When touch-typing, I just blasted this into my browser address bar: ysos,cin And then pressed enter before my brain could engage the brakes on my fingers. It turns out that I had my right hand off by one column on my keyboard. It was a column to the left, and I resigned myself to a page of garbage results. (Edit: The first result is, of course, not garbage :) ) Where do you think I was trying to go?

If you’ve been looking for the sample scripts from the PowerShell Cookbook, you might have had trouble finding them on the book’s main landing page. It turns out that September and October are very busy publishing periods, so was some delay getting them live. Fortunately, a delay is just that… a delay :) O’Reilly recently published the PowerShell Cookbook sample scripts and code samples to the main page, so you can now just click on the ‘Examples’ link from the main landing page to download them.

One thing you sometimes run into when it comes to some management tasks is the concept of ‘Token Privileges’. Now these aren’t just privileges that Windows gives you to make you feel better - those are Token Compliments. Token Privileges are aspects of the things your user account can do, but you often don’t need that power enabled by default. For example, anybody can restart a computer, but windows doesn’t enable that privilege by default:

Last week the fine PowerScripting Podcast had me on the show. We had a great wide-reaching chat about usability in PowerShell, the Windows Product Cycle, system administration, automating yourself into a higher-paying job, and of course the recently released PowerShell Cookbook. They posted the interview today, so take a look! http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/episode-125-cooking-up-some-powershell-with-lee-holmes/

If you’ve been wondering why this blog has been flaky lately, perhaps this report explains a bit: DAILY UPTIME AND PERFORMANCE SUMMARY www.leeholmes.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- date uptime dns connect request ttfb ttlb 2010-09-07 58.88 0.097 0.120 0.120 0.240 0.287 2010-09-06 92.93 0.101 0.214 0.214 0.530 0.574 2010-09-05 74.04 0.153 0.292 0.292 0.471 0.508 2010-09-04 42.15 0.210 0.233 0.233 0.191 0.203 2010-09-03 41.53 0.173 0.197 0.197 0.148 0.173 2010-09-02 70.00 0.034 0.058 0.

For today only, O’Reilly is offering the electronic version of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook for only $9.99. This gives you unrestricted access to DRM-free PDF, MOBI (Kindle, etc) and ePub versions of the book. If you have an iDevice, the Stanza book reader (among several others) supports both the PDF and ePub file formats. Get it while it’s hot! Use code DDWPC http://oreil.ly/cFRco0

Update 1/22/2013: The much expanded third edition is now available. On Friday, we wrapped up the final details of the PowerShell Cookbook, V2. O’Reilly has already made the electronic edition available, which is a great resource for searching, copying, pasting, and working with the content in its native form. If you or your company subscribes to Safari, it should be available shortly. If you’re a fan of the printed version, it’s off to the printers now, and has a scheduled “in-stock” date of 8/24: the date when it’ll be in boxes in the shipping / receiving area of book stores.

Over the past few days, Astronomy resources have been making a big splash about a couple of coronal mass ejections (CME) primed to cause widespread visibility of the Aurora Borealis. Last night was when the first one hit, and its effects extended deeply into southern Canada and parts of the northern US. There may be another round tonight, so maybe this post can help you catch your first Aurora :)

One instrument that’s got great allure is the PanArt Hang – a metallic drum-like form with great complexity and resonance: They are difficult to obtain, and expensive should you want to try. Looking online, I found some WAV samples graciously provided by Andreas Bick at http://www.andreas-bick.de/hang-samples/. He also included the sampler settings to convert this to a virtual instrument for Apple Logic Pro’s ESX-24 sampler. If you have Propellerhead Reason, the sampler settings won’t work – although you can still use the raw WAV files and do your own mapping for the Reason NN-XT sampler.

An interesting question came up today about the Set-AuthenticodeSignature cmdlet. It actually supports more than just .ps1 files, but what files exactly? It turns out that this isn’t actually possible to know programmatically. Your best bet is to hard-code a list of things you know or can scrounge from the internet :) The ones I am aware of off-hand are: .CAB, PE formats (.EXE, .DLL, etc) , .CAT, .MSI, .