to simply type out the date and do the conversion to a System.DateTime within the function.  I may use a later revision to verify the format of the passed string is correct.

I have also included some help information so you can run get-help get-vbeers -full to get the full breakdown including examples.

The Function

That's enough talk from me.  Here's the function in version 2! Cheers!

Damian Karlson ( @Sixfootdad ) gave me a great idea after my last post.  Nothing Fancy here and probably not entirely legitimate to what Google would like for me to do but this is considered an exercise to see if it were possible.  Is it possible to use PowerShell to search to see if your city is represented on vBeers.org?

It's not perfect but I say YES!

function Get-vBeers([string]$location){ $searchstring = "http://www.google.com/search?q=" + $location + "+site%3Avbeers.org" Start-Process $searchstring } Get-vBeers Raleigh

While I know it's not necessarily giving you the next upcoming, it does at least get you in the right direction and let you know that people in your town have organized! :-)

Now that I'm working hard to get vBeers started in Raleigh I've started a little list of good places the group should meet.  The trick is that there are so many good places to go there is some value in mixing up the meeting location.  Naturally I turn to PowerShell and the Get-Random cmdlet.

Here's a list of locations saved to a file C:\Josh\beer.txt

Big Boss Brewery Natty Greene's LoneRider Brewery Tyler's Taproom CBC Brewery Aviator Breweries Bull city Burger Full Steam Durham Bulls

First we need to import the list from the file with Get-Content

    $beer = Get-Content "C:\Josh\beer.txt"

Typing in $beer will give you the list of locations.  Now you just need to pipe that to Get-Random to get your random selection.

    $beer | Get-Random

If I follow this then the next location would be:

   Full Steam Brewery in Durham

Even though I had a small sample set of data guaranteeing I'll have duplicates from time to time I found it did pretty well.  I tested Get-Random by first sorting the list alphabetically:

   $beer | Sort-Object

typing $beer gave me the alphabetical list (I love PowerShell by the way)

I ran the following repeatedly to see how often a back to back duplicates would show up.

   $beer | Sort-Object | Get-Random

Out of a quick sample of 16 times nearly all were selected at least once with Full Steam being selected 3 times.  Poor Bull City Burger didn't get selected at all.