I've used PowerShell in the past on projects at work. Mainly searching through multiple documents looking for certain patterns and outputting the files that matched those patterns. This week I had a task of pulling 154 records out of a document that had 156,000 records total. The script would then need to write those 154 records to a new text file keeping the exact same format as they were in the original document.

I originally thought about doing this with Python but I wanted to try with PowerShell. With the help of online docs and PowerShell's help pages I was able to piece together the code to do this in about 10 lines.

The end result ran in well under a minute and worked beautifully. I must say PowerShell is definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Working on a command line and having many tools available to me really made me feel as if I were back working on one of my Linux workstations.

I highly recommend PowerShell for developers working in a Microsoft Windows environment. Especially if you're working with large amounts of data.

I stumbled across a nice online regular expression testing tool yesterday. It's called RegExPal and has been a handy tool for writing regular expressions and testing them before implementation.

Today I glanced over at a pile of NES games that I have. I thought it'd be fun to play a few of them. Instead of hooking up the NES I installed NEStopia for Linux. NEStopia is a free emulator that I have enjoyed using in the past. Once installed, I then downloaded a few free ROMs from The NES Files. I may have opened a can of worms because there are a lot of games I want to play again. Games such as Battle Toads, Bubble Bobble, Friday the 13th, Fester's Quest, Donkey Kong, RBI Baseball, the list goes on and on.

Around 2001 a friend (Pete Lindeman) and I started a web hosting and development company called, Veloy Technologies. We had an amazing store front office on Walnut Street in Mankato, Minnesota. We were up and running for a few years until our largest client acquired us. I believe we were ahead of our time back then. I only wish that I had been mature enough eighteen years ago to handle the stress and responsibilities of owning a business. I think we could have done bigger and better things with a sales team and proper management.

Below is a screen shot of our company's website in 2001. We also had a separate site for technical support for our web hosting clients, our very own IRC server running for live help, as well as our own web-based email client that we developed specifically for our customers' use.

I some times find myself looking through backups of photos, websites, code, etc. for fun. I stumbled across this website mock-up from 2008 by my old friend Ken Adams. I ran with this for a couple of years. He has always created fun graphics for me to work with and I always enjoy working with him.

It's been eleven years now. I look at this and I just can't believe how far web development has come in such a short time. It continues to change rapidly and I do believe that it has to be one of the most exciting fields to be involved in.