He did say plainly that Modules are intended to replace Snapins, and gave some details about using PowerShell data files (.psd1) for module loading (although I still can’t get that to work in CTP2) ... I could really dig getting some help files for these cmdlets and functionality, or maybe a new release with some of the bug fixes they’ve already put in

I really like your ideas. Really the scripts with built in dependencies thing is brilliant. I have written bash scripts before that automatically check for dependencies and download them if they are not met, but it actually never occurred to me there could be created standardized way with little logic to accomplish the same thing.

As far as the security concerns, I am not an expert in encryption and hashing/signing algorithms, but I can assume it can be done for free as packages are typically required to be signed to work with apt-get without throwing a scary error. By default apt-get in Ubuntu for instance will only find and install software signed by select Ubuntu developers. I assume they use this “web of trust” thing, but as I said, I didn’t study how it’s accomplished yet.

But we can have a trusted group of people who evaluate all the scripts and cmdlets to ensure they are malware-free, then sign them using this method. Like apt-get if the auto dependency checker encounters a dependency which it can not verify a trusted signature for, it should fail.

On the flip side, if the goal just verifying the integrity of the script, that can be valuable, and I would fall towards running a community CA, whether self-signed or not (sorry, I’ve got no connections with any CA’s).

Thanks for bringing this up Jaykul!

In case it’s of use to anyone else, here’s what I did.

You can create scripts directly using Autohotkey for any of the key codes that it can pick up. Use its instructions to discover the key codes for the special buttons and then set these keys to “disabled” in the intellitype software control panel so you can work with them directly with Autohotkey.

Unfortunately, the favorites 1-5 and the help, undo, etc (alternate F1-F12) keys don’t send any special keycodes that Autohotkey can recognize. To send these keys to Autohotkey you need to do what you describe here and remap the keys in the IntelliType configuration files and registry to send keystrokes which Autohotkey can then pick up. For example, I’m having the Help (F1) key send ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-F1 from the IntelliType software which Autohotkey can pick up and do something more useful with.

I ran into the issue of almost not having enough of the Microsoft command numbers to remap all the keys that Autohotkey couldn’t pick up. As you noted, some actions like “logoff” will still take their action no matter how you remap them with the commands.xml file. The command ids I used that seemed (mostly) to work globally without undesired side-effects were 100, 101, 102, 103, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 301, 302, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 315. I deleted most of the application-specific actions from the commands.xml file and just left the “StandardSupport” section and an empty language section for English.

Removing application-specific settings isn’t a problem since autohotkey can also map keys differently depending on the application or active window if you want the keys to act differently in different applications.

I ran into problems with the ids 100-103. They would fire from IntelliType when a window was active, but the keys didn’t seem to fire when I was hovering the mouse over an icon on my desktop, for example.

I fixed the problem of special circumstance IntelliType keys by editing the mscmdkey.xml file and changing appCommand=‘36’ for each of these items. This appCommand number originally went with the copy command, but IntelliType didn’t care that some other items in mscmdkey.xml also used this appCommand too. It successfully changed the behavior so the key acted globally rather than just in a specific circumstance or window.

I’m thinking that perhaps some of the keys that don’t remap well to other behaviors might be able to be remapped to do standard key combinations by changing their appCommand number to 36 or one of the appCommands that doesn’t take any specialized action. Maybe it would be possible to use the commands such as “logoff” to do other things if you change their appCommands in mscmdkey.xml. I suspect the appCommand number references an action elsewhere (perhaps in one of those dlls) and the more extreme actions could be neutered by changing their appCommands to something else.

I hope this is helpful to someone out there.

filter kb { $_ / 1024}
filter mb { $_ / 1024 / 1024 }
filter tb { $_ / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 }

I use Powershell as a calculator:

10mb + 285kb | mb

Goodbye calc!

I talked about it a bit when we recorded Episode 55 (soon to be released), but the Sysadmin Meme has really taken off. Admins and scripters from all areas are responding and calling out their associates… I’ll update this as I see come acros…

I named Send-Paste first, and then couldn’t see Receive-Paste as a reasonable name I suppose Put-Paste would work as an alternate name.