TechProsaic

I write about great software, Internet technology, cool gadgets, and The Next Big Thing.

May 8th, 2008

Usability–what’s that?

Earlier today I clicked on a link to go to some intranet app.  I forgot about it and came back later.  I filled in my user ID and password then clicked login.  Here’s the message I received:

HTTP Status 408 - The time allowed for the login process has been exceeded. If you wish to continue you must either click back twice and re-click the link you requested or close and re-open your browser

I’m sorry, but that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a couple of weeks.  Please, people!  If you have to instruct your users to “click back twice” or “close and re-open your browser”, then you are doing it wrong!  Computers are supposed to work for us, not the other way around.

Jeez!

April 25th, 2008

Live Mesh is pretty sweet!

Windows

image If you’ve been under a rock, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s latest foray into the cloud computing space.  So far it’s just a “tech preview” and feature-wise, it’s fairly limited.  Today, it’s basically FolderShare with a few extra features.

But if you read up on the Live Mesh blog, there is a ton of cool stuff in store.  It’s very visionary–hopefully that stuff lands here on Earth with us.  :)

If you need an invite, leave a comment on the blog.  Also, if you are interested in joining a little proof-of-concept file sharing group we have going right now for sharing PowerShell scripts, let me know.

P.S. Sorry I’m so light on blogging lately–Twitter has sorta caught my fancy lately and I’ve been writing more there.

April 4th, 2008

VMware + PowerGUI = Great Combo

Powershell

Check out this blog post by Carter @ VMware.  Great stuff!

The PowerGUI VMware PowerPack has lots of great features, including the ability to manage your ESX Hosts and VMs, as well as doing bulk operations. In my opinion, PowerGUI’s best feature is that as you interact with PowerGUI, it generates PowerShell code as you go. You can take this code and re-run it later or you can parameterize it and turn it into a script. This is especially great if you’re not a hard-core scripter, or if you aren’t very familiar with PowerShell.

image

Hmmph, can’t figure out how to make it connect to the server.  I tried making a script node with this snippet: Get-ViServer (read-host “Server Name”).  No luck.  Will mess more with it later.

April 1st, 2008

PowerShell Version 2 Released!

Powershell

According to the PowerShell Team Blog, Jeffrey Snover has announced the surprise release of PowerShell Version 2.  New features include:

  • Remoting - this is the ability to execute powershell statements on remote computers
  • Script Cmdlets - you can now make real cmdlets using only powershell script–no C# required!
  • Tons of new cmdlets for controlling popular web-services such as:
  • Out-Flickr
  • Get-OrkutProfile
  • Post-DelIcioUsBookmark
  • Find-Yahoo
  • Out-Digg
  • They finally fixed the WMI authentication bugs!
  • Now I find the most intriguing aspect of the new cmdlets is that it shows a strange confluence of Microsoft and Yahoo technologies.  Did MSFT play their hand too early?  I wonder if this means more than it appears…Watch the two stock prices today.

    Go download it now!  Here’s a screencast I did of the new stuff in action.

    March 15th, 2008

    VMware PowerShell Toolkit Open Beta

    Powershell

    At long last, VMware has released their PowerShell toolkit to the public.  You can grab it at this convenient URL (love it when companies do that):

    http://vmware.com/go/powershell

    There is already an official forum online for the toolkit which those in the closed beta were already participating.  That means there’s already some content in there for new users.  It’s a great place to ask questions. 

    The toolkit is still beta, and the documentation is unfinished.  But what’s in there now is really cool and very stable.  I believe it is covered by VMware Support already so you can actually open a support case if you run into trouble, if you have a support contract.  Below is a list of the scope of the cmdlets included.  Instead of waste 102 lines of text I’ve grouped them by verb and noun for clarity.

       1: 76# Get-Command -PSSnapin v* | group verb | ft count,name -auto
       2:  
       3: Count Name
       4: —– —-
       5:     1 Add
       6:     1 Dismount
       7:     2 Find
       8:    28 Get
       9:     1 Load
      10:     1 Mount
      11:     7 Move
      12:    16 New
      13:    17 Remove
      14:     1 Restart
      15:     1 Save
      16:    18 Set
      17:     1 Shutdown
      18:     1 Start
      19:     2 Stop
      20:     2 Suspend
      21:     1 Update
      22:     1 Wait
      23:  
      24: 77# Get-Command -PSSnapin v* | group noun | ft count,name -auto
      25:  
      26: Count Name
      27: —– —-
      28:     5 VMHost
      29:     3 Tools
      30:     1 EntityView
      31:     1 EntityViews
      32:     4 CDDrive
      33:     5 Cluster
      34:     5 Datacenter
      35:     4 Datastore
      36:     1 Event
      37:     4 FloppyDrive
      38:     5 Folder
      39:     3 HardDisk
      40:     3 Inventory
      41:     1 Log
      42:     1 LogType
      43:     4 NetworkAdapter
      44:     4 OSCustomizationSpec
      45:     5 ResourcePool
      46:     4 Snapshot
      47:     1 Stat
      48:     3 Task
      49:     4 Template
      50:     1 View
      51:     1 Views
      52:     4 VirtualSwitch
      53:     1 VIServer
      54:     1 VIToolkitVersion
      55:     8 VM
      56:     4 VMGuest
      57:     2 VMHostNetwork
      58:     1 VMHostStorage
      59:     2 Session
      60:     3 CustomField
      61:     3 VMHostNetworkAdapter

    Supposedly there was going to be a PSDrive provider as well but I don’t see it anywhere.  Maybe it’ll turn up.  :)

    March 14th, 2008

    So, I’m Writing A Book

    Powershell

    No, seriously!  I’ve never written anything longer than a lengthy blog post or maybe a two-page email.  Now’s my chance to shatter that record.  Anybody who knows me has heard me say before that I have zero creativity.  Luckily, that’s not required when writing a technical manual.  :D  We’ll see how it goes. 

    Anyway, the book is to be published by Sapien Press.  I’m not saying when the book will be ready at this point because I have no clue how these things work.  I guess it is safe to say, “this year”.  Hopefully, well inside of that time period.  :)

    If you read my blog, you probably know my current passions are PowerShell and VMware.  Well, it should come as no surprise that the working book title is: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell: TFM.  I’m really excited about the project and I hope it turns out well.  And if nothing else it’ll be good fuel for a fire.  Win-win for everyone!

    Wish me luck, and may God grant my wife patience!

    March 7th, 2008

    Start++, Almost a Reason to Run Vista

    Windows

    Very cool-looking tool!  From the site:

    What is Start++?

    Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing “w Windows Vista” will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia!

    And now, some screenshots:

    image

    image

    (thanks to Trent, a Lifehacker commenter)

    March 3rd, 2008

    Server 2008 & PowerShell discussion, continued

    Powershell Windows

    My long reply to a long reply was getting a bit…long, so I thought I’d move it here. Much easier to do the editing in Live Writer anyhow. :)

    You can find the original article and several comments from myself and the author at this blog post: Why PowerShell, Servermanagercmd and co. don’t really rock on the command prompt. I recommend you read the article, it’s a nicely-worded opinion piece. The article deals with the author’s frustrations with Server 2008 command-line utilities (which I agree with) but he then extends those opinions on to PowerShell. I’m making the point that PowerShell addresses most if not all of his frustrations. He also goes into reasons why he thinks the GUI is generally superior for any task, which I also disagree with. (Lots of dangling prepositions today.)

    My reply continues below:

    Well, the PowerShell rebuttal to ‘difficulty in memorizing commands’ is handled by a cmdlet called “get-command”, and the enforced (by Microsoft’s Common Engineering Criteria internally) consistent naming convention for cmdlets and other related interfaces such as PS Providers. For example, say you want to do something with a mailbox in exchange. You already know the noun you are dealing with–it’s a mailbox. So you type “get-command *mailbox” or “get-command -noun mailbox” and you’ll get several matches. To go a step higher, say you know you want to do something with VMware but you forgot how to connect to the auth server and you have no idea if the verb (the part before the dash) is even called ‘connect’. In a case like that you would use “get-command -pssnapin v*”. That will return all cmdlets which are contained within any snapin which starts with the letter V.

    On top of all that, there’s some great IDEs and enhanced editors and graphical consoles whicih make all of this even easier. You can tet real visual studio-like Intellisense on filenames, cmdlets, parameters, .NET types, WMI classes…I certainly can’t memorize every WMI class, but I can type “get-wmiobject win32_net” and hit TAB and voila, there’s a dozen answers popped up in a listbox.

    In answer to your point that “The number of software vendors offering tools for administrators has been growing dramatically in the last years.”: I would say YES–and PowerShell is/will be largely seen as responsible for accelerating that trend. VMware, Citrix, IBM and many more vendors are starting to provide PowerShell hooks.

    And lastly, of course GUIs are more prone to mistake! How many times have people accidentally clicked on shutdown when they meant logoff (before the start menu was rearranged in what…2003)? I mean…seriously, I could go on and on. GUI accidents could be blamed for spyware installs, too.

    If I’m about to make a change in a production environment which may have adverse affects, best practice wisdom would say (yeah, I know that’s like saying “they say” but hear me out) you should make a change plan and a backout plan. You are already doing things to a high level of detail, you might as well script the whole thing. This allows you to not only automate the change, but to validate the change, and if necessary, reverse it. This applies doubly so if you are not the person to make the change. Maybe you are the lead admin delegating a task off to a junior admin or an offshore resource. you tell them:

    Run this script, wake me if stuff starts blowing up!

    February 21st, 2008

    Call for Script Ideas: VMware PowerShell Toolkit

    Powershell

    Calling all ESX admins!  I am looking for novel ideas for scripts to write for the upcoming VMware Toolkit for Windows PowerShell.  Yes–I am offering to do the writing.  I am doing research for a project (details of which to be announced in the coming weeks), and I could use some really great ideas of missing functionality or fixes to problems you have seen while working with VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.  Pointers to something cool you have seen done with the VMware Perl Toolkit are good too.  It’ll be amusing to see how much simpler those will be in PowerShell.  :D

    So please share anything you can come up with. You can leave them in the comments or contact me directly.  Thanks!

    February 20th, 2008

    Windows 2008 Server launch event in Atlanta

    Powershell Windows

    If you are going, let me know via the event I just created in Facebook.  Details are in the link.

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