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2024

Why I never learned Bash

I’ve been using a computer since ~1996 (age 12/13). I’ve built many PCs, and installed various Windows and Linux operating systems many hundreds of times over the past 28 years. I played L.O.R.D. on my dads BBS, played DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Descent, and Duke Nukem. So far in my IT career I’ve worked as a system administrator, software vendor support, and as software developer. It may surprise you to hear then that I learned my first shell language just 5 years ago, in 2019.

Nerdbank.GitVersioning and the Revision number

Screenshot of various versions returned by the command "nbgv get-version"

I love using the NerdBank.GitVersioning CLI tool nbgv. It completely removes the need to think about an aspect of a project that doesn't add any value to your customers. But today I realized I understood the first three parts of the version produced by nbgv, but the fourth "revision" component was not obvious. Turns out it is a uint16 value of the first two bytes of the commit id!

But I AM the administrator

A while back I was helping a co-worker with a project where the customer needed to automate a lot of minor Windows configuration steps on some Windows IoT server appliances. One of the tasks was to make it possible to disable Windows Firewall, because even an administrator was greeted with the message "For your security, some settings are managed by your system administrator" and the option to change firewall settings was disabled.

Image Comparison

I recently came across a couple of blog posts on image comparison algorithms shared by Dr. Neal Krawetz. One of them, titled "Kind Of Like That", describes the "dHash" algorithm which generates a perceptual hash based on gradients in the image. With more than 200k family photos to wrangle, I wrote up a PowerShell implementation to find similar images and it works surprisingly well!