Konnichiwa,

so, what have I been up to, development-wise, in the last couple of months, since the last DevLog?
Not nothing, but also not nearly as much as I wished and hoped for.

Life

I still don’t dwell in my usual surroundings, because I’m still taking care of my elderly and ill father.
One big pain point with this is that he is him: a person to which I (or anyone, for that matter) never had a noteworthy relationship, even in good times. But I’m also not so far removed from him (by a matter of habit) that I could really feel detached from the whole thing (in addition, I don’t have any siblings, so there is no one nearby to share this burden).

Not having the temporal, physical, or psychological space that I’m used to. And, as trivial as it may sound in comparison, lacking most of my equipment here and the environment also doesn’t help with being productive on a lot of my projects. Unfortunately, I can’t forsee if or when that will change again, and am also kind of frozen on what steps to take next; so I’m currently trapped in a mental limbo *sigh*

Nevertheless, I could at least do some (minor) things over the last weeks:

Website

The big change was that I spent several days (and I am still fine-tuning it) to learn about and then apply a “responsive web design” approach. That makes this site much more pleasent to view on smartphones and tablets (‘mobile-friendly’).

I also updated my Hugo installation from version 0.89.4 to 0.116.1, but I don’t think that made any difference in my usecase.

Some notable changes to the content (only a few highlights, look at the homepage for more):

• New post: On Software: Logging
• New post: Powershell: Name of the current Citrix desktop
• New post: Powershell: Using Write-Information
• Updated post: Powershell snippets
• Updated posts: The earliest Mini-Reviews (#1-#24) have been upgraded with 5-star-ratings now, too — not so easy to retroactively rate a film or season of something that one has watched 3-10 years ago (there’s another reason for that, but that’s still ‘under construction’).

Powershell module saoe

• New:

  • Add-saoeModuleTableOfContentsToReadMe (replaces my Build-ReadMe.ps1 script)
  • ConvertFrom-saoeEMailAddress
  • Format-saoeTextToCenter
  • Select-saoeChoice (blog post)
  • Show-saoeCalendarMonth (see below)
  • Repair-saoeACL
  • Wait-saoeTimedLoop

• Changed:

  • Get-saoeADLastLogon (Most notable change: Takes now also the ‘LogonTimestamp’ into account)
  • Install-saoeModule
  • Show-saoeACLWithResolvedSID

Details: Show-saoeCalendarMonth

I made the new Powershell function Show-saoeCalendarMonth, that shows a compact view of a calendar month, like this:

2023-08 (AUGUST)
═══╤═════════════════════
CW │ Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
───┼─────────────────────
31 │     1  2  3  4  5  6
32 │  7  8  9 10 11 12 13
33 │ 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
34 │ 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
35 │ 28 29 30 31

Why? Just because I saw something similar on a screenshot on some random site, when I was looking for something completely different, and thought: Well, how would one create that?
Not that I really have an immediate need for it, but I do have a few ideas where it could come handy…

Miscellaneous

I created another Powershell module in a private repository, just for myself:

• Albeit that was already the original plan for the module saoe, that module became a public repository for any kind of my generally (more or less) useful scripts. By that nature, the code in that module is designed to be more generic and flexible.

  But in the meantime I have also accumulated some code that is really only useful for me and applicable in my environment (due to specific paths, hard-wired values, etc.), which obviously I don’t want to make public.

• And over the years, I have learned that a Powershell module is really a more convenient way, in comparison to stand-alone scripts: They can automatically be loaded into each new PS session via a profile, and then one can call these functions without needing to know where the actual script file is located.