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Why Isn’t Everyone a Boundless Optimist?

My uncle got my my wife and I tickets to see The Scottsboro Boys in the West-End for Christmas. It was awesome; funny and affecting with a late, optimistic coda. That said generally the entire story was pretty grim (racial oppression and a brutal miscarriage of justice.  But with catchy tunes!) which is even worse if you read the actual history of what happened.

But I got to thinking about how much things have improved.  I’m an optimist and a believer in the steady march of progress so I got to wondering; why would anyone not be? How could someone want social/scientific/cultural progress to slow down, stop (or in the case of reactionaries) reverse?

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PowerShell : Recording Process Run Time (Or, How Long Have I Played That Game For?)

I did a post about all the games I played in 2014.  The only source of data I had was the total play-time from Steam, but I really wanted a way of getting more detailed information (like when I played them and how long for).

I thought about it and I what I wanted was script that would record the time processes that were running on my system and write them to a file.  The script would stay running and update the file at periodic intervals to record how long the processes  had been running for.

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Computer Gaming Glossary

My kids are getting into computer gaming and they often ask me what certain gaming-related words mean.  I never really think about how byzantine some of the words are until someone asks so I thought I’d note them down as best I kind.  I’ve tried to keep the list as generic as possible (if I included all the MMO slang it’d probably be several dozen more pages).

So here’s the list, and my best attempt to make sense of them;

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Tales from IT : The Great Snipe Hunt for DNS

One of the first places I worked was a software development house who’d built themselves up from a small group of developers into a pretty big (2-3 thousand) outfit.  Originally they had two IT departments;  one (where I worked) focused on the developers and one focused on everyone else.  When the company reached a decent size it was decided to merge the two as part of both unifying IT work and stopping all the squabbling between the two departments.

One of the first tasks was to bring all the company servers into a proper server room.  But first, we had to find the company’s servers…

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Dumb Ways to Die : Elite Dangerous Edition

Elite-Dangerous-Logo

I’m really enjoying Elite Dangerous, but sometimes I think I’ve got a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome as sometimes playing the game seems like being in a long-term relationship with a sociopath.

One of the best/worst things about the game is that failure has consequences.  If you lose your ship, you lose it and everything in it – there’s no reload or roll-back.  If you’re careful you always have enough money to cover an insurance claim; that allows you to rebuy your ship and equipment at a fraction of the cost but you’ll still lose anything you’re carrying or have accumulated as data since leaving port.

But as long as you’re cautious you shouldn’t die too often, right?

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PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders) Part 1

There are plenty of commercially available systems for synchronizing the contents of two folders (I’ve used Allway Sync a bit and it works well).  But what if you just want to quickly sync a folder (and sub-folders) to another location using PowerShell?

Ideally I’d want it to take a source folder and synchronize it to a target folder with any missing content being recreated.  If the target folder is already populated, I’d want to update any newer versions of the files and remove anything that has been deleted from the source.

The script (and a breakdown on how it works) follows after the line.

Update : I’ve revisited this script a few times with new additions and modifications.The latest full version of the script is here.  That post also includes links covering the other revisions to the script.

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PowerShell: Synchronizing a Folder (and Sub-Folders)

This is the latest version of my PowerShell folder synchronisation script.

I’ve revisited this script a few times with new additions and modifications.  If you want explanations about how the script was developed over time or how parts of the script work, have a look at the following posts;

Part 1 covers the basic script to sync two folders.

Part 2 adds the ability to specify exceptions that the sync process will skip.

In part 3 I added an XML configuration file so more complicated processes can be run.

I customised and validated parameter input (parameter sets) and added some proper error checking in part 4.

The script was updated to deal with non-standard paths and to output objects reporting on the changes it made in part 5.

In part 6 I add more use of literal paths (to prevent path errors) and generate statistics.

I add a filter option, turn strict-mode on and optimise the statistics generation in part 7 (plus fix a bug!).

In part 8 I’ve added some validity checks on the XML configuration file.

WhatIf functionality was added in Part 9 plus some corrections to make sure Filter and Exceptions worked correctly.

In Part 10 I added text file logging.

In Part 11 I fixed an odd bug where $Nulls were being added to arrays and added a -PassThru switch.

Part 12 covers some fixes for behaviour and adding the ability to support  multiple target folders (so the source folders can be synced to multiple locations).

Part 13 added more control over what gets logged and how, added a timestamp to the log filename, creating a new log on each run, code cleanup and some bug- fixes.

A zipped version of the script is here;

Sync-FolderDownload
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