{"id":13741,"date":"2011-06-03T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2011\/06\/03\/useless-typingor-playing-with-powershell\/"},"modified":"2011-06-03T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T00:01:00","slug":"useless-typingor-playing-with-powershell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/useless-typingor-playing-with-powershell\/","title":{"rendered":"Useless Typing…or Playing with PowerShell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/b>: Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP, Sean Kearney, talks about a fun Windows PowerShell script he calls “useless typing.”\nMicrosoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. This week we will have one guest blogger for the entire week. Sean Kearney has written a series of blog posts about Windows PowerShell and the Legacy, as well as today’s blog about having some fun with Windows PowerShell. I am not going to be redundant by reposting his biography<\/a> each and every day.\nTake it away, Sean…\nSometimes we code in Windows PowerShell to improve our jobs at work.\nThen there are other times…well, we just play.\nToday I played. Maybe I over played…\nSeveral times, I’ve seen Start-Demo<\/b> in action, which is a script to display a Windows PowerShell script while executing it. Presenters use it commonly. But I kept seeing it on the screen and thinking to myself, “I should make that look like somebody REALLY is typing it…”\nWell, that wasn’t difficult. A simple string with a bit of Random, like so:<\/p>\n

\n

$Sentence=“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, because my Cat ate my lunch!”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

foreach ($x in 1..$Sentence.Length) {<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Write-host $Sentence[$x-1] –nonewline<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Start-sleep –milliseconds (GET-RANDOM 100)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

}<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

WRITE-HOST<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/em> <\/i>\nGreat! I’m done!\nWRONG!\nYou see, just like anything fun, once you start playing, things can get out of control.  \nI decided that I wanted NOISE! Some bizarre piece of my head snapped open and said, “There MUST be, nay… there SHALL be, the sound of a typewriter.” (Note: the complete Start-Typewriter<\/b> Windows PowerShell script is located in the Scripting Guys Script Repository<\/a>.)\nSo I started digging for some typewriter sounds. I tried cheating by just using Invoke-Item<\/b>, but the problem was that the sounds fell all over each other. So I dug online and found a great article written by Windows PowerShell MVP, Shay Levy, about Playing Sounds in PowerShell<\/a>. It worked perfectly, except I needed a synchronous play (I wanted to make sure that nothing happened until the noise of the typing went away).\nSo I assigned New-Object <\/b>to $Sound<\/b> per Shay’s article, and then I ran Get-Member<\/b> against it, as shown here.<\/p>\n

\n

$SOUND = NEW-Object System.Media.SoundPlayer<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

$SOUND | GET-MEMBER<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/em> <\/i>\nI found a method called Playsync()<\/strong>,<\/strong> <\/strong>which met my needs perfectly. I turned that into a useful function in my script called PlaySound<\/b>. If I pass it the location of the WAV file to play, it will play it.<\/p>\n

\n

function playsound {<\/span><\/span><\/span>
        param($Location)<\/span>
    <\/span>
        $sound=new-object system.media.soundplayer<\/span>
        $sound.SoundLocation=($Location)<\/span>
        $sound.playsync()<\/span>
<\/span><\/span>    }<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The next task I decided on was to have it pick that sound randomly. There are a bunch of ways to do it, but this is for fun. I stored them all in a variable called $List<\/b> with Get-ChildItem<\/b> pointing to the folder with the files.<\/p>\n

\n

$LIST=GET-CHILDITEM C:PointlessTypingCLACK?.WAV<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At this point, I could just write a little function called PlayTypeSound <\/strong>that would (strangely enough) make a typing noise by playing a random one from the available WAV file list.<\/p>\n

\n

function playtypenoise {<\/span><\/span><\/span>
        param($LIST)<\/span>
        playsound (GET-RANDOM $LIST)<\/span>
<\/span><\/span>    }<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At some point, my brain walked out the back door and decided that I should have the “ever perfect computer” make mistakes. So, as the song would go: “Conjunction junction, another function…” Every so often, I would have it type two completely random letters, mutter something, and then undo it, as shown here.<\/p>\n

\n

function oops {<\/span><\/span><\/span>
        <\/span>
            playtypenoise $LIST<\/span>
    <\/span>
            $typo1=[char](97+(GET-RANDOM 26))<\/span>
<\/span><\/span>            $typo2=[char](97+(GET-RANDOM 26))<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

            write-host $typo1$typo2 –nonewline<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

            playsound ‘C:Pointlesstypingdoh.wav’<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

            start-sleep -milliseconds (GET-RANDOM 100)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

            $undo=”`b`b  `b`b”<\/span><\/span><\/span>
            <\/span>
<\/span><\/span>            write-host $undo –nonewline<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

            $playtypenoise<\/span><\/span><\/span>
            start-sleep -milliseconds (GET-RANDOM 100)<\/span>
        <\/span>
<\/span><\/span>    }<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/em> <\/i>\nI even wrote a silly function called FlipCoin<\/b> to decide (based on parameters) if the odds were against our typist friend.<\/p>\n

\n

function flipcoin {<\/span><\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>    param($odds=25,$base=50)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    IF ((GET-RANDOM $BASE) -gt $odds) { return $TRUE }<\/span><\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>}<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/em> <\/i>\nThen I went completely mad. I decided that a single line wasn’t enough. OH no…NOOOO! (Muah haha hahah!) I had to have a paragraph! So I tweaked the function a bit and pulled it together. Step through each line in the paragraph, type them suckers, make noise, irritate the neighbors…<\/p>\n

\n

foreach ($line in $paragraph) {<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


    $length=($line.Length)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

    foreach ($x in 0..$length) { <\/span><\/span>
<\/span>            <\/span>
        $letter=$line[$x]<\/span>
        <\/span>
        write-host $letter -NoNewline<\/span>
    <\/span>
<\/span>        if (flipcoin 19) { playtypenoise $LIST }<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

        if (flipcoin 47) { oops }<\/span><\/span>
<\/span>}<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/em>\nSo I played. I REALLY played. If you’re curious to hear and see this monstrosity, you can download my tiny ZIP file<\/a>, and store the contents of all of this into a little folder called C:PointlessTyping<\/b>.<\/em> Run the script Start-Typing.PS1<\/b> to get it all into memory. Then execute either of the following:<\/p>\n

\n

START-TYPEWRITER –paragraph “To be or not to be, that is…. that is…. oh darn it what was my line?”<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

or<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

START-TYPEWRITER –paragraph (GET-CONTENT C:SomeReallyHonkingHugeTextFile.txt)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/em>\n…and, errrr, be prepared to get some funny looks if you run it on a bus…\nCheers!\nSean, The Energized Tech\nGuest Blogger Week will continue tomorrow when Sean will talk about Windows PowerShell and working with legacy systems. This is a DO NOT DARE MISS series of vital blogs that has been months in the making. A special thank-you to Sean for writing this week’s blog posts. Hope you enjoy them.\nI invite you to follow me on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com<\/a>, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum<\/a>. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.<\/p>\n

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP, Sean Kearney, talks about a fun Windows PowerShell script he calls “useless typing.” Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. This week we will have one guest blogger for the entire week. Sean Kearney has written a series of blog posts about Windows PowerShell and the Legacy, as well as today’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[56,2,3,4,154,45],"class_list":["post-13741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-guest-blogger","tag-running","tag-scripting-guy","tag-scripting-techniques","tag-sean-kearney","tag-windows-powershell"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Summary: Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP, Sean Kearney, talks about a fun Windows PowerShell script he calls “useless typing.” Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, here. This week we will have one guest blogger for the entire week. Sean Kearney has written a series of blog posts about Windows PowerShell and the Legacy, as well as today’s […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}