Neither rhyme nor reason

We have had a pretty good 2 days so far at LCA. As I expected, I flittered between the Virtualisation, Gnome and Debian mini-confs. I learned a lot from Jon Oxer’s talk on Xen Image Manager. Probably most interesting was learning about recent glue tools such as ATA over Ethernet ( a poor man’s iSCSI), drbd ( A Network RAID-1) and Unison (a better rsync). Anyway it certainly has some good ideas for building reasonably sophisticated data centres on a budget.

We also heard a little about the OLPC project from Chris Blizzard’s keynote - and catching up with James Cameron at morning tea meant that we could actually have closeup look at the one he has been testing in the bush.

At lunch I was able take a ride on Geoffrey Bennett’s open source segway clone.

Jono Bacon exemplified the value of open source development, talking about the audio editor Jokosher that spawned as a result of the need to fill a niche for a multi-track editor that mortals could use.

Anyway a pretty good days so far!

I’m getting all revved up for LCA tomorrow. Jez (my son) and his friend Dan will be coming along as well. Having been to Dunedin for ‘06, I’m much more aware of what to expect. As I found last year, LCA is definitely a smorgasbord with an overflowing cornucopia to choose from. The difficulty of choice is inevitable - especially seeing that work is paying for my rego - so I have to decide between head (enterprise architectually relevant things) and heart (kewl toys and things to spin my propeller). Anyway I am confident that Sylvia and her team will be trying very hard to get video of the talks available to the masses this year - so I hope I can timeshift those talks that I’ll miss.

LCA is also an incentive pump some life into this blog - hopefully I can get a few posts in during the week.

I just noticed that Microsoft have this thing called PowerShell. The blurb says it allows easy command-line control of your system through “cmdlets”. Being an avid Linux user and also regularly use Cygwin on Windows, this sounded pretty good. 2MB download and you need .Net 2.0

• It installed fine.
• I clicked on the program shortcut.
• It brought up a “CMD” like box - but just blank.

I waited 20 secs or so and I thought that I would hit “Enter” a few times to wake it up.

When it did wake look what I got :-

Windows(R) PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Do you want to run software from this untrusted publisher?
The file C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml is published by CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US. This publisher is not trusted on your system. Only run scripts from trusted publishers.

[V] Never run [D] Do not run [R] Run once [A] Always run [?] Help (default is “D”):

Error loading the extended type data file:
Microsoft.PowerShell.Core, C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml
File skipped because of validation exception: "The file C:\Program Files\Windows PowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml cannot be loaded. You have elected to not run this software now.".


Which was repeated three times.

I guess I won’t shoot it for buffering my “Enter” keystrokes (which means that the startup code didn’t run) but surely you would think that whatever these plugins would already be signed and hence trusted by the PowerShell code I have already installed?

Man, Microsoft, we really haven’t advanced at all if you have the capability of clearly establishing the authenticity of code but you still want to ask the user whether you should trust what is part of of the base install