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Personal website of Steven Peck. Focusing on Microsoft technologies (most notably PowerShell), and other random bits I think to write.

Getting user display names

Wed, 2008-03-26 13:44 — sepeck

UPDATED: 05Jun2008
There I was with a list of user login id's and a need to turn them into Display Names. Hmmm..... get-qaduser seemed a likely choice.

Drupalcon travel

Tue, 2008-02-26 17:03 — sepeck

While chatting in IRC the other night, I found that Adam Light and I will be on the same flight through Chicago on our way to Drupalcon. So, if anyone else is scheduled for United 534 leaving Chicago at 1:10pm leave a comment. Adam and I plan to share a cab to the hotel as they are reasonably close and Public transport in a city new to me on a Sunday night after being up 14-16 hours just doesn't seem to hold an appeal for me. I plan on wearing my BADCAMP07 Drupal shirt so should be easy to spot.

On the downside, it appears that ChipIn has been having issues for the past 16 hours and timing out when people try and donate :(. It does seem to be working now so if you are still interested in helping out my travel fund I'd appreciate it.

http://sepeck.chipin.com/travel-to-drupalcon

Overall this schedule does work nicely. My in-laws are coming up to keep my wife company while I am gone (I suspect they are here to visit with the grand kids).

Drupalcon documentation session

Fri, 2008-02-22 12:12 — sepeck

My session on documentation (Documentation - challenges, travails and myths) has been accepted and scheduled for Wednesday 4:45-6:00pm.

I hope to briefly cover some of the history and evolution of Drupal documentation, knowing the history is often important to understanding the present. Spend more time going over some of the present challenges of creating and maintaining documentation and debunk some persistent myths.

While the session is just over an hour, I hope to have feedback and participation, get some more people participating in one of the easiest ways to get started contributing to Drupal.

On Friday there is a code sprint, if you scroll down towards the bottom there is mention of non-developer activities and a documentation sprint so bring your laptops and get ready to participate.

I'd also like to add a thank you to those who have helped me out by contributing to my travel fund to get me there.

Drupal and the perception of success

Thu, 2008-02-21 13:14 — sepeck

This is the result of seeing one too many 'For Drupal to really succeed' posts. Drupal is already a success. There is certainly room to get better and grow more, but Drupal has already succeeded.

When listening to interviews with musicians who have a new 'hit' album/song I often get a sense that the interviewer has this fundamental assumption that the artist just started playing/singing last month. When you listen carefully, you find that the artist has been working at their craft for years. So it goes with Drupal and Drupal's success.

For the time I have been with the Drupal community we have had a steady progression of success. In my first few years, the community took pride in the fact that sites could be built by skilled developers with no indication that it was using Drupal (Yes, many hobbyists often implemented sites that were obviously Drupal). Calls to put 'tagging' into the code to more easily identify Drupal based sites were often met with resistance. The prevailing attitude was to focus on quality and capability rather then count implementations.

Quest PowerShell extensions GET-QADGroupMember

Thu, 2008-02-14 23:42 — sepeck

Last year, I found a neat tool to list group members in PowerShell. Well, my co-worker asked me about it again and it's a good thing I blog as I couldn't remember what I told him.

Turns out, Get-QADGroupMember was the tool I was after. This time there was a slight twist. He wants to get the members of a distribution group that are nested in another one and weed out any duplicates.

Hmmm...... Probably not the prettiest way, but this seems to get us the information he needs. It will error if there are user accounts in the top level group.

# Requires Quest Active Directory Extension
# Get date for file name
$day = Get-Date -UFormat "%Y%m%d"
 
$count = 0
$groups = Get-QADGroupMember "Distribution list name"
foreach ($group in $groups)
  { $count++
    $members = Get-QADGroupMember $group.DisplayName
   }
$members | sort-object | select DisplayName | get-unique -asstring | Export-Csv -Path $day-members.csv

It could be improved by allowing input from the PoSH line. I may update tomorrow.

Drupal 6 is out - yay!

Thu, 2008-02-14 23:15 — sepeck

Now come the fun part.... whenaremymodulesgonnabeupgraded!

For an initial test, I updated my site on a test site and it went very smoothly. Picked up settings and everything. I tried image module but it turns out that while image module will evidently work on a new install, it's not quite there yet for updates.

I really rely on Drupal core and image module. I can do without the others but Tagadelic is one I've been enjoying, so I may actually take a shot at it with coder module as a guide and see how far I get before it gets update. That does depend on my family, friends and work schedule though so perhaps it's a mere pipe dream.

Theming looks to be way more fun and much easier. My site, while personal has some definite areas, maybe it's time to change the theme in those areas a bit? Hmmm.... so much to do, so much to consider, so little time.

On a personal note, please consider helping my travel to Drupalcon fund out.

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