It looks like its back to iTunes for me... as I went and did something quite hilariously frivalous... I was looking for a new mp3 player - looking around mind you, not with any great interest of buying anything. I had a couple of spare euros lying around from a quiet month and suddenly it was burning a hole in my pocket... a €400 hole in my pocket.

I'd been following the realease here in Ireland, and wow was it quiet. Having read around it looks like this was due to the fact that there's such huge demand everywhere and because of the initial screen problems with the first batch that got here... According to a knowledgeable source, its the ones that had Corinne Bailey-Rae on the box. The week 27 batch. There's a bit more info here. Apparently Apple will replace any unit that was bought with a defective screen - you can do a test here to see if yours is ok...

As you can see if you read the first link there were quite a free people looking around for them without any luck. However one person rang a number of places and someone was able to send him to a store with them. I did the same thing - I rang 3G in Stphen's Green shopping centre and they told me that only their Athlone store had any stock! And I wasn't heading off to Athlone! So next on the list was one of the o2 experience stores. I rang the one on Henry Street and the chap who answered told me that they had just recieved a couple in both the 8 and 16GB flavours, but they were already walking out of the shop! After getting the assitant to hold one for me and a bit of bargaining with my boss of I was heading to Henry Street!

So after trying so hard to get one - is it worth it? Absolutely. It's a thing of beauty. The touch screen is amazingly intuitive, and after a quick read through the manual I was happily sliding and stretching my fingers around the screen. It feels solid and the screen is bright and very easy to read. I've had it out in relatively bright sunlight (this is Ireland afterall :) ) and I was able to see everything fine. And Wifi?? Practical and great. I think everyone can see the benefits... even for people like me who likes to keep their technology separate and purposeful...(my real pet hate? Camera's on phones... phones in watches... ipods in phones... :) )

So a quick break down of the pros and cons for all those trying to make up their minds...

Pros

• Absolutely jaw dropingly gorgeous.
• Clear, bright screen
• Easy to use after a quick learning curve
• Wifi! For when you just need it!
• Just the right mix of functionality - doesn't try to be everything!
• Videos from youtube, itunes music store, and all that.
• Did I mention it was beautiful?

Cons

• wow... that price is expensive
• shoddy earphones... When your used to a very good set you'll notice the difference - straight back into the box...
• having to connect it to itunes when you turn it on for the first time... delays play time...
• Having to use itunes at all!! Wow i hate it...
• This isn't really a presonal one - but I've heard it around so I'll throw it here - This isn't an iphone without a phone. There is quite a bit of functionality missing that the iphone has... Fine by me - I just want it to play my music and maybe get me cinema times... :)
• the niggling feeling that Apple are deliberately trying to have barely a trickle of devices on the market to make it more desirable...

All in all very nice. Would recomend especially if it comes down in price...

I havn't updated this site in a while mostly due to a new project, work and social obligations. But I have been keeping my eye on the web. Just stuff to keep me entertained and new ideas for projects etc., but I came across http://www.xkcd.com on my travels through the net. And what a find. I literally spent a couple of hours one morning reading through the comics from the very start. Ansolutely hilarious stuff. A lot of in-jokes... but not enough for you to not find most of it very funny.

The comics cover a whole lot of various topics from computers to maths and back again. Even a good few about love, that don't seem supposed to be funny... But nearly everything in there is worthy of a smile and a giggle and a few that made me laugh out loud. Check it out at www.xkcd.com. But here's one that made me laugh out loud... and then go and buy the t-shirt in the store...

I've been playing around with powershell for a couple of weeks. Just basic stuff to get me through some tasks that I needed to script. I'd not do a bat script but I decided since Microsoft were going to make a big deal about this Powershell, that I better learn something about it. So I downloaded it and started to read the getting started document.

It seemed pretty useful so I decided to do some testing. Powershell is object orientated so coming from a Java background I was able to pick it up pretty fast - well at least the OO(Object Orientated) portion of it.

I'm not going to bore you with how it works and why it does what it does - you can find all this information here at Microsoft. The first task that I had to do was modify Active Directory for a number of users based on a .CSV file that I was given.

We needed to modify AD so that the pager field was filled in. But its pretty much the same for any field that you need to edit in AD. So I wrote the following script in Powershell to modify AD without having to manually fill in all the users manually.

$uarfilenm = "C:\import.csv"

$UserDetails=Import-CSV $uarfilenm
foreach($UD in $UserDetails) {

	$user = $UD.user
	$pager = $UD.pager
        $UserOb=[ADSI]"LDAP://ad.microsoft.com/cn=$user,
         ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=microsoft,dc=com"
        $val = $UserOb
	if ($val -eq $null){
		write-Host "$user object does not exist"

        }
        else{

            	$IFSUser.Put("Pager",$pager)
            	$IFSUser.SetInfo()
		write-Host "$user has been modified"

	}
}

As you can see its not that long. Nor is it complicated after you break it down. Plus Powershell has handy cmd-lets(hopefully you've read the documentation from the above link) that do normal and repetitive or regular tasks. So the importing of a .CSV file is done by the following command:

$UserDetails=Import-CSV $uarfilenm

It then takes the each line and makes it an object. This object has parameters and properties. This is shown easily like so as the line has a name property and a card ID property. You can get those values using these lines:

$user = $UD.user
$pager = $UD.pager

So once we've read in the name of the person - Its the full name and it should match the cn(Full name) of the user in AD. Then you find that person in AD, read its values and make an object out of it. That object can then be edited and passed back or printed to screen - whatever you want really. So we have the user as an object.

$UserOb=[ADSI]"LDAP://ad.microsoft.com/cn=$user,
 ou=Users,dc=ad,dc=microsoft,dc=com"

You can then set a property of that object - i.e. we want to modify the pager field in AD. The following will do that for us.

$IFSUser.Put("Pager",$pager)
$IFSUser.SetInfo()

It also does some very very basic error catching. Your better off doing some better stuff. But that's an example of modifying AD with powershell - hopefully this helps someone and maybe starts someone off on the right path.