Friday, February 02, 2007

Morning Coffee 23

• My Binding Across States post made it to the home page of DotNetKicks, so at last six other people liked it. I wonder if I'll be able to detect and traffic increase from that.
• I wrote yesterday that I had ordered a PCMCIA Smart Card reader for my laptop. I ordered it around 11:30pm on Wednesday and it arrived yesterday around 2pm.That's good service! And so much more convenient than the USB smart card reader.
• I also mentioned yesterday that I had moved my laptop over to Vista. I'm not sure why, but my battery life has gotten significantly better. Maybe it's because these days I'm primarily using my laptop to remote into my desktop so I'm not exercising the local system much.
• I was checking out Windows PowerShell Quick Reference from O'Reilly (on Safari) and discovered this PS offers the numeric constants of gb, mb, and kb to represent gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes. Example: $downloadTime = (1gb + 250mb) / 120kb. That's pretty cool.
• Speaking of PS, I stumbled across PowerSMO! from Dan Sullivan. Instead of building native PS support for SQL administration, PowerSMO! makes it easy to access SMO objects in PS. Instead of having to call "new-object Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ManagedComputer", you call "Get-SMO_ManagedComputer". Even more interestingly, PowerSMO! uses metaprograming techniques to generate all the Get_SMO* methods. It iterates over all the SMO types - about 1000 types in total - and generates the associated Get-SMO functions into a temp script file. Once the temp file is created, it can be invoked like any other script. Must noodle on this approach further.