Microsoft PowerShell – Surprised!

Having taking programming Decades ago as a possible career, but going in a different direction. Dabbled in many languages from Atari Basic, Apple Machine Language to LiveCode and many other odd short lived ones. I was putting so much effort not to use PowerShell, thinking it was just for scripting. Boy was I wrong. Today I compiled my first script.. Oh and by the way, that was on a Mac.

Think I’ll be using it more and more.

Thanks for the pleasant surprise Microsoft!

OH, and it is free!

Moving Backwards

Back in the early 90’s I programed in Microsoft QuickBasic, and after that I started using Visual Basic, then finally I’ve been using LiveCode.

Just for laughs I started building a machine able to run DOS 6.55 and Windows 3.1, brings back memories. After a couple of months assembling the needed parts I finally got the tiny HP T5000 running. It was like an old friend.

It took some time to reacquaint myself with the OLD and how I setup the computers back in the day. I was impressed, my code and batch files were commented and easy to follow. The things we did with serial communication and NO Networking. The newer programs had limited networking, but nothing we find on today systems.

There were full collections of QuickBasic libraries, with manuals, ranging from “windows” and dBase III, speech and even code to create background functions. Those were the days, one person could provide a whole company with software that wasn’t filled by off the shelf programs. All customized for their needs.

Lately I’ve been also revisiting PowerShell and the power of Active Directory, having adding both a Windows Server configured as a Domain Controller and a few Windows 10 machines as Clients. Trying to get both the old and new to communicate has been, frustrating.

Was thinking about using Jabber, or XMPP, to issue small commands to a server/controller/monitor. But as with all projects of this nature, it seems I busted my server by installer a newer version, that wasn’t supported by the hardware I have. Oh well, time to rethink and reproach what I am trying to do.

Creating a Win10 install Thumb Drive on Mac

Company I work for is in the process of upgrading all it Windows 7 netbooks to Windows 10. They supplied us with a limited number of thumb drives with installer. Nice setup, log in as Administration, press ‘Start’ and walk away. However with just under 500 netbooks to upgrade and 10 thumb drives, this process could take a few weeks.

As you can see by earlierĀ post, I snagged a few $4 thumb drives at Target, 16 GB.

According to the Win10 thumb drives they are 32 gb, but only using a little over 8 gb.

Enter Paragon Software’s “NTFS for Mac”. I was able to format my thumb drives as NT, then using an older version of Carbon Copy Cloner (5.3.7) and Snow Leopard. I was able to create a sparse image of thumb drive, then use CCC to image the thumb drive.

Took almost an hour to create each thumb drive on a laptop. But in the end it saved hours of work and allowed for more imaging of netbooks per hour.

So the process is, 1) Partition thumb drive using NTFS for Mac, 2) Erase/Format thumb drive again, as ExFat then 3) use CCC to copy the sparse image onto the thumb drive. Using a USB thumb drive on my MBP, cloning took almost 2 hours, deadly slow. So try to stick to USB 2 thumb drives.