Chinkes At Home

Author: john

  • A better way to cheat at voting

    I was flipping thru Facebook a little while ago and a few things popped up together: this is actually what america would look like without gerrymandering and Schwarzenegger rips gerrymandering congress.

    This got me to thinking, what could I do? I reached out to my local representative and am waiting a response. In the meantime I started looking at what’s out there on the internet and found these –

    I agree that using computers vs. people to make districts can produce unfair outcomes without any trouble. I’ll have to try the game and see what I can learn. After all, you put bad values into a computer program you will get bad output. And what is fair anyway?

    All this led me back to a series of videos from C.G.P. Grey where he covers this a few different ways. Perhaps the issue isn’t Gerrymandering but ‘winner takes all’?

    Something to ponder.

  • parse array for valid usernames

    I was helping a colleague with a list of email addresses and trying to get a valid username out of it. He is going to get a list of emails every week so writing a script to parse it out for him seemed the best idea. This is only part of the process; there are steps to actually create the account if not already existing and more. So this is mainly an example of text parsing to get the info you want based on a few simple rules.

    clear
$emails = "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "Perumel.Aranin.Senthenekrishnin"
$usernames = @()

function Get-Username() {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
 takes a given email address and makes a username based on specific rules
.DESCRIPTION
 Converts a given email address to a username. 
 The username cannot be more than 20 char long, if the first and last name combined are too long only first initial is used
 If the email has a number in it, it is retained in the new username
.PARAMETER
 -email: the email to work with
 -userName: if the email is not parsable, a username can be given to use instead (or in addition to)
.EXAMPLE
 Get-Username -email "[email protected]" -userName "jchinkes"
.NOTES
#>
 Param(
 [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)][string]$email,
 [string]$userName
 )
 $fname = $null
 $lname = $null
 $nameNum = $null
 try {
 #split the email (do we need a test for valid email address?)
 $splitString1 = $email.split('@')
 #take the username of email and split on dot
 $splitString2 = $splitString1[0].split('.')
 
 if($splitString2.Count -le 1){
 #error checking if there is no first or last name
 #is there a better test?
 #use $userName here somehow
 }
 
 if($splitString2.Count -ge 3){
 #more than three items in the array
 if($splitString2[2] -match "^[\d\.]+$"){
 #the third item is a number
 $nameNum = $splitString2[2]
 $lname = $splitString2[1]
 }
 else {
 #third item is a name
 $lname = $splitString2[2]
 }
 }
 else {
 #two part user name
 $lname = $splitString2[1]
 }
 $fname = $splitString2[0]
 
 if($nameNum -ne $null){
 #eval name to see if needs trimming
 if ($fname.get_Length() + $lname.get_Length() -gt 18){
 #trim fname and keep lname
 $fname = $fname.Substring(0,1)
 if ($lname.get_Length() -gt 16){
 #need to trim lname too!
 $lname = $lname.Substring(0,16)
 }
 }
 return "$fname.$lname.$nameNum"
 }
 else {
 if ($fname.get_Length() + $lname.get_Length() -gt 20){
 #trim fname and keep lname
 $fname = $fname.Substring(0,1)
 if ($lname.get_Length() -gt 18){
 #need to trim lname too!
 $lname = $lname.Substring(0,18)
 }
 }
 return "$fname.$lname"
 }
 }
 catch {
 "There was an error- $($_.Exception.Message)"
 }
}


foreach($email in $emails){
 $usernames += Get-Username -email $email
}

$usernames

  • Make Link List with PowerShell

    A script to get a list of links off a given page. I found these two examples to start from: http://normansolutions.co.uk/post/using-powershell-to-check-all-pages-in-website, https://www.petri.com/testing-uris-urls-powershell.

    clear
function get-URLlist($testPage, [int]$linkDepth){
    #set the counter
    [int]$i = 0     #loop thru the list of links, going to sub-pages until the counter equals the given link depth
    while($linkDepth -gt $i) {
        foreach($link in $testPage.Links) {
            #only look at links on the same site
            if($link.href.ToString() -notlike "http*") {
                #if not already in the array, add it
                if(!($sitemap.ContainsKey($link.innerText))){
                    $sitemap.add($link.innerText, $url + "/" + $link.href)
                    $testPage = Invoke-WebRequest "http://$url"
                    #check out the sub-pages one less level than the given link depth
                    $sitemap = get-URLlist -testPage $testPage -linkDepth $($linkDepth-1)
            }
        }
    }
    $i++
}
return $sitemap
} try{
    #set your domain and the array to hold the links
    $url = "www.domain.com"
    $sitemap = @{}     #read the page
    $testPage = Invoke-WebRequest "http://$url"
    #get all the links into the array
    $sitemap = get-URLlist -testPage $testPage -linkDepth 5
    $sitemap
}
catch{
    "There was an error- `r`n$($_.Exception.Message)"
}

    I wrote this with an understanding of what the links look like on this page, so the function formats them with the given URL.