Today’s Friday Fun is my version of a script originally posted a few years ago by The PowerShell Guy. I’ll list the code but you really need to run it to enjoy it. #requires -version 2.0 #This must be run from the PowerShell console. NOT in the ISE. #this is based on a script originally…
Category: Miscellaneous
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
I got this announcement the other day for a Halloween webinar and the title is just too cool not to share: “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: Protecting Both Your Brains and Your Data.” I hope it goes without saying that data protection is a big part of an IT Pro’s job so anything we can learn…
Quick and Dirty Excel from PowerShell
I continue to tinker with Office applications and Windows PowerShell. I was looking at an Excel issue related to opening a new workbook. To verify the problem wasn’t PowerShell related I offered a suggestion to try creating an Excel workbook in VBScript. In VBScript creating a blank workbook in Microsoft Excel can be accomplished with…
Thursday Treat – A PowerShell Word Find Game
Now for something completely different but hopefully a little fun. I’m a big fan of word games and puzzles. Tim Bolton has assembled a few PowerShell themed crosswords, which you can find on his blog. I’ve always like word finds so I put together a pretty simple one using 16 common PowerShell cmdlet names. You…
Friday Fun Convert Object to Hash Table
I’ve been working on a few PowerShell projects recently and one requirement I had was to turn an object into a hash table. I thought this was something that was already handled in PowerShell but I couldn’t find a cmdlet or an easy .NET technique. So I wrote my own function, ConvertTo-Hashtable. The function is…
Create a Master PowerShell Online Help Page
As I hope you know, PowerShell cmdlets can include links to online help. This is very handy because it is much easier to keep online help up to date. To see online help for a cmdlet use the -online parameter. get-help get-wmiobject -online I decided to take things to another level and create an HTML…
Friday Fun The Scripting Geek is Here
I am proud (and a wee bit nervous) to announce the arrival of ScriptingGeek.com, a site devoted to the lifestyle of your favorite scripting geek – you! My goal is to provide a one stop shop for anything scripting related. Currently www.ScriptingGeek.com will direct you to an online store that offers tshirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, coffee…
Friday Fun – New Thriller
I read a lot of thrillers by authors like James Rollins, Jeff Long, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs. Certainly not high-brow literature, but generally well written and often a lot of fun. Of course with any fiction genre, there are certain thematic paradigms that must be followed, almost as if by recipe. Thus was born…
Custom Prompts 3 Ways
Recently, a number of PowerShell MVPs were having a discussion about the transcript feature in Windows PowerShell. One comment that arose was a need to see how long tasks have run or otherwise provide some sort of date time information. One solution is to use a customized PowerShell prompt and provide the information yourself. Here…
Friday Fun: Color My World
The end of another work week and time for a little PowerShell fun. When I first started using PowerShell, I was fascinated by Write-Host and the ability to write colorized text to the console. Visions of ANSI art danced in my head, but I’ve moved on. Using colors with Write-Host is a great thing, and…
Friday Fun: Music of the Shell
We made it to the end of the week, and I don’t know about you but I have my head buried in PowerShell work. But you know what they say about all work and no fun…so I figured I’d take a break from serious PowerShell and do something a little fun. Although, I suppose you…
WBADMIN Demo
Earlier this year I wrote an article for REDMOND Magazine about the new backup features in Windows Server 2008 R2. I’m not going to re-hash the article here except to say it includes some sample scripts on using the WBADMIN command line tool. One of the scripts is an old-school batch file. The batch file…
PowerShell Weather Module
I first wrote a Windows PowerShell function several years ago to retrieve weather information via Yahoo’s weather service. I’ve been itching to rewrite it and finally found some time over the weekend. Turns out it’s a good thing I did because the method I had been using to query the Yahoo web service has been…
VMware Backup with PowerCLI and Veeam
My primary backup drive for my virtual machine backup toasted on me so I had to recreate all of my backup jobs. I’ve been using Veeam’s backup product for VMware and it couldn’t be easier to use. I’ve known that it included a set of PowerShell cmdlets but I had never really looked at them…
In the Beginning and at the End was the Command Line
I just finished reading a terrific essay (or short book) on the nature of operating systems and how we interact with them. The book is In the Beginning…was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. The book was written about 10 years ago so some of the material might seem a little dated. But for those…