I have found many times when writing stuff in PHP that I have come across a need to generate a random number. That’s not too bad in and of itself, but what about when you need a unique ID key or something like that. For example, say you are writing the next best helpdesk application and need unique case numbers and don’t want to simply use a counter. For whatever reason, I put this little function together and it has served me well. Check it out …

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PERL is a wonderful scripting language, it is extremely powerful, flexible and portable. It also lacks a couple basic functions that other languages have built in. Fear not my friend, just like the PERL round function, I have functions for other things as well!

One thing I miss is a trim function. They have chop and chomp, but that doesn’t always fit what I want. Below I have included a few suns that will get the job done nicely, check it out. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post, I’d like to do two things.  First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps.  What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable.  They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really.  It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations.  That’s hard to beat!  Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey all your PERL junkies like me, I have a present for you. Anyone that has done any coding at all other PERL will know (and miss) the round function that most other languages have built in. For those that may not know, the round function lets you do just that, round a number to the specified digit. So, instead of having to use 3.14159265 as an answer for a particular equation, you could round it to 3.14. Nice, huh?

Well, here is a neato little round function that you can drop into your PERL scripts and call to actually round numbers instead of cutting them off with ceil or cut. Check it out:

sub round {
  my($number) = shift;
  return int($number + .5 * ($number <=> 0));
}

There you go!

I guess this could be considered part of the password post that I put up a few minutes ago, but I wanted to post this script over in the forums that is a PERL script which generates passwords for you. Check it out, take a look and maybe you can get something beneficial from it!

I am one of those type of people that like to make backup copies of files before I tinker with them, especially when I am modifying important files like system stuff. It’s always a good idea to make a backup copy before you edit something so you can put it back if you break it. For that reason, I wrote this simple little PERL script that I then put somewhere in my path so I can run it from anywhere. I call it simply “bu” so that it’s easy to type and use. What it does is copy the target file you specify, to a file of the same name only with a date stamp appended to it. I have found this to be a really handy tool, so I thought I would share.

Take a look at the script here.

Check it out, I hope you find it as useful as I have.