log 11 = 1.0413

This weekly log is a bit different. Because, I am writing the entire post in the last day of the week. Usually, I write down my logs throughout the week and launch it. But, this time I was very busy with a lot of stuff.

At work

I have been spending a lot of time at work lately. Good thing is, some of the things are open sourced and I could should show you what I was working on.

This page got to my notice few days back. In particular the terms Q4 2017 for iOS builds and Windows Containers. I think, it means the feature is estimated around 4th quarter of 2017. Well, that’s right. Efforts have been going for it to happen and that too in the open.

This week, I got to work on enabling Shippable builds on Windows
Task executes a minimal dir command by scriptnull · Pull Request #131 · Shippable/execTemplates
Contribute to execTemplates development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com

I got to learn about PowerShell a bit. I am super amazed by the work that has been went into designing and developing PowerShell. Go check it out!
PowerShell/PowerShell
PowerShell for every system!github.com

Coolest thing in PowerShell

Most of the time, I felt like I was on bash when using PowerShell. But there is this one functionality which I feel is very powerful.

PowerShell allows us to access the .NET Framework inside a PowerShell script.

I wanted to generate a UUID in our PowerShell script.

First, How do we do it in bash?

bash does not have access to some thing like a .NET framework in its scripts. So, as a work around we are expected to rely on a program that bash can access to get a uuid from stdout and use it.

That’s what we do exactly here. There is this file in the proc fs, ( /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid ) giving us a uuid everytime we read it. ( I am curious to know why it exists in first place )

group_uuid=$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid)

Now, in PowerShell instead of calling an external program, all we need to do is to access the Guid class in .NET Framework.aspx).

$group_uuid = [guid]::NewGuid().Guid

Learning about Linux

I have been tweeting most of the interesting things that I learnt throughout the week.

Thanks for reading. I quote verses from my favourite Tamil literature “Tirukkuṛaḷ” at the end of my blog posts.

“கேடில் விழுச்செல்வம் கல்வி யொருவற்கு

மாடல்ல மற்றை யவை.”

— திருக்குறள்

Translated meaning ( in my words ): Education is the only wealth of a man that could not be destroyed. Any other wealth is not considered to be a wealth in front of a man’s knowledge through education.