So lets break from computers just to something that makes me giggle a little. Last night was bad. So we were going to have Tuna sandwichs for dinner, and I got the good idea to make a couple of tuna melts. So I get the butter from the fridge, open the new stick and finish putting the first sandwich in the pan, this is when things started to go really bad. I knocked something on the counter and it knocked the butter and tray off. The tray landed right side up, on top of the butter. so picking that up the and then the smoke detector goes off. I flip the sandwich and it is only slightly blackend. Not a huge deal, just pay attention to the other side, and a pepsi sounds like a good idea. So I go to get the new box of pepsi from the bottom of the fridge, and it is stuck. A slight tug should get it out, along with the glass shelve above it, the  two gallon jug of water, the picture of tea and bottles of beer. So after unloading the shelf, one handed, pulling the soda out, putting everything back in, i get back to my totally burnt tuna melt. That was the only  sandwich that gave its life for the other two to be good. 

But wait, don't order yet! there is more! 

Adter dinner, I managed to step on and stub every toy and peice of furniture in the small apartment, on my way to taking the garbage out, all the way out, to the curb. This is normally not a big deal, and is usually a simple task, just roll the cans down the shared driveway to the curb. First can goes on, second can gets caught on the neighbors rear view mirror and does no damage at all to it. The third can magically catches on a different spot on the mirror and runs into the happy SUV. I didn't look last night at the damage to it cause i was scared it would be really bad, no issues though just a small couple of scratches. 

And the last point of amusement for the evening. 

After the trash went out, Tiki asked me to wrap up the tuna and put it my nemisis for the evening, the fridge. I open the draw to get a piece of saran wrap, and start pulling it, holding it in place, like i have done thousands of times, and it pops out, rolls into the drawer, bounces out and hits the floor. 

At this point i couldnt stop laughing and told Tiki and she sent me to bed. 

So how about this for a weekly update. Nothing happening and nothing going on. Lets see if I can do a weekly tip. Today will be a Linux tip, specifically the Red Hat based distributions. So you want to know what is loading when you start the machine. There is the command chkconfig, that when run shows you the options you can use.

       chkconfig --list [name]
       chkconfig --add name
       chkconfig --del name
       chkconfig [--level levels] name <on|off|reset>
       chkconfig [--level levels] name

so with chkconfig –list it will show you everything that you can enable and disable on the box, I am not listing it here for space/time reasons, also I am not near a linux box at the moment.
So chkconfig shows you everything running, so next let us combine it with a pipe and a grep
chkconfig –list | grep on

This will show you on the services that are turned on, all of them, no matter what run level as long as it is on.

Lets say you are looking for mysql, so you can get specific on it and do
chkconfig –list | grep mysql
if it shows as being off just do a
chkconfig mysql on
and that will turn it on for run levels 3, 4, and 5.

That is it for tonight.

So I had a blog post all done up and good to go, when my computer blue screened. It is my own fault, I just plugged a hard drive into it so that I could work from it today instead of killing laptop batteries. I just cant remember what I had typed out.

So for that you get nothing other then my first real perl script

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $word = "Times";
my $number = 12;

print "$number $word $number is ", $number * $number "\n";

yup that's it.Simple, to the point, and does something. It is a begining and that is the important part. I am not trying to be a perl expert or anything, I am just trying to get the basics of it, after all these years.

I think I am also going to work on some powershell scripting as well sooner or later.