I’ve been a Twitter user for the better part of fifteen years, now, and it’s a platform I’ve enjoyed using. With Elon Musks takeover of the site, and the sackings that immediately followed it, I have found continuing to use it much less of an attractive proposition, and I have made the decision not to post until I see what direction the site takes.
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Powershell: A script to find all members of several groups refined
One of the scripts that I use most often is the one I wrote about back in September of 2019. Usually, I only run it for up to ten or so groups, so it’s not a big problem to simply swap out the group name, rince and repeat. Recently, however, I needed to run it for more than five hundred groups. The sheer amount of data makes that a very different proposition.
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Prioritizing value
It is one of my strongly held beliefs that what we do must provide some customer value. If it doesn’t, we probably shouldn’t be doing it. I don’t mean that we necessarily do something we can charge for (the goodwill we get by NOT charging for it can be benefit enough to do it), but rather that we inspect what we do to identify whether or not the customer benefits from it. Here are some examples:
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Powershell: Add user to multiple groups
A while back, I had a user that had to be added to a large number (150+) of active directory groups. Rather than doing so manually, I spent a little time looking up how to automate it, and created a script to help me do it. Here’s how I constructed it:
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Review: YubiKey 5 NFC
October is the national cyber security awareness month, where a lot of people emphasise the importance of InfoSec to daily operations. Here’s my small contribution; a review of my Yubico YubiKey 5 NFC U2F token. It’s a mouthful, to be sure, but let’s get into it:
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Payment and product
I have previously written about the adage “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product”, and struggled with how it applies to myself and this blog. To be sure, there are – at the very least – exceptions to this rule, that go both ways.
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Outlook: Problems opening and organizing calendars
On a relatively regular basis, I find my days packed with appointments, reminders, and meetings. At other times, I need to organize a meeting, or talk to a colleague, and need to check their availability. For these reasons, and others, I’m an active user of digital calendars. Anything that happens during the work day is listed in some way or another in my work calendar (even if simply showing my availability or lack thereof).
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Version control and me
In 2000, I spent a year abroad. At the time, desktop computers were the norm, and laptops were prohibitively expensive. USB flash drives had literally JUST hit the market, and the cloud was barely something industry insiders talked about. I produced huge amounts of text on computers, however, and the way I transferred it was using 3.5″ 1.44 MB floppy drives. Microsoft hadn’t even started talking about version control features in the Office suite yet, but I had to keep track of what file to hand in to my tutor. In lieu of actual version control came increasingly impossible to deal with naming conventions such as this:
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The ticket cost funnel
A common misconception among end users is that we (i.e. the IT department) charge them per ticket. While I don’t know where that misconception comes from, let me say right out that my experience of more than twenty years in the industry is that this simply is not true.
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Powerpoint: Remove presentation notes
As part of my job, my role as head of my union local, and as a board member in my shooting sports club, I give presentations on a relatively regular basis. Whenever I do so, I usually share my slides so that people can refer back to them later on. I do not, however, share my presentation notes. I use the presentation notes feature in Powerpoint to write, edit, and keep track of the script I am presenting.
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