Category: Technology

Upcoming Features from Ignite 2019

  1. Private channels should be coming this week … not my tenant yet, but soon
  2. Multi-window functionality where chats, calls, and such can pop out into another window
  3. Live captioning should land later this year — this is an obvious great feature for people with reduced hearing or frequency loss, live “closed captioning” is awesome if you’re working from a noisy location too
  4. Microsoft Whiteboard moved into general availability — it’s been a preview for quite some time now
  5. “Attendee” roll will prevent people from inadvertently sharing their screen in the middle of a meeting
  6. My Staff portal that allows managers to perform password resets (and maybe unlocks) for their employees. This is something I’ve done as custom code in IDM platforms, but it’s nice to see Microsoft incorporating ideas that reduce down-time due to password challenges.
  7. I’ll be curious to see if the healthcare-specific features move into other verticals — MS rolled out a feature that allows you to designate a contact when you’re in surgery (basically redirect all of my messages to Bob because I’m busy right now) that seemed like it would be quite useful in enterprise or education uses. The “patient coordination” feature they talk about might work as a contact management tool out of the medical realm too.
  8. URLs in Teams will be protected like the links in other Office 365 programs — if you click on a link and see something about “Advanced Threat Protection” … that’d be why 🙂

Reverting a Single File with Git

Git revert is great for resetting the entire project to a particular state – I went down a bad path, really don’t want to do this, and resetting to the state I was in this morning is exactly what I want to do. Sometimes, though … that’s not the case. I added a couple of debugging lines to a file that I don’t really need. Or I’ve gone down a bad path here but have good work in a few other files too. In those cases, you can revert a single file to the latest committed version. Run “git status” and “git diff” to confirm that it is an uncommited change.

To revert a single file to its latest committed state, use “git checkout – filename” – you can see the added line has disappeared.

 

Extracting the Transcript from Microsoft Stream Videos

Updated script available at https://www.rushworth.us/lisa/?p=6854

While Microsoft does not provide a way to export the transcript from Stream videos (thus recorded Teams meetings), it is possible to get something a nicer than the select/copy/paste from the transcript box. Click the video settings and select “Show transcript”

Display the browser developer tools – In Firefox, select the “Web Developer” sub-menu from the browser menu and select “Web Console”

This console is often used for displaying errors in a website, but it can also be used to send commands to the browser. There’s a “>>” prompt – click next to it and you’ll have a flashing cursor.

Paste this into the console:

window.angular.element(window.document.querySelectorAll('.transcript-list')).scope().$ctrl.transcriptLines.map((t) => { return t.eventData.text; })

… and hit enter. Another line will appear below what you’ve entered. Right-click on that new entry and select “Copy Object”. Now paste into a text editor or Microsoft Word.

The output could use a little cleanup. You’ll see “\r\n” anywhere there’s a newline. This

Becomes “a new tip to make things quicker. So\r\nshare your knowledge” … you could replace “\r\n” with a space (I find the newlines to be superfluous) or use a regex replacement to replace “\\r\\n” (literal string, the backslash escapes the backslash to retain it) with “\n” (an actual newline)

Each time-stamped bit of the transcript is in a separate set of quotes – I’ve got a quick replacement that takes

",\n "

And replaces it with a newline … so

Becomes

Depending on the target audience … for me, that’s where I stop. To send the transcript to someone else, I manually clean up the spaces and quote before the first line and the quote-comma on the last line.

Android 10 Backup Issue

Pixel XL with Android 10 (build QP1A.191005.007.A1). Enabled Backup, selected a backup account (only one account on the device), and found the ‘Back up now’ button was grayed out. There is a strange work around — temporarily removing the security pin. The ‘Back up now’ button is active, and a backup can be performed successfully.

*But* I have to re-register my fingerprints when the pin is disabled / re-enabled. Which means I’ve got to type my long and complex banking password on the little phone keyboard. Not cool. I was able to back up my phone using ADB but needed to input a passphrase on the device to encrypt the backup. Not sure if there’s something about the screen lock security that requires the backup to be encrypted … which then precludes the magic to-the-cloud backup from proceeding?

To back up device from command line:

adb backup -apk -shared -all -f ./backup.ab

< on device, type a passphrase and approve the device backup>

 

Microsoft Teams: Cross-posting to multiple channels

Click on “Post in multiple channels”

To post in additional channels, click “Select chann…”

Check off the channels into which you want the post written – this can be a channel in any Teams space where you are able to post messages. Click “Update”.

When your message is posted, an indicator will appear letting everyone know it was posted in multiple channels. No, there doesn’t appear to be a way to see which channels – that’s probably a permission / information leakage nightmare (post something into the “Mass Layoffs” channel that I shouldn’t know exists … I shouldn’t be able to see that channel name). But the glif gives you some confirmation if you think you’ve seen this info elsewhere.

Note – the posts are not linked to each other. If someone replies in one channel, the post in the other channels will not include the reply. So while this is a quick way to disseminate the same information to various teams … you’re starting multiple conversations too.

Also note — there doesn’t appear to be a way to edit cross-posted messages.

Git Log

Git log can be used to get a quick summary of the differences between two branches. The three dots between the branch names indicates you want a “symmetric difference”. That is the set of commits that are in the branch on the left or the branch on the right but not in both branches.

The –left-right option prefixes each commit with an ‘<’ or ‘>’ indicating which “side” has the commit. The –oneline option prints the abbreviated commit ID and the first line of the commit message.

Showing the differences between your local uat branch and the remote uat branch:

D:\git\gittest>git log –left-right –oneline origin/uat…uat

> 961f53a (uat) Merge branch ‘ossa-123’ into uat

> 803096b (origin/ossa-123, ossa-123) Added additional files

> cf9c419 Added initial code to branch

The top line is the most recent commit, the bottom line is the oldest commit that does not exist in both branches. I can see that the uat branch in my local repo is not missing anything from the remote (there are no commits with “<” indicating changes in the remote that do not exist in my local copy) but I have local changes which have not yet been pushed: two code commits plus the merge commit which incorporated the code commits to my local repo’s uat branch. The head of the local and remote ossa-123 branch are at the commit just prior to the merge, so on my local repo that branch has been fully merged into UAT and I just need to push uat up to the remote.

Additional options to enhance output:

–cherry-pick will omit any changes that represent the same changes in both branches (or –cherry-mark to mark those commits with an “=” flag)

–graph uses an ASCII chart to depict branch relationships.

* The three dots mean something different in git diff than in git log. In git diff, mean “what are the differences between the right-hand branch and the common ancestor shared by both the right and left-hand branches”.

Two dots in git diff mean is the differences that are in the branch on the left or the branch on the right but not in both branches.

In git log, two dots displays only commits unique to the second branch. Since commits and differences are not exactly the same thing, two and three dots don’t exactly have the opposite meaning between diff and log. But the meaning is not logically consistent.

 

Postfix IPv6 Loopback Failure

I needed to send email messages from a PHP form, and the web server at work uses Postfix. So … I’m getting Postfix set up to relay mail for the first time in a decade or two 🙂 I thought I’d just have to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add “relayhost = [something.example.com]”.

Nope. The service fails to start with nothing particularly indicative — just a [FAILED] status from the init script. Attempting to start Postfix outside of the init script is far more informative:

[lisa@564240601ac2 init.d]# /usr/sbin/postfix start
postfix: fatal: parameter inet_interfaces: no local interface found for ::1

Turns out I’ve got to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and tell it to use IPv4 only:

# Enable IPv4, and IPv6 if supported
inet_protocols = ipv4

 

Testing Procedural Code with PHPUnit

You can use PHPUnit to test procedural code — in this case, I’m testing the output of a website. I have some Selenium tests for UI components but wanted to use the shell executor for functional testing. In the test code, you can populate the _SERVER and _POST (or _GET) arrays and simulate the web environment.

<?php
    namespace phpUnitTests\CircuitSearch;
    class CircuitExportTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase{
        private function _execute(array $paramsPost = array(), array $paramsServer = array() ) {
            $_POST = $paramsPost;
            $_SERVER = $paramsServer;
            ob_start();
            include "../../myWebSitePage.php";
            return ob_get_clean();
        }
        public function testUsageLogging(){
            $argsPost = array('strInput'=>'SearchValue', 'strReportFormat'=>'JSON');
            $argsServer = array("DOCUMENT_ROOT" => '/path/to/website/code/html/', "HOSTNAME" => getHostByName(),
                                "SERVER_ADDR" => getHostByName(php_uname('n')), "PWD" => '/path/to/website/code/html/subcomponent/path');
            $this->assertEquals('{}', $this->_execute($argsPost, $argsServer));
        }
    }
?>

Running the test, my web output is compared to the static string in assertEquals. In this case, I am searching for a non-existent item, nothing is returned, and I expect to get empty braces. I could use AssertsRegExp or or AssertsStringContainsString to verify the specifics of a real result set.

Docker for Windows: Using Built-in k8s

I just started using k8s built into Docker for Windows, but I couldn’t connect because the target machine actively refused the connection.

C:\Users\lisa>kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"14", GitVersion:"v1.14.6", GitCommit:"96fac5cd13a5dc064f7d9f4f23030a6aeface6cc", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-08-19T11:13:49Z", GoVersion:"go1.12.9", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"windows/amd64"}
Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp [::1]:8080: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

No idea — it’s all internal traffic, but I resorted to turning off my firewall anyway just to see what would happen. Nothing. Turns out I need a KUBECONFIG environment variable pointing to the config file

C:\Users\lisa>set | grep KUB
KUBECONFIG=C:\Users\lisa.RUSHWORTH.000\.kube\config

Applied the yaml file and started the proxy

C:\Users\lisa>kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/dashboard/v1.10.1/src/deploy/recommended/kubernetes-dashboard.yaml
secret/kubernetes-dashboard-certs created
serviceaccount/kubernetes-dashboard created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/kubernetes-dashboard-minimal created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/kubernetes-dashboard-minimal created
deployment.apps/kubernetes-dashboard created
service/kubernetes-dashboard created

C:\Users\lisa>kubectl proxy
Starting to serve on 127.0.0.1:8001

Working! Get the token from

kubectl -n kube-system describe secret default

And access the dashboard.

 

A reminder for myself — the totally not obvious package name for the kubeadm binary on the CHANGELOG link list is Node. Go figure!