I think I've begun to overuse it though... Today I ran into the problem of "how do you spell that name again?" while trying to write an email. The obvious things of "use the address book" and "remember it you idiot!" failed, and the outlook for successful addressing of the message was bleak. But then I remembered my trusty PSH! It was so simple!
get-adusers | where-object {$_.sn -match ".*jack.*"} | select-object givenName,distinguishedName
Gotta love PSH... (of course, it helped that I had the get-adusers function, which I wrote a while ago and have stashed in my profile).
Oh, and for those that are interested, the here's get-adusers (along with a few other AD functions that are very similar):
function global:get-adusers
{
param( [string] $domain = (get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(&(objectClass=user)(!(objectClass=computer)))')
}
function global:get-adcomputers
{
param( [string] $domain = $((get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain) )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(objectClass=computer)')
}
function global:get-adprinters
{
param( [string] $domain = $((get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain) )
return (get-adobject -domain $domain -filter '(objectClass=printQueue)')
}
function global:get-adobject
{
param(
[string] $domain = (get-wmiobject -namespace 'root\CIMV2' -class 'Win32_ComputerSystem').Domain,
[string] $filter = ''
)
$local:directory = new-object -TypeName 'System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher' -ArgumentList $domain
$directory.PageSize = 500
$directory.Filter = $filter
$matches = $directory.FindAll()
$local:d = new-object -TypeName 'System.Collections.ArrayList'
foreach($m in $matches)
{
$d.Add($m.GetDirectoryEntry()) | out-null
}
return $d.ToArray()
}
Well, it's finally "really" snowed here in West Lafayette. Yes, the snow actually stuck to the ground this time, unlike when it snowed back in the fall where the flakes melted before reaching the ground. And yes, the roads were slick last night when not everything had been salted, plowed, & melted. So naturally I used my excuse of having to mail stuff to go out and drive in it in my car. It's really not that bad; just accept that you don't have complete control and keep your head about you, and it's not that big of a problem. In fact, I think it's actually fun.
But I don't imagine that the people in this video think snow is that fun. But I did enjoy it.
(video seen at http://kindel.com/blogs/charlie/2007/01/16/3741.aspx)
It's ~1:40AM (local), and I'm sitting in the basement of the new CS building (LWSN B160) waiting for a battery to charge so that I can capture images of it moving from the webcam that's watching the room so I can have a backup for during the presentation's demo portion tomorrow. 'Cause I'm pretty sure that there is no way in hell that its going to actually WORK tomorrow when the room is crowded with people, I don't have adequite time to set up, and I don't have good sensor/robot positions.
I've gone through 3 9V batteries tonight, 1 robot battery, still have to overhaul half my slides, then theme them, and at some point it'd be nice to sleep & practice.
But right now I'm bored, tired, and fed up with working on PowerPointalism. So making a rambling, pointless blog post seemed like a decent waste of time (and look, I've wasted 5 minutes!).
I had been planning on writing up a big summary of my CS307 Software Engineering project. But after thinking about it for a bit, I'm not really sure what would be achieved by doing so. It would probably have just come off as complaining and whining, which is certainly not my intention. I loved the class, and thought it was incredibly valuable. In fact, I think it should be required of everyone who isn't going to grad school & planning on becoming a professor (and maybe even they should take it).
So, about the project. First, a bit of background: it was a client & two-tier server system, in this case for medical records. I was on Team A, the largest team (we ended up with 9 people). We divided into three sub-teams of 3 each: Client, Communications, Data. I volunteered to be the sub-team lead for Data. We also had a team leader, documentation manager, and development environment expert.
Now, as I see the project, it was a failure. We failed to complete the Regional Server (the second server tier) portion, and so we failed to meet the requirements. This failure was a result of the people involved in the project. As a team, I do not think that we were motivated to work on the project. And we never seemed to find that motivation. Consequently, we didn't work hard enough to try and get everything done. Furthermore, the problem was not one of which we were unaware. It was blatantly obvious that some members were not contributing their share. We were just unable to come up with a successful resolution to that problem.
The other big problem with the project was a lack of testing. The majority of the team was unfamiliar with developing using the platform and tools that we picked, and just didn't have any experience working on this type of problem. This let do a lot of bugs appearing, which testing could have uncovered earlier. But we didn't test early, and even at the end we did not test thoroughly. Hence the GUI crashing during our demonstration because of an invalid entry of a date, and hence the server responding with failures because the Event Log had filled up. We were using unit tests and regular builds, but having good process techniques is not enough if there are only 20 test cases (for a program that was in development for 10 weeks!), and those test cases don't test anything.
In the end, it didn't really matter. The project wasn't worth any of the grade; the paperwork, documentation, and presentation were the grade. So 5/9 people (including me) pulled off A's in the class without any problems. On the presentation day, we were awarded all the website awards (Best Organized, Best Aesthetics, Best Updated – Go SharePoint!) and the team awards (Best Conference Calls, Best Work Sharing – yes, it's a good idea to PAY ATTENTION TO PREVIOUS CALLS and address issues raised during the next calls). The Work Sharing award kind of left me scratching my head, because that was an area I felt we could have done better on. I guess we did a good job of dividing it up, and people did a good job of reporting about it – whether a task really got done or not. It also makes me wonder about who did what on the other teams…
Finally, I had some individual accomplishments. During the awards granting, my justification of our platform choices during the presentation was singled out and applauded for being, well, the only justification of platform choices from any group. On my team, I was voted the MVP (all other teams had pairs of people as their MVP's). And I got the A for the class (only the 3rd A for me in a CS class!).
So this site has been down for…a while. The hard drive in my old domain controller died, taking all security settings with it. Which, because of the restricted system policy that I got from the MS lockdown recommendations, meant I couldn't login or use the other servers in my old domain. At all.
Not to mention the fact that the database for ntldr.net was on that dead DC, which meant that ntldr.net was dead. In any case, I was stuck in a situation where I couldn't turn off the ISA box, because it wouldn't come back up without the DC. Oh, and I couldn't log into my 64-bit desktop either. And the Exchange server was unusable. Hmm…and now that I think about it, my old TC1000 probably can't do much either. But I use that so infrequently that I haven't even thought about it until now…
So, with that nasty situation set up, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work. On other things. Like the CS307: Software Engineering project that sucked up tons of time. And the CS490T Robot stuff. And the Technical Writing papers that kept coming up from nowhere, only to disappear and never be heard from again just as fast. And the usual drone of probability, counting, and graphs that make up Discrete Mathematics. Not to mention the interviews, CERIAS work that I finally had to get around to, and the dealing with SSCI no longer being SSCI but instead becoming part of Aptuit.
However, despite working on all that stuff, I was able to do a preliminary damage assessment and begin trying to repair things. I have a SharePoint backup of ntldr.net, and just need to figure out/find time to restore it somewhere and get the data out (I've already got a tool that I wrote a while ago that will do that data extraction for me, as long as I can get everything back in SQL Server). I also had my daily backups of Exchange intact. Unfortunately I can't figure out how the fuck to actually get data OUT of those backups, and apparently there are a whole bunch of rules for how you can do disaster recovery with Exchange, and you apparently only get one chance per forest to get it right, and I screwed it all up. Yes, I know this would have been a wonderful opportunity to get reacquainted with PSS. I just don't care enough, especially since I got email working a bit ago using Windows Live Domains.
I also got ISA back up and running (finally), which explains why the site is back up and visible to everyone again. Surprisingly, I remembered the firewall rules better than I remembered things like server & organization names, so it was really pretty painless.
Emil's new phone just ate my first ever moblog post.
:(
But the HP iPaq Mobile Messenger hw6945 ROCKS. At least on first impression. Definitely a cool device though...maybe a good birthday present ;)
First snow fall of the 2006-2007 winter has begun.
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About the author
Jeffrey Stults is a software developer currently in Portland, Oregon. He is contactable at:
stultsj@ntldr.net
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Disclaimer
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright
2012
Jeffrey Stults, Jr.
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