For the next couple of posts, we’ll be talking about an important facet of computer security – hashing, hash codes, and especially what makes “cryptographically strong” hashes special. If you’re a developer or scripter and things stop making sense – let me know. It’s my fault, not yours.

One common problem in software is the desire to determine if two things (i.e.: files, documents, passwords) are the same or different without having to compare those things verbatim. For example, after downloading a huge file – how can you find out if it was corrupted during the transfer? It turns out that asking the web server, “Are you sure?” for every byte doesn’t really solve the problem.

The PowerShell community lost a great member last night. Carrying out one of his final wishes, his family posted this on Twitter last night:

We are sad to tell you, Andy “the most passionate Powersheller” passed away on 12th Jan 2011, and wanted us to say goodbye to you all. Andy
http://twitter.com/AndyTearle/status/25414783826141184

Rest in peace, Andy.

I recently had a friend ask me how to set up a website. They wanted more than a blog – something to post their artwork on, put up a gallery, and perhaps sell some things.

There are a couple of options – it just depends on how ambitious you are!

At the most basic level, here are some free options:

• Create a Google Site at http://sites.google.com. They’ve got a bunch of templates – here’s a default one that I created just to see what it’s like: https://sites.google.com/site/stufforsale01234/.
• Create a blog at http://www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is normally for making blogs, but there are many templates that are meant more as galleries and showcases. Here’s an example: http://www.creativedepart.com/.

There’s also Etsy – something like http://www.etsy.com/people/paintedcottages?ref=ls_profile. Etsy isn’t free  - it’s about 7 cents per item per month that you have listed, plus 3% of an item when it sells. However, it does expose you to more potential customers, although I have no personal experience.

When is the last time you gave the gift of appreciation? I don’t mean “Thank You” as the social lubricant. I mean a thoughtful expression of exactly what somebody has done, and the impact it had on you.

One of my favourite work habits is expressing this simple act of ‘Thank You’. Not always to the person themselves – but to their manager.

Aside: At work, I send ‘Thank You’s to the person directly, and CC their manager. That way, their manager knows, and you get to thank them directly.

When touch-typing, I just blasted this into my browser address bar:

ysos,cin

And then pressed enter before my brain could engage the brakes on my fingers. It turns out that I had my right hand off by one column on my keyboard. It was a column to the left, and I resigned myself to a page of garbage results. (Edit: The first result is, of course, not garbage :) ) Where do you think I was trying to go? Bing knew, and I’m still caught somewhere between disbelief and amazement.

If you’ve been looking for the sample scripts from the PowerShell Cookbook, you might have had trouble finding them on the book’s main landing page. It turns out that September and October are very busy publishing periods, so was some delay getting them live.

Fortunately, a delay is just that… a delay :) O’Reilly recently published the PowerShell Cookbook sample scripts and code samples to the main page, so you can now just click on the ‘Examples’ link from the main landing page to download them.

One thing you sometimes run into when it comes to some management tasks is the concept of ‘Token Privileges’. Now these aren’t just privileges that Windows gives you to make you feel better - those are Token Compliments. Token Privileges are aspects of the things your user account can do, but you often don’t need that power enabled by default. For example, anybody can restart a computer, but windows doesn’t enable that privilege by default:

Last week the fine PowerScripting Podcast had me on the show. We had a great wide-reaching chat about usability in PowerShell, the Windows Product Cycle, system administration, automating yourself into a higher-paying job, and of course the recently released PowerShell Cookbook.

They posted the interview today, so take a look! http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/episode-125-cooking-up-some-powershell-with-lee-holmes/

If you’ve been wondering why this blog has been flaky lately, perhaps this report explains a bit:

DAILY UPTIME AND PERFORMANCE SUMMARY

www.leeholmes.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------  
date          uptime       dns   connect   request      ttfb      ttlb

2010-09-07     58.88     0.097     0.120     0.120     0.240     0.287
2010-09-06     92.93     0.101     0.214     0.214     0.530     0.574
2010-09-05     74.04     0.153     0.292     0.292     0.471     0.508
2010-09-04     42.15     0.210     0.233     0.233     0.191     0.203
2010-09-03     41.53     0.173     0.197     0.197     0.148     0.173
2010-09-02     70.00     0.034     0.058     0.058     0.150     0.171
2010-09-01     67.27     0.084     0.108     0.108     0.135     0.172
2010-08-31     70.87     0.051     0.073     0.073     0.184     0.221
2010-08-30     52.00     0.027     0.050     0.050     0.070     0.088

----------------------------------------------------------------------
minimum        41.53     0.027     0.050     0.050     0.070     0.088
maximum        92.93     0.210     0.292     0.292     0.530     0.574
average        63.30     0.103     0.149     0.149     0.236     0.266
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I’ve hosted my domain for the last five years with a host called WebHost4Life. They used to provide great service, uptime, and at a reasonable cost. I’ve been experiencing issues in the last few months after a “platform migration”, and initially gave them a pass since they built up 5+ years of Hosting Cred with me.

For today only, O’Reilly is offering the electronic version of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook for only $9.99. This gives you unrestricted access to DRM-free PDF, MOBI (Kindle, etc) and ePub versions of the book.

If you have an iDevice, the Stanza book reader (among several others) supports both the PDF and ePub file formats.

Get it while it’s hot!

Use code DDWPC http://oreil.ly/cFRco0