jeffaBlog

http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/

Gotta love a freebie.

You can download the complete Powershell reference/tutorial as a PDF or read it as HTML online.

Here is the table of contents:

1. The PowerShell Console
2. Interactive PowerShell
3. Variables
4. Arrays and Hashtables
5. The PowerShell Pipeline
6. Using Objects
7. Conditions
8. Loops
9. Functions
10. Scripts
11. Finding and Avoiding Errors
12. Command Discovery and Scriptblocks
13. Text and Regular Expressions
14. XML
15. The File System
16. The Registry
17. Processes, Services, Event Logs
18. Windows Management Instrumentation
19. User Management
20. Your Own Cmdlets and Extensions

I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t offer an opinion, but it looks good at first glance.

What does the future of social media hold?

Well, let's look at the past and project forward.

For expediency, let's pretend that it all started with blogs.

Blogs

Blogs allow you to say pretty much everything and anything you like with very few constraints.

For the most part it is a one way street. You say what you want without interruption. Some blogs allow comments, but many shut that feature off, because the bulk of comments are spam of one sort or another.

Myspace

Next we see Myspace. Like a blog, but typically shorter posts with more interaction.

Facebook

OK, not really THAT much different, but somewhat shorter posts and more people involved in the conversation.

Twitter

Now we come to the current state of things. On Twitter you can only post 140 characters and there is a ton of interaction.

Future Technology 1

EVERYONE contributes in a series of 1 character posts. Kind of like a game. I post a letter, you post a letter, Bob posts a letter, eventually we get the word "Once". About three weeks in we have "Once upon a toilet seat, the queen of hats ate some purple." Not very compelling to us now, but our ultra attention starved selves of the future (say next Thursday) will eat it up like, well, a big bowl of purple.

Final Technology

Contributions come from everyone who ever lived as well as fictional characters and the odd carrot. Everyone contributes exactly one bit. All these bits eventually add up to something utterly incoherent, but that's OK, because, OH MY GOD ASHTON KUTCHER AND JOHN MAYER RESPONDED TO ME!!!

Today I’m installing the developer version of SQL Server 2008 on my development station at home and thought I’d share a couple of points about it:

1) Before it will work on Windows 7 you have to install the SP 1 for SQL Server 2008 (obviously you still install SQL Server first, then the SP).

2) Before you install SQL Server, make sure you have installed SP 1 for Visual Studio.

If I had known these two facts before I started installing, I would have saved a bunch of time. The other bone-headed trick I pulled (besides not actually reading anything before beginning, because, hey, I’ve installed SQL Server lots of times…), was that when I downloaded the SP for SQL Server from MSDN I didn’t look as carefully as I thought at the name… I grabbed the ia64 instead of x64. Doh!

Remember, forewarned is four-armed or something. You don’t want to be caught with only two arms in the 64 bit Win 7 world of tomorrowlandville.

What follows is my post to Slashot.org in response to a comment about the following news story:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html

I'll wait here while you go read it. Do-de-do-de-do. Ah, you're back.

The comment I responded to asked why the writer should feel a sense of rage that the government wanted to make themselves more open and accountable. Several people responded.

That slashdot page is here http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/09/1711238/Recoverygov-To-Get-18-Million-Redesign?art_pos=2

So with no further ado, here is my response:

Started to make a joke and decided not to. This isn't funny.

My guess is that on slashdot a really large percentage of the readers are capable of producing a website. A smaller percentage could make a good website and a really small percentage could make a website that will be every bit as good as the upcoming $18 million website from the govt 2.0.

Being good slashdotters, many of them would know of the concept of FOSS (Free Open Source Software).

So the existence of FOSS means that it is possible to achieve this website for the cost of 1) servers, 2) bandwidth, 3) electricity, 4) infrastructure (building, etc), and 5) people to make/run/maintain the site.

Let's say we just take about $1 million and buy a really nice building somewhere. That may not get you much in DC, but all we need is a connection to the internet, right? I seem to heard something in the news recently about real estate and how some people are having trouble selling theirs. Maybe for $1 million dollars we could pick up a really nice building in the mid-west somewhere?

That leaves us $17 million to work with.

If we take the Google approach of buying cheap PC grade hardware and making a big distributed system, we could build a pretty nice farm for another $1 million. Right? Now we are down to $16 million.

If we run more than $100,000 a year for combined bandwidth and electricity, I'd be kind of surprised, so we're good for ten years on $1 million. That leaves $15 million.

That leaves people. So we have $15 million dollars to hire people to make and run a website. Let's spread that over ten years as well. That gives us $1.5 million per year. We'll pay every single one of them $100,000 a year. That means we can have 15 people. Realistically we only need the bulk of those people during the initial redesign, but why quibble? It's only money, right?

So laying it out that way, wouldn't you agree that we should be seeing one heck of a great website? Innovative and interactive indeed!

OMG! Just RTFA! The $18 million tag is not for 10 years, but only 5 years. Wow.

As for your sense of rage, that's up to you. You could feel rage that the government is spending more money for this than is necessary. You could equally feel a sense of irony that they are spending a large sum of money on a site meant to show you how well they are managing your money and not spending it frivolously.

How you react to the story is really up to you.