PowerShell on an iPhone…almost!: v.2 now available.

V.2 of the iPhone PowerShell help app I posted about now available.  Details here.

Windows 7 Cake Edition

Just over a week ago I passed what some may think of as a milestone birthday, and as I was on leave I thought that I had got away with it passing by unnoticed by those that I work with.  Well not quite as this afternoon I was presented with a cake, handmade by a colleague, that was undoubtedly the most apt design that anyone could have come up with…

Even the base was made of icing and had been done in the same design as the default Win7 background.  Oh, and it was delicious as well!

Big thanks to Cath for creating such a delicious logo!

PowerShell on an iPhone…almost!

I’ve been lucky enough to have been issued with an iPhone as a replacement for my HTC S740 Windows Mobile device.  I’m trying not to get too attached to it as it might be possible that someone may decide to pull rank on me and it may end up being reallocated as quickly as it arrived, but like most things Apple it’s a pretty nice device.  Anyway, since I’ve had it I have inevitably trawled the AppStore looking for useful applications to allow me to be more productive at work with my work supplied device.  So far..Lego Photo, BubbleWrap, AirCoaster, Sky News, Sky Sports Football Centre, Met Office Weather, Paper Toss and an app to turn my iPhone into a Star Wars light sabre….well, you get the idea.  But that was until yesterday when into my Inbox arrived an email from Sapien updating me on their products (I’ve used PrimalScript as my scripting environment for years and I’m yet to find anything better).  Lo and behold there’s a PowerShell app for the iPhone that contains full descriptions for all PS v1 cmdlets.  Installed it and it looks pretty good, and now I’m happier as I’m now doing something almost work-related on my new device.  Details on the app can be found here.

Doesn’t time fly…?

So I’ve posting to this blog for 12 months now, having started on last Christmas Eve.  I have no idea whether anyone has found anything I’ve posted useful or just entertaining, although my ClustrMap indicates that a few people from various places around the globe have stumbled across my blog either on purpose or by accident (well, if I’m being honest it’s probably the latter, and when I say ‘people’ what I probably mean is automated web-crawling bots…).

So I’m still stuck at work until the bitter end but there’s a very relaxed atmosphere about the place, so there’s not a lot of real work being done.  That said, I did rebuild a WSUS server this morning.  Perhaps this afternoon when time is really dragging I may pass the time with a bit of Quake Live.

So Merry Christmas to anyone who may come across this, and as there’s still a bit of snow around here we may even get a white one after all…

So you work in IT…? #2

As I’ve said be before, being an IT Consultant automatically means that I’m also expected to know how to fix anything that has display and buttons for user-input.  So the conundrum put to me at the weekend was why a newly purchased Sony DVD-recorder/Blu-ray player wouldn’t play said Blu-ray disks.  Sometimes when troubleshooting, despite all your instincts, you have to get back to basics.  After a few moments the cause was quickly identified and after steeling myself to update the person concerned I took a deep breath and said to them “It’s not a Blu-ray player…”.  Despite their initial protestations, after pointing out..

• The lack of Blu-ray logo on the device & packaging,
• And that the manual didn’t list Blu-ray as a supported playback media,

..it was found quite funny all round (probably more so for me!).  But then they remembered that they had asked for a load of Blu-ray films for Christmas…

A bit of light reading…

On and off over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2 by Dmitry Vostokov.  While I was in Berlin at TechEd I attended a session on Crash Dump Analysis presented by Daniel Pearson of David Solomon Expert Seminars which proved how much I don’t know about it (I’m okay with !analyze –v or basic stack trace diagnosis but there is obviously so much more that I don’t know yet) so I thought I’d read up on it.  The book is proving really interesting and I’ve already picked up a couple of things that I didn’t already know but it’s pretty heavy going in terms of raw-geek content (even for me!).

For an idea of what sort of content to expect check out the website.

Defragmenting drives with PowerShell: updated

A while back I posted about how it was possible to defrag a disk with PowerShell but ended the post saying that I would probably never need to use it.  Turns out that I did need to after all…

It had been quite some time since I’d defragmented either the drive in my main PC at home or any of the external hard drives connected to it.  What I wanted to to be able to do with a PowerShell script was:

1. Identify all local hard drives,
2. Work out how defragmented the drive is,
3. Defrag the drive,
4. Show how much less it is fragmented afterwards,
5. Log it all to a file
6. Then shutdown the PC (given that if I’m sitting in front of this PC I tend to be playing Team Fortress 2 I wanted it to run when I’d finished then shut the box down.  I know that defrag will fall back into the background if it detects that the user is doing anything but given my n00bTF2 skills I can’t afford to hamper my performance!).

Using the code I posted previously as a starting point, turned out that it was pretty easy to achieve everything I wanted the script to do…

1. Identify all local hard drives using Win32_Volume class, checking that DriveType equals 3 (a local drive) and that there is a drive letter assigned,
2. then use the Win32_DefragAnalysis class to work out how fragmented the drive is,
3. then use Defrag Method associated with the Win32_Volume class,
4. repeat step 2,
5. Log it all using the start-transcript and stop-transcript cmdlets,
6. and finally shutdown the PC using the stop-computer cmdlet.

This will only run on Vista and later and needs to be run elevated, but it means that I can defrag my drives and shut my PC down without having to leave it on and rely on scheduling and it’s one less excuse I have for being beaten on TF2 again….