A couple of weeks ago, DevOps Collective (PowerShell.org’s parent non-profit organization) announced the availability of the ‘GetGoing’ IT Ops Education Program and Scholarship.
For those of you who may not have yet heard, DevOps Collective and Pluralsight have partnered together to create a modern ’turnkey’ curriculum that brings together mapped courses, recommended hands-on experiences, and live mentoring to prepare people for the real-world of IT Operations. With this initiative, they’ve offered up to full-ride scholarships for 2016. Applications for the scholarship have opened, and applications will be taken in until May 15th.
Now that the way has been paved, it’s our turn as members of the community to get the word out; and doing so might be easier than you think!
Contact Your Local School Districts
I recently reached out to my hometown public school district, and was immediately met with enthusiasm from the local superintendent and their Science, Guidance, and Counseling departments. It only takes a quick email with some bullet points on the program to get the conversation initiated. I’ve included the text of my initial correspondence for you to use as a guide to help you on your way.
Contacting your school district is
easy
. A quick search online for your district can get your to their website with contact info, often including the email addresses for the district superintendent and other office officials that can help! Send them a copy of the brochure to help them get informed of the initiative.
Use Your Social Media Skills
Get the conversation going on social media! Talk to your followers; speak out to local educational organizations; and make them aware of this awesome new program!
Inform Your User Groups
Get your user groups in on the action. Enlist the greater community to get the word out faster! Together we can canvas an even larger area and get more people interested!
Get Involved
Offer to become a mentor. We all know that the best way to learn is from real world experiences. We, as a community, have this vast repository of practical knowledge that no book can effectively provide. We, as a collective resource, can help to bring a new generation of administrators, engineers, and architects into this world already prepared to take on DevOps, Agile IT, and more!
If you need a hand getting started, feel free to contact me at webmaster at powershell.org. Now let’s #GetGoing ourselves, and make this happen!
Here’s my initial contact email that you can use to fit your own story:
Greetings [Contact Name],
Here is the long awaited post of my third installment of where I revisit my script and provide some explanation as to why I did the things I did in regards to synchronizing Active directory groups.
As always feedback is welcome.
Link is here
PowerShell for Developers After authoring last month scripting games puzzle, which involved some scripting around the Unicode standard, I decided to have some fun and write a PowerShell module which interacts directly with the online Unicode Database (UCD) to retrieve the main properties of characters.
Using this module you will be able to retrieve the following information for a single char or for every char in a given string:
- Glyph name
- General category
- Unicode script
- Unicode block
- Unicode version (or age)
- Decimal value
- Hex value
Here’s a few sample outputs you can get from using the functions in the UnicodeInfo module:
Get-Unicodeinfo '$' Glyph : $ Decimal value : 36 Hexadecimal value : U+0024 General Category : CurrencySymbol Unicode name : DOLLAR SIGN Unicode script : Common Unicode block : BasicLatin Unicode version : 1.1Get-Unicodeinfo ‘Powershell!’ | Format-Table
Glyph Decimal value Hexadecimal value General Category Unicode name Unicode script Unicode block Unicode
version
The session recordings are now online! We did miss a few of the videos. The few 2-hour sessions scheduled in Room 406 were not recorded (and weren’t planned to be; we only have two sets of recording equipment, although for 2017 we’re adding a third set). And, we had a couple that had video problems on-site and weren’t recordable. We hope you’ll appreciate that our priority on-site is to provide a great experience for the people who were there, and stopping everything to make sure we get a recording isn’t always practical. As always, recordings are on a best-effort basis. As far as we know, we missed one of Matt Graeber’s sessions, Lee Holmes’ session, and the Microsoft general session from Kenneth Hansen and Angel Cavelo.
A new experiment this year should come online by July 2016. Pluralsight showed up with two film crews, and captured live HD video, and audio right from the speakers’ mic, in rooms 404 and 405, which were our main session rooms. Those recordings, which will combine the live video with our screen captures, will be available in the Pluralsight library for all Pluralsight subscribers. Registered attendees of the event will receive free access to those as well, by means of a “slice” of the Pluralsight library.
Note that last-minute registration transferees will not be automatically included in that, as we’ll be sending the library information to the originally registered person. In addition, for attendees who did not provide complete contact information (like, if someone else registered you), the notification will go to the contact information we do have. We don’t have the ability to update that list at this point, sorry.
Carlo really put a brain-twister out for our March 2016 Puzzle. Also, as a note, we’re eagerly awaiting submissions of next month’s puzzle, so don’t delay in handing that in. Here’s how you can contribute to the community’s favorite scripting game.
Official Solution
It’s probably easiest just to share his solutions as actual script files, so here’s both the Beginner and Advanced versions that he provided, as a ZIP:
Solutions
Carlo also provided some notes on his thinking:
Just a precision concerning the regex: the idea I had was to ‘force’ competitors to think in terms of Unicode categories and block ranges (unknown concept to most I bet).
Without digging, some people could come up with an expression like this, which is NOT what we want:
Have you been enjoying our monthly Scripting Games puzzles? Want to keep them going?
Then it’s time to jump in and contribute! PowerShell.org is a community site, which means it only works when community makes it work! So come up with your Scripting Games puzzles (you’ve seen the different kinds we’ve done)! Your submission should include:
- The puzzle itself. This can include a narrative, example output you want people to achieve, etc.
- The solution (in code form, and it’s fine if you put this on GitHub or in a Gist too), along with a narrative of how and why the solution achieves the goal(s).
Ideally, we’d love it if you could also review some of the entries for your puzzle and provide some commentary on ones that you found noteworthy.
Submit your puzzle to Dan Iverson, our newly minted GamesMaster, via email to gamesmaster@ (and you should be able to figure out our domain name, as you’re on our site, right?). We’re looking for an April puzzle and beyond! For months where we have no entry, we’ll post a “taking a break” at the top of the month, just so you know.
Don’t let us down! Personally, I’d love for this to become enough of a thing that we can start awarding not only top entrants (I have been tracking entries each month), but top puzzle authors - and maybe invite them to a PowerShell Summit where we’ll do a live Scripting Games event one evening! But it only happens if you help make it happen!
Our March 2016 puzzle comes from Carlo Mancini. We’re actively interested in receiving Scripting Games puzzles from members of the community - submit yours, along with an official solution, to us at admin@ via email!
Twin Cities PowerShell Automation Group meeting Tuesday, March 8, 2016, at the Microsoft Technology Center in Edina, MN.
Come and learn about the road map for Microsoft’s automation platforms, System Center Orchestrator, Service Management Automation and Azure Automation. Ryan Andorfer will cover the road map for these three products and then dive into how to utilize Azure Automation in the cloud and on premises for both process and configuration automation in an enterprise setting, including strategies around code management, PowerShell Module development and PowerShell DSC management.
Ryan ran the IT-Automation team for General Mills for 6 years, was a Cloud and Datacenter MVP for 3 years and is now a Microsoft Technology Solutions Professional.
This is a secure facility. RSVP with full name is required. If you do not use your full name on meetup, please email us your full name. Please RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-PowerShell-User-Group/events/229312191/
Food and networking starts at 4:30. The presentations will start at 5 PM. We’ll keeping talking until 7 PM.
The agenda is available on the official event page! Please note that this is subject to change, but we’ll update that same copy so you can just refer to it. We’ll have handouts on site, but we recommend having an offline copy of the PDF, or your own printout, as a backup. It’s worth reviewing this in advance, so you can start planning your own personal agenda. Don’t forget that the registration site (https://eventloom.com/event/home/PSNA16) allows you to set your own personal agenda (after logging in), and provides a mobile-friendly view at the event.
So, we have 3 seats left, which isn’t much - and we contacted our venue, and they said they they’d let us bring in those people more last-minute (in terms of us setting food and space requirements), but there’s a small uncharge of $100 per person. So those last three seats are on sale at PowerShellSummit.org, through the morning of March 11th, and the new pricing should go into effect sometime tonight. In the meantime, if you happen to show up and the lower price is still there, go for it. But… only three seats. Good luck!
