Black Mountain

Recently had a conversation where someone needed help adding up the last column in a tab separated text file. It looked like a calling plan report. In channel tons of people brought up all sorts of *nix based tools which I thought odd since it was a Windows based IRC channel.

I've occasionally had a need for something like this anyway so poked at it for a few minutes and came up with the below one liner which I will leave here so my bad memory can find it again.

import-csv .\test.txt -Header "date","something","type","cost" -delimiter "`t" | Measure-Object cost -sum
 
Count    : 12
Average  :
Sum      : 2.38
Maximum  :
Minimum  :
Property : cost

Since the text file doesn't have any header rows, you have to 'add them' through the import command.

Here is that test.txt file example.

14-Dec-11 	0-234 	Long Distance 	0.32
14-Dec-11 	0-960 	Long Distance 	0.04
09-Dec-11 	1-237 	Directory Assistance Call Comp 	1.25
09-Dec-11 	1-960 	Directory Assistance Call Comp 	0.15
22-Nov-11 	0-234 	Long Distance 	0.12
22-Nov-11 	0-960 	Long Distance 	0.01
16-Nov-11 	0-234 	Long Distance 	0.16
16-Nov-11 	0-960 	Long Distance 	0.02
12-Nov-11 	0-234 	Long Distance 	0.20
12-Nov-11 	0-960 	Long Distance 	0.02
11-Nov-11 	0-234 	Long Distance 	0.08
11-Nov-11 	0-960 	Long Distance 	0.01

Update:
A user (spade) in #PowerShell contributed this approach as well.

gc data2.txt | % {$sum=0} { $sum += ($_ -split "`t")[-1] } { $sum }

In a given environment there can be many short term solutions that over time grow into long term headaches. We have a situation where we need to provide access to RDP sessions through Citrix. The original solution by previous admins was to create a custom RDP icon configured to the server in question and publish it in Citrix. This resulted in a rather 'busy' screen in Citrix and intermittant update issue.

A co-worker asked about PowerShell doing this and I said something off handed about Windows Forms to generate a menu selection should be do-able. He found a nice Windows.Forms example and then did a hard coded elseif menu (which seemed as bad as all the links to me). I came up with an improvement where we pulled the server/ip list from a file and used Select and Eric Woodford added a nicer $choice option with the added bonus of turning the line for launching RDP into a variable. This is good because we have a similar issue with putty links. This should wipe out 80 some odd custom published Citirx apps.

Came across this link on Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support. This shows as a visual the reality of what happens in the Android eco-system. The iPhone has the advantage of being owned as a vertical platform across it's hardware and software (I rather dislike iTunes so it's not really an option for me).

While the Windows Phone is not on the chart, as a contrast we have this post Updates: Windows Phone 7.5 now available more broadly. This shows how much effort it is to have a diversity of hardware platforms yet a consistency of versions in a global market yet they are doing it. Add in things like the integrated hubs and that everything just flows together more seemlessly for me, it ends being the obvious choice.

Microsoft continues to travel a path of having all it's users have a consistent core experience, yet still maintain a diversity of hardware choice.

Found via Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support