Lee Holmes

In an earlier post, I wrote a brief overview of Monad’s three main security features:

• Not allowing users to double-click on Monad scripts by default
• Requiring that all scripts be signed by a trusted publisher
• Requiring that users explicitly invoke scripts in the current directory

The discussion was helpful, but a little abstract.  How do the security features of Monad compare to those of other shells?    How …

Well, Scott and Omar have been busy again, and have just released DasBlog 1.8. It’s added a few helpful new features, and plenty of themes. The upgrade went painlessly as far as I can tell – be sure to let me know if you see any issues!

I’ve set “BlogXP” as my theme – it sure is beautiful. My pet peeve of the old “Discreet Blog Blue” was that the sidebar would float all …

Just as a reminder, the second Monad technet webcast is happening right now (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277852&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.

I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here.

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies …

If you’ve read Adam’s post ("Preparing for Slashdot",) you probably read how we worked to inform the Slashdot crowd via early entries in the discussion. Luckily, they were moderated up fairly quickly, and people were able to continue commenting with quite a bit more basis in fact than the original article provided.

Often, this is called “Astroturfing,” alluding to “fake grass” in a …

F-Secure has reported on some recent work by Second Part To Hell on a Monad scripting virus ("First Vista Virus Found"). It’s a misleading title, as it’s an issue that affects any vehicle for any executable code on any operating system. There’s an excellent treatment of shell script viruses on Virus Bulletin that covers this issue, but predates it by 2 years: Unix Shell Scripting Malware.

The fact …

Just as a reminder, the first Monad technet webcast is happening today (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277850&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US.

The next one is next week, I’ll post a reminder then, as well.

I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here.

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script …

I recently stumbled upon this blog entry that expanded on a piece I wrote a few days ago: Command Line Shortcut for Repetitive Operations. (Hankatsu?)’s entry is in Japanese, so I don’t know what it says. In fact, for all I know, he or she could be making fun of me. In any case, the code included with the blog entry shows a quck way to download sequentially numbered files from the internet – such as …

Josh Ledgard recently wrote an excellent post: Two Ideas to Cut off Duplicate Questions in Online Forums. It deals with a problem that clogs almost every technical community: some users treat the group as their personal support oracle. This happens in online forums, mailing lists, IRC, blogs, and more. Heck, I’d say that 70% of the questions posted to our internal Microsoft mailing lists could have been solved …

For those of you that haven’t yet downloaded Monad through BetaPlace, you now have another option – Beta1 of the WinFX SDK!  This is not an NDA release, unlike BetaPlace.  Here’s a direct link to the download page.

“The WinFX SDK contains documentation, samples and tools designed to help you develop managed applications and libraries using WinFX, which is the set of next-generation managed APIs …

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day.  Wikipedia summarizes it as:

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day or SAAD (as in Happy SAAD!), falls on the last Friday in July. It exists solely to show appreciation to sysadmins and people with other similar occupations.
[…]
Typical observances of this holiday are to present gifts to your Sysadmin. These gifts include chocolate, beer, …