Root Access

5:01 PM

hmm, yes, I thought about index for a split second and forgot, I will check this out, thanks.

blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/06/26/… yikes

ugh I hate the "Hey Scripting Guy" articles - he always has to write a goddamn novel with a ton of unneeded narrative instead of just telling you how to use it

actually that one isn't too terrible

but I've seen some pretty ridiculous stuff in that blog column in the past

Brady Trainor

Powershell, why you no "locate"

Ben Richards

@allquixotic I don't know of any easy way to interface into Windows' index database. I remember questions going around about that but never any actual solutions.

It seems like an obvious thing that should be there though.

Psycogeek

@allquixotic gotta sell it first, that way all the BS you have to go through to implement it looks like fun.

Brady Trainor

tfin

oops, pentadactyl getting the better of me

allquixotic

5:08 PM

@BenRichards would be nice if someone wrote a wrapper around the nasty complexity in .NET that could easily be called as an assembly from powershell

Ben Richards

@allquixotic Indeed.

allquixotic

just need basic substring searches and stuff like that - not all the flexibility of Windows Search

it's an example of a system that was designed to be too flexible, and now it's hard for people to use

it would be fine if it were that flexible under the hood but had a convenient simplified wrapper layer that could also be used

Ben Richards

Yeah it's one of those oddities of programming. Make things easy to use by being flexible, but when they get too flexible it's difficult all over again.

allquixotic

like Extended MAPI vs. Simple MAPI vs Outlook Automation

Brady Trainor

i read that as "not (unix philosophy)"

Ben Richards

5:10 PM

The way I tend to try and guard against it in my own mind is if I start to see myself implementing what amounts to another programming language on top of a programming language, I'm going too far. :P

allquixotic

lol

Ben Richards

The difficulty there, though, is it's just too fun, so you kinda want to :P

allquixotic

we have this "Automation Framework" at work, which started out as a way to hide the complexity of web application automated regression testing from the tester, who is not expected to know any programming languages and just has to be superficially experienced with HTML

Ben Richards

Weird, Windows or IE locked the picture file that I had uploaded to chat here, so I had to fully close IE before being able to delete it.

allquixotic

it's a bunch of keywords that you can select from a dropdown list in Excel, with "parameter" columns for up to 4 parameters, to customize the behavior of the keyword and supply it with values

these keywords under the hood are Ruby functions that accept 5 parameters

over time they added more keywords to support stuff other than web apps, and now they also support IF statements and loops in the (Excel) keyword "test design documents"

now it's basically a very thin wrapper over Ruby, since your test design documents can contain if/then, loops, calling other tests, JS, XPath, CSS selectors...

one wonders why we don't just write our tests in Ruby and resign ourselves to the fact that test automation engineers need to know programming

Ben Richards

5:14 PM

heh

yeah, that's how it happens.

allquixotic

thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Enterprise_Rules_Engine

Brady Trainor

is that really the standard parantheses placement coding style?

Ben Richards

Heh, I'm not as familiar with .NET and not familiar with MSAccess so it kinda goes over my head, but I get the sentiment.

Well, each company will have their own coding guidelines.

There's no universal standard. All that matters is that everyone working on the same codebase does the same thing.

Though there are general "standard forms" that are community acceptable.

allquixotic

well in some places the company is so large that they have "silos" and each "silo" does their own thing differently than the rest

(hint hint, that's what it's like here)

djsmiley2k

lol yes

Ben Richards

5:17 PM

I know about that. :P

djsmiley2k

i write php as that's what our tools are written in

Ben Richards

I'm sorry.

djsmiley2k

but other groups have all sorts here, perl, python, things beinging with p

haha

I'm enjoying writing stuff and seeign it actually WORK. That's never happened before :P

allquixotic

puby? :P

Ben Richards

PHP is a bastardized mess. A Frankenstein monster that continues to live against its will.

djsmiley2k

5:18 PM

So is flash

and look how well we got rid of that

allquixotic

unfortunately when you have silos doing their own thing, you end up with something like what I saw at NASA when touring one of their datacenters

djsmiley2k

now stop fighting, and carry on

/me doesn't care how 'bad' php is

Ben Richards

:)

allquixotic

they had, within a few feet of one another: Sun servers, HP-UX servers, Linux servers, Wintel servers, even Apple OS X Servers

djsmiley2k

haha

allquixotic

5:19 PM

all, somehow, communicating and interacting in horrific ways

Ben Richards

It's ok. I don't do web development except if I want to in my own time (which is mostly never, these days)

djsmiley2k

we have a OSX server appently

for time machine backups.

allquixotic

and I bet somewhere in a closet is an IBM Mainframe underlying all that

djsmiley2k

and yes, linux and windows machines too

Windows for AD and stuff, Linux for actual working

Windows for reports that are all shiny and stuff...

allquixotic

nobody seems to understand how to set up LDAP properly on Linux, unfortunately, which is why everyone prefers Windows AD

djsmiley2k

5:22 PM

I tried once

it made me want to cry.

Ben Richards

And the VAX servers just sit in their own office, never having been rebooted for 30 years.

djsmiley2k

lol

Ben Richards

Hah, I tried setting up LDAP on Linux. I actually succeeded, too. But it was a pain in the butt.

djsmiley2k

I'm unsure if I succeeded

I seemed to be able to authenicate myself against it, but that was so painful I stopped.

Ben Richards

Actually, it was to get Linux to use LDAP authentication against a Win2k Server box on our AD.

That I succeeded with. CentOS 6 changed up the way they did it compared with CentOS 5. That's what I was trying to overcome.

I think it was Windows Server 2003.

Scrappy startups and their scrappy networking setups.

djsmiley2k

5:27 PM

o yeah that's when i looked at it

because LDAP changed or soemthing

Ben Richards

That was around the same time I switched us over from VNC or NX to xrdp.

djsmiley2k

I could build a server out the 'old' way

Brady Trainor

/m dreams of setting up a tiny server serving multiple address books for personal use, artificial grouping.

djsmiley2k

but the config files on the new way hurt my mind.

Ben Richards

Everyone was all excited to be able to just use Windows Remote Desktop to log into Linux machines. :)

I suggested it to IT here. They said it was neat and would evaluate it.

Brady Trainor

5:29 PM

someone on #emacs complained about rectangles in rdp

allquixotic

my least favorite configuration morass is the Postfix mail server

Brady Trainor

maybe contrasting with X

allquixotic

Archipel is pretty bad, too

and OpenStack is just too much

Brady Trainor

wow, "Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched"

djsmiley2k

o_O

Ben Richards

5:32 PM

rectangles in RDP?

allquixotic

c'mon Cavil, I'm 99% sure I restarted you when I messed with containers earlier

Ben Richards

I don't understand what you mean by rectangles in RDP. Like, it's rendering all rectangles?

Brady Trainor

@BenRichards, maybe something about redrawing rectangles, as opposed to locally running through X. I didn't really understand the details of their meaning.

Doesn't X client do all the drawing locally?

Ben Richards

@BradyTrainor Yeah, I still don't follow what they'd be complaining about.

Yes.

So all the font resources and such also have to be locally stored on the client.

Brady Trainor

I tried xrdp once, it didn't look too good.

Ben Richards

5:35 PM

the client running the server... which connects to the remote server...

X is so convoluted lol

allquixotic

@BenRichards actually that depends

Ben Richards

xrdp worked perfectly for me. :)

allquixotic

there is some stuff that X server can do on its own

Ben Richards

X can do a lot. It's a nice system. It's just very very chatty.

allquixotic

modern stacks don't do a lot on the server side though

Ben Richards

5:35 PM

Not really too great for GUIs.

Bob

@BradyTrainor @BenRichards Don't hack findstr in there.

Ben Richards

NX does a lot of clever stuff to shortcut X's chattiness.

allquixotic

GTK says "draw these pixels" and pushes pixels to the X server as a Pixmap

Brady Trainor

@Bob, use a powershell function instead? I think I just grabbed the first thing I got to work.

Bob

Use the -Include param, or the -Filter param, or pass it through a Where-Object (shorthand is ?{})

allquixotic

5:37 PM

old versions of Mosaic, and other such old widget toolkits might actually request the X server to draw some primitives, like buttons, arcs, etc

Bob

gci -Include "*blah*"

gci -Filter "*blah*"

allquixotic

Motif not Mosaic

Common Desktop Environment

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX98 Workstation Product Standard, and was long the "classic" Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free software on 6 August 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2 or later. Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives. == History == === Early development === Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and USL announced CDE...

Motif was all the rage in the 90s

Bob

gci | ?{ $_.FullName -contains "*blah" }

you can use -like or -match too

Apparently -Filter is preferred: tfl09.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/…

@BradyTrainor If you want a locate-equivalent, then, yes, you need to look into accessing the Windows Search index.

Note that the index usually only includes a very limited subset (user profile/data folders)

allquixotic

I know some government systems that are still based on CDE

Bob

Get-ChildItem is more like find

Brady Trainor

5:40 PM

@Bob, thank you for these notes, added.

Ben Richards

CDE is so ugly yet it still persists. Oddly.

I guess it's rose-colored glasses due to nostalgia.

It looks like the UNIX version of Windows 95 and all its ugly colored themes :P

Bob

@BradyTrainor If you want to use indexed search... it does get complicated. If you use it often, recommend that you create a function. See blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2012/06/25/… or stackoverflow.com/questions/13918329/… for a simple filename search example.

Or grab this script, I guess :P gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/…

But do keep in mind that the index is fairly lacking.

You might be able to use it to find a file you want, but you can never use it to verify that a file doesn't exist, or to perform operations over all files in a directory.

(locate has similar limitations)

Brady Trainor

oh yeah, find more reliable than locate

Bob

The index is basically best-effort with no guarantees.

@BradyTrainor Also, if you want to perform an operation over every file in the result set, you might find Foreach-Object (shorthand %{}) useful.

Or a foreach (keyword) loop, if you're writing a script.

allquixotic

8:35 PM

Gee, thanks, Amazon. /sarc

Michael Frank

8:59 PM

@allquixotic is that all? I came in to work this morning and the cleaners had unplugged my desktop overnight...

Psycogeek

9:35 PM

Life is easy for Superusers , 1 hour after you have a problem ask. What ever happened to beating yourself to death over (even stupid) issues , racking your brains, and exhausting all of your resources for 2 days , to figure out a problem. Dang people they must even have real jobs.

Staying up for 26 hours straight trying to fix it (and of course fixing it 2 minutes after you wake up with your brain working)

Calling all your friends , who have no idea what the heck your on about, and asking them how to fix it.

I want to see more head bashing, sweaty palms, bloodshot eyes , complete re-purchaces of working hardware you thought might be the problem. Wildly insane batches that do 360*s around the problem, and cause 12 more problems.

Michael Frank

I don't.

Psycogeek

And i suppose you would use a parachute when jumping out of a plane too :-)

This one

0

I've spent an hour Googling this to no avail. I am running Windows 8.1 Pro x64. I have a situation where I regularly introduce all kinds of new, obscure file extensions to my system. For this explanation, I do not have any association with .xyz files. Say I create file.xyz. It has the default d...

Michael Frank

That's not relevant at all. Parachutes are designed specifically to allow you to jump out of planes.

Banging your head against a wall to fix something is not by design.

He's also right, he doesn't want to remove a file extension association, he wants to remove the suggestions.

Psycogeek

Has me stumped, i just know that it is only a different visual interface, because programs would not have changed the method for associations and the "open with" kind of listing would still be pretty much the same.

Michael Frank

9:51 PM

Yes, but his file is not associated with a program yet. That is the difference.

Psycogeek

The last answer, like who ever reads that, says search and destroy, find the items in the registry. Probably have to do a bit of searching as to what to remove, make a registry backup, and start banging away.

and the original question itself does know that there is a likelyhood of that being in the registry.

On the other hand it would be GREAT! to have a comprehensive win8 only type of question fully answered of this type.

I just want to remove that "find it in the store" thing before i even have to see it once :-)

I can bounty it, the time has come.

Canadian Luke

10:30 PM

3

Psycogeek

that would be really funny if it was fake :-) But I already had to do that a few times before :-(

Michael Frank

@CanadianLuke At least it gives you the option of using it anyway...

Psycogeek

just input your windows licence key , I manage to get that typed correct about every 5th time, good enough to log-in to important places like Reddit

Bob

11:17 PM

@CanadianLuke WTF excluded characters

Psycogeek

11:28 PM

B can look like 8 , 5 can look like S , O can look like Q etc. many of the licence keys exclude that stuff based on that, but that would have like nothing to do with security ?

Bob

11:43 PM

@Psycogeek Yea, that would be useful for human-readable key-generation.

Licence and product keys especially.

But a password by its very nature does not need to be human-readable (just human-memorisable).

Psycogeek

passwords that perfectally OCR ?

Good for that NSA through the wall monitor scanning , which was only for CRT. But i assume it could apply to the "projection" and long distance camera pickups and all monitors :-)

and no i never wonder how many "security" cameras in stores and aimed at ATMs and kiosks , have imaged my PINs , and are controlled by 19 year old security experts

I float in the ocean of vulnerability , with my inflatable security

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