The first ever #BridgeConf was awesome. Really enjoyed presenting to PowerShell peers from the PowerShell Slack / Discord #bridge channel.

I’m travelling a lot more these days so spending time in hotels is now for winding down and sleeping to minimise the effects of jet lag. Something I find doesn’t actually get any easier the more you travel. I now take my Chromecast with me. It’s just one of those things that just works. No fuss or hassle. So I don’t need to spend time trying to troubleshoot problems.

Speaking for the first time at PowerShell Conference Europe, in the beautiful Hannover Congress Centrum in Hannover, Germany was a real highlight of my speaking career. No matter how much preparation I put into the talks, none of my demos worked when I arrived!

In the good old days you hosted your website yourself or using a dedicated web hosting provider. Whichever option you chose you needed a machine, virtual or physical, with a full operating system that needed patching, some sort of remote access, web hosting software such as Apache or IIS and some sort of SSH or RDP access. And perhaps it’s own firewall rules. That is a lot of investment for just a blog.

Finding a cross-platform virtualisation solution to work with both Mac and Windows is not too difficult. There are not than many options to choose from. But throw Vagrant and Docker into the mix and it can be a frustrating experience. Find out how to run Hyper-V, VirtualBox and VMWare Windows virtualisation together, on the same computer using multiple boot entries.

The Chocolatey Community Repository currently has 6,655 unique packages. When we add up the versions of each of those packages it grows to 65,549. That’s a lot of packages. A lot of storage needed to house them all. And a lot bandwidth needed for you to download them.

But the Chocolatey Community Repository is not for everybody. Chocolatey doesn’t recommend organizations use the community repository directly for several reasons.

I’ve had an disagreement recently with a colleague about the usage of open-source automation tools, especially Chocolatey in Business environments. A key point of this argument was the integration of new open source tools into long-existing, mostly commercial software based workflows.

One of the main reasons to use Chocolatey in an organization is its ability to integrate seamlessly with already existing automation infrastructure.

Getting PowerShell Core to run on Linux was easy enough. As I’m running Kubuntu 18.10 it’s a simple case of using snapd.

However, I didn’t expect running PowerShell Core on Linux to be problem free. And it wasn’t. After installing my own PsTodoTxt module from the PowerShell Gallery, PowerShell couldn’t find it.

I started using PC’s with MS Dos 4 and then 5. I graduated to Windows 3.11 and I’ve used every single version of Windows released since then. I lasted two months on Vista which some have claimed I should get a medal for (Vista wasn’t all that bad…). But I’ve also dabbled outside of the Windows world. I used OS/2 Warp for almost a year in 1995 (I still have the box!

Craig Porteous [t|w] and I are running a Hacktoberfest workshop on Saturday the 27th of October at the Incremental Group in Glasgow!