joeware - never stop exploring... :)

After seeing http://blog.joeware.net/2010/01/07/1860/ my good friend Deano reminded me that he had shown me something like this back last year for just Network Connections…

md c:\_special\nc.{7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}

Looks like…

http://www.wired.com/video/ces-2010-hands-on-with-transparent-display-of-the-future/60826805001

I have been exceedingly lax in updating AdMod this last year. I started working on it on and off after releasing AdFind V01.40.00 last year and while I have gotten much in, I haven’t gotten it released. In the meanwhile, I would hit little things that needed to be fixed in AdFind so I started tweaking that as well. Now I see we are in the new year and still no release and my testing of the existing functionality hasn’t been going fast either to make me comfortable to release as production so instead… I have gone the way of Google and am now offering a public beta of AdFind V01.41.00 and AdMod V01.12.00. You can find the beta versions at

http://www.joeware.net/downloads/beta/adfindmod_beta.zip

These have been stable in my testing but my testing has not been comprehensive. Obviously AdFind isn’t going to break anything, it can’t, it doesn’t write anything anywhere, however AdMod could go a little awry though again, I haven’t experienced that in a bit. If I had been experiencing it, it wouldn’t see the light of day. I am a bit picky like that, I can and will make mistakes and something will get released with a bad issue occasionally, but something will not get released with a bad issue when I am aware of it.

I am not going to go over all the changes in the code right here right now. My main concern is for people to play with the tools to see if they break anything that previously worked. There were some massive changes around CSV processing so definitely check that out.

If you look back through the blog postings from this last year, you will find a couple of examples of new features/switches in AdMod.

   joe

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/2/3/823871D1-819F-446D-ADD5-3049B78F020F/Windows_Server_2008_R2_Feature_Components.pdf

Mark Minasi has an interesting newsletter this month about a special folder that you can create to see all your CPL’s in one place. Very nice… You can read about it here –> http://www.minasi.com/newsletters/nws1001.htm

Basically I ran the following command

md c:\_special\cp.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

And then just pull the folder up in Explorer…

explorer c:\_special\cp.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

That will save a lot of time hunting around for stuff… I agree with Mark that I don’t see anything “hidden” there, but likely it is stuff that people weren’t aware of because you have to click on so much stuff to find things anymore if you are just browsing. The “search” mentality is growing and affecting design decisions… You know the mentality I am talking about… You can put stuff anywhere on your computer, it doesn’t matter where because you are just going to use Google Desktop to find it… As I heard today when discussing organization of data on computers… “I am utterly reliant on Google Desktop for it to be meaningful.”

Anyway, I can just imagine the discussions at MSFT…

Engineer: We should put this stuff in a central organized location.

Manager: Nah, throw it everywhere, it doesn’t matter.

Engineer: They won’t be able to find the stuff…

Manager: They will be using our search engine and can just type in what they are looking for and it will pop right up…

Engineer: What if they aren’t searching for something specific, but looking around.

Manager: No one would ever do that, do it the way I said, just throw things everywhere.

Unfortunately, this is the first Minasi newsletter I have seen in some time. I like looking at newsletters, especially techy based ones. But if I get an email and it requires me to chase after the info in a web site, I generally decline and delete the message. I am in email now, I want to stick there and get it done, if I go to a web browser who knows what will happen, I will probably get stuck on Google News or something. I recall way back when Mark used to send out actual newsletter emails, then he said he had to stop temporarily for some reason. Don’t recall what it was but he said don’t worry, I will go back to sending out newsletters again… Still waiting here… 🙂

Anyway it looks like this

Then if you are enumerating the items looking for something in particular, say color, you can still use the Windows Search stuff and type color in the search bar at the top and it will filter the list down for you like…

   joe

No new info here… Just revisiting my previous post about the recorder that lets you record what you are doing for documentation or debugging. I keep forgetting the command and so wanted to post here so I can find it easier without having to worry that the original poster’s post goes away…

So joe, when you can’t remember the command again… it is PSR.EXE

Someone asked me a question at work today about PowerShell… yes, I know, silly silly people but I was a bit curious as well so I opened up the PSompt (hmmm PSPrompt… Command PS… P Prompt… PS Prompt… ) err whatever… I opened the Windows application that gives me an interactive PowerShell instance and typed

help import-csv

That gave me what I needed to answer the question that was asked so I responded to the question and said don’t ask me PowerShell questions every again…

After that I noticed in the help where it said “RELATED LINKS” and it specified an online version. I thought that was quite cool, a link to the online assistance for a command right from the command line usage. That seemed very intelligent to me as it gave a location to go for quick help that could be more up to date or more fleshed out, etc. Then I thought, it would be really cool if you could ask for that help right from the command line… So without knowing if it would work or not I typed

help –online import-csv

and sure enough it popped an IE tab with the online help that was more fleshed out than the local usage.

I loved it. Great idea. I have filed that in the back of my head for future tools as well.

Anyway, I give Kudo’s where Kudo’s are due and definitely someone at MSFT who came up with that idea gets a Kudo. 🙂

   joe