bit of windows services

Have you ever played with the command 'sc' ? Me not. Me start today. Me like it :)

Trying to set up SVN to start as a service, I found it very interesting. The 'sc' command allows you to create,delete and play with any of your Windows services available in your Start\Run\services.msc

Note: be careful ! I am not to be held responsible if you accidentally delete your core Win services, so do this on your own risk !!

It's been several months now that I've had a "test" service (not even sure how I created it, must have been some play sometime). But I could not delete it, actually I did not had the time to look for how to delete it.

Now, accidentally, I've found the solution:

C:\>sc delete test
[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS


whoooow ! this is fun !

and there's more to it: if you have a longer service name, try first the GetKeyName option, like the following example:

C:\>sc GetKeyName "Kerio Personal Firewall 4"
[SC] GetServiceKeyName SUCCESS Name = KPF4

C:\>sc delete KPF4
[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

(Kerio personal fw was another service I could not get rid in ages, thus it stayed 'disabled', waiting for me to discover the sc command. )

Now it's time to return to SVN ...

message for UK's tabloids

I was born and I am living in Romania. For those who does not know where this country is on the map, google for it. Lots of bright people were born in this country, as they were anywhere in the world.

Now, there is a big fuzz in some of UK's tabloids about Romania joining EU (European Union). Nobody seems to care, except for all romanian media. I hear it all over the radio and television that UK is afraid all romanians will eventually end up working in UK.

For those worried about it, here's a message:










PS: if I owe credit to this picture, please let me know, I think this message is genious :)

sort of visio alternative

I've just discovered gliffy , an beautiful example of Ajax powered application which can be freely used to draw diagrams. For a entry-level user of Visio (like me) this can be very useful.

I don't need all the power and fancy stuff of Visio, I just need to sometimes draw diagrams representing different things.

You can export to SVG, PNG or GIF, you can even publish on line the drawed diagrams.

Check it out, I really like it.

up for a new adventure

well yes, a new adventure, this is what I'm calling switching my home desktop into Fedora Core 6.
Still dual booting with windoze for the moment, until I'll get some skills into mangling the linux . Skills which I had about 4 years ago, when I did managed some Domino servers into redhat 6, aix and solaris platforms.

Good old days !

I had some issues though, was not so easy installing, due to some strange hardware: I had an EpoX MB with AMD Sempron 2800+, 2 SATA disks and one IDE. I installed Fedora on the IDE disk, making sure I would not screw my data from the SATA disks (meaning keeping these disks unconnected).
Then, after GRUB modifying into trying to convince it to dual boot, it would not recognized my SATA disks, thus booting Fedora and not Windows :)

I scratched the web for 2 days when I found something related to Epox motherboards and Linux. Seems the SATA controller was lying somehow to GRUB and was not sending the real parameters of the SATA disks, thus GRUB could not boot the Windows.
Solution was to throw away the MB and get a new one, from GigaByte. Together with it I also changed the processor with a AMD Athlon 3000+ on 64bits - as a gift:) and everything is running smooth.

Reinstalled fedora x84_64 this time, which surprisingly comes with the xGL effects I mentioned into a previous post.

I actually feel I'm 5 years younger, there's a lot of new stuff to learn, starting with remembering the vi commands.
I'd like to see how difficult will be to run linux as a desktop, considering I'm not a total newbie. We'll see the following months.