Weather Prediction Error

I wrote a Python script to download the 1 through 5 day predictions for the weather in the top 50 American cities from the Weather Underground. I’ve got almost 2 years of data now. Here are the RMSE for predictions for all cities. I believe the RMSE for all cities is 2.24, 2.89, 3.68, 4.29, 4.92 degrees F for 1 through 5 days respectively. I put the data up here, but I don’t yet know how to add visualizations. Unfortunately I have forgotten what little statistics I’ve ever learned. I tried a naïve prediction: tomorrow will be the same as today. This scored a RMSE of 6.11, which is significantly worse than even the 5 day forecast. I’ll try some machine learning algorithms on the data. In addition to the temperature, I stored things like weather condition (rain, snow, cloudy, etc) which may help make better predictions. Overall, I guess the weather underground does ok.

Upgrading Ubuntu to 11.10

I run various versions of Ubuntu within VMware. Every single time I let it do a full upgrade to a new version it fails. This time an upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 failed to reboot. Here’s the problem and solution. This is my first look at Ubuntu’s Unity. Generally I don’t care about the desktop because I live in Emacs. However, this is a colossally bad UI experience. Suddenly the firestorm of complaints about Unity make a lot more sense. I’ll keep trying it for a little while. If I still hate it in a week I’ll switch back to Gnome.