Konnichiwa!

I began writing this issue on 2024-03-10; so I guess now, around three months later, it’s as good of a time as any other to finally release it.

Life

My life is sadly still “on hold”, since I need to take care of my old and ill father (who is a very special character, of which I am not very fond).

But this family dissolved anyways, with the death of my dear mother almost two years ago; now life just drags on for me, with the day job and the routine tasks to keep him and his household in shape. It’s a personal dilemma of mine, and I hope to get out of it somehow in a foreseeable timeframe – and hopefully on a positive note.

The main problem is: Since I’m not back at my own place, and thus without my usual equipment (PC or data) or other resources (like time for myself), this hampers what and how I can develop anything of complex nature. Additionally, my own health is also suffering under the current circumstances.

I have a few ideas on how to change things, but none of them are ready yet; so it may still take a while…

Code

Powershell module saoe

• Changed New-saoeHTMLHelp: Two changes: (1) ‘Examples’ section was improved in regards to linebreaks; (2) Parameter aliases will now be displayed.
• Changed Import-saoeIniFile: Function got renamed from Get-saoeIniFile to Import-saoeIniFile.
• Changed Show-saoeACLWithResolvedSID: Can now look up accounts in multiple domains.
• Added Export-saoeIniFile: Function to save a data structure to a text file in a simple INI format.
• Added Out-saoeLog: Helper function to create a log entry and/or a log file.
• Added Enable-saoeADUser and Disable-saoeADUser: Functions to enable/disable one or multiple AD user accounts.
• Added Convert-saoeFileEncoding: Function to convert the content of a text file to another character encoding.
• Added Compare-saoeArrays: Function to compare and count the content (items) of multiple arrays. That way, similarities and differences between them can be revealed.
• Added Import-saoeXLSX and Export-saoeXLSX: Functions to import/export data from/to an Excel (*.xlsx) file (requires the module ImportExcel).
• Added Initialize-saoeConfigFromJSON: Function to combine multiple datasets that are spread over many JSON files in (multiple) global Powershell variables and combined JSON files.

Other

• [Code in non-public repository] Reworked the Python script that I use for the FTP upload of this site: Now using WinSCP instead of Python’s builtin ftplib.
  I had often problems with the transfer before, probably due to the unstable server connections: WinSCP too got several sudden “connection lost” errors in the middle of the sync-transfer, but was able to automatically re-connect and continue from where it left off.
  (Maybe I could have added such a feature to my script code, but why bother, when such a good tool exists? And that topic wouldn’t have been of great interest to me anyway.)

Website

• The website saoe.net has now a TLS/SSL certificate, to enable the HTTPS protocol; just because… and because Google seems to a bit picky with non-HTTPS sites. It’s not for free, but also not terribly expensive.
• These posts and its category have been renamed, once again: This time from DevLog to Journal – I think it’s more fitting, considering the content of most of the recent issues.
• Since I started to revise the “Mini-Reviews” posts (mainly because of a bit of format harmonization: That drifted apart over the years), I now also removed the old URL aliases (which represented the old names from the Wordpress era (e.g. aliases: /blog/1234/)). It’s been years since the switch, and I very much doubt, that anyone on the planet will notice. Getting rid of them also cleanses the Hugo build process a tiny bit.