Work Musings

Windows 10 is nearly upon and one of the features I am looking forward to is PowerShell 5.  More specifically I am looking forward to the new PowerShellGet module.
This is effectively apt-get or yum for Windows and the implications for systems administrators are significant.  I just finished a quick test drive of the functionality in the Windows 10 Technical preview and wanted to share my findings.

Let’s start by finding the module.  We assume it has the word ‘get’ in it so we can do:

Get-Module *Get* –ListAvailable

We find a module called ‘PowerShellGet’.  Let’s see what commands it offers using Get-Command

Get-Command –Module PowerShellGet

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I am a big fan of the traditional Blackberry philosophy of building hardware and software that can get work done quickly in as few steps as possible.

With the release of OS10, Blackberry effectively had to build a new OS from scratch.  This is a ton of work and as a result, many of the refinements that were added to OS7 over the years are now missing. I have read many forum posts of people requesting feature x to be added back to the platform.  Blackberry has finite resources for development and testing and simply can’t implement everything all at once.  As a result, these posts become effectively nothing but noise.  It was clear to me that forums alone are an ineffective method for getting Blackberry the information it needs for what features to implement next.

What is required is a “single source of truth” or a curated list of all requested new features and the relative popularity of each.  I have decided to take ownership of this problem and attempt to solve this at a global scale by providing a common platform for everyone to voice their requests.

I have created a new voting poll that I intend to be a living list of new feature requests for the Blackberry 10 operating system.  I am formally offering myself as the official curator of these requests.  You can see the first iteration of the poll below that includes a number of feature requests that I personally have after using my Classic for several days.  My hope is that others will review my list and if they agree can vote on those items.  Alternatively they can add their own.  I will be monitoring the new submissions and if they don’t already exist or are not entirely unreasonable I will add them to the poll.

Below is the poll and the questions.  Please if possible leave feedback either here or on the official poll website (available at http://poll.fm/536y9) as the feedback is required to correlate the numbers in the polls to show the relative interest in a given feature and to give this poll the weight it needs to have any hope of affecting change.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please leave them in the comments as well.  I want to make this a tool that the entire Blackberry community can leverage and maybe, just maybe influence the behavior of Blackberry itself!

If you would like to see new feature requests added to this poll or changes to the existing entires, please add the entry to the “other” field in the poll and then leave comments on how you feel your idea should be implemented.

View the post for details on each feature request

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"640kb ought to be enough for anybody." – Bill Gates, 1981

That quote, while Bill Gates claims is apocryphal has nonetheless become cautionary shorthand for a situation where you arbitrarily limit your design under the inevitable false assumption that no one will ever need to exceed your design specifications.  I suspect that this quote is at least partially responsible for the decision to make the IPv6 address space as large as it is.  Back in the day, the designers of IPv4 almost certainly could have been overheard saying, since the number was so seemingly impossibly large anyway:

"4,294,967,296 IPs ought to be enough for anybody."

Fast forward to the 21st century and it turns out that they were spectacularly wrong and this resource is now almost completely exhausted.  "So much for forward thinking" their successors almost certainly thought.  So when IPv6 came along, I swear they just dared people to quote them.  I mean just look at what this theoretical quote would sound like!

"340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 ought to be enough for anybody."

Alright, so what is my point to all of this?  I recently ran into a situation at work that required that I better understand how Windows memory management works.  Through that research, I ended up working with a Sysinternals tool called RamMap.  This tool gives tremendous visibility into exactly how your RAM is carved up.  But of course to make use of the numbers, you need to understand them.  This lead me to a video on Channel9 for the series "Debug Tools".  In this video, they give a lecture on how to use RamMap.  If you’re at all interested in Windows troubleshooting, this is a fascinating video and I recommend it.  You can can that here.  This then led me to another Debug Tools video on VMmap which yet another wonderful tool from Sysinternals.  This one focuses on understanding virtual memory.  During the video, the presenter made an off handed comment about why VMmap reported that the total available virtual memory pool was "only" 8TB. He explained this was because the CPU designers (ie Intel and AMD) decided that even though they are building a "64 bit" CPU, that we aren’t going to actually assign all 64 bits to the pipeline to make designing the chips easier. 

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Last year I watched an absolutely fantastic two day training session on Powershell now available here:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/getting-started-with-powershell-3-0-jump-start

Among the many things I learned from that training, one quote from one of the trainers really stuck out with me. Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of Powershell said “Powershell is designed to solve business problems.”

The take away for me from that quote is that Powershell can be an incredible vehicle for building complex automation tools that can be shared with your entire company and beyond. But also, sometimes you have business problems that are much simpler and “one-off” in scope. It turns out Powershell shines brightly here too. I’d like to give you a quick example of how I used Powershell to quickly solve a personal “business” problem in what otherwise would have been very frustrating.

I am starting to revisit the idea of finally learning Korean – enough to be actually properly conversational. With that goal in mind, I found a Korean aptitude test on the Internet. It was 70 questions and increased in difficulty as you worked your way through the list. I thought this was a great place to sink my teeth into the language again. However, I decided that I would much prefer to have these questions inside a “Visual CertExam” or VCE file. This works with an application called the VCE Designer and VCE Manager to present electronic multiple choice exams. “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could somehow import this exam into a VCE file so I could quiz myself? The question is, how could I do that? Let’s start with a sample of what the source material looks like:

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Being in IT means I have to take a lot of screenshots for use in various kinds of documentation. With the release of Windows Vista/7, Microsoft included the “Snipping Tool” which proved to be an invaluable improvement over any free solution I used at the time.  That is to say, alt-print screen and mspaint. Snagit was always available but not only was it a commercial product but it grew to be a beast in terms of functionality and size. I just wanted a simple screenshot tool that would allow for simple annotations.

Once I started posting this blog more regularly, I quickly realized I needed a way to obfuscate certain work related screenshots before publication. Using the snipping tool, this proved to be a pain in the butt as there are no shape tools… or anything really. With that in mind I finally decided to sit down and “see what’s out there” for free screenshot solutions. As you might expect, there are many, many of them. Over the course of nearly 2 hours, I installed more than a dozen tools. Some promising, some crap but none of them did exactly what I wanted.

My objective was to find a tool that had that met the following requirements:

• Tiny in file size, memory footprint and UI
• Portable (that is to say no installation is necessary
• Supports keyboard shortcuts so I can press a single key combination to select a region of the screen
• Simple annotation tools (I would have been able with the ability to draw only boxes)

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