Posted on

How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell

The Remote Desktop Procotol (RDP) is still strong and it’s not going away anytime soon, indeed there are companies like CITRIX that have built part of their success creating robust management for it.
As you can Imagine, there a lot of ways to manage RDP according to the type of implementations or tools involved, so some corner cases will not be cover in this article. There are also tools like gateways that will provide a central management point for all sessions, but let’s assume that these tools are not available to you or not part your infrastructure design. Continue reading “How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell”

Posted on

Check if a mailbox exists with Python and smtplib

Every day we discover different tools that should make our life easier, enchanted by the promise of achieving the best result without any effort. If we can master that tool or technique we can solve many problems even without understanding or finding the root cause, right?

So often I’m guilty of making that assumption, because it not just lazyness it’s harder and it takes time and patience to break complicated puzzles into small simple pieces. Even more to put it all those parts back together to finally find answers to questions like: How? When? Why?

Continue reading “Check if a mailbox exists with Python and smtplib”

Posted on

Automating Document Conversion from Markdown with Pandoc

I’m gradually moving away from reStructuredText (RST) and I use more MarkDown(MD) to write generic documentation.  In fact, I found myself using md files more and more and I really like the approach of focusing on content and let the tool generate a well formatted document according to the type needed.

If MarkDown doesn’t need much introduction the tool I’m using to convert .md is called Pandoc.

Pandoc is a universal document converter and from an MD file can generate multiple output format. It’s  open-source and really simple to use. Continue reading “Automating Document Conversion from Markdown with Pandoc”