Before I lost data, you would have seen a few posts on my favorite flavor of Linux - Ubuntu. I’ve been a casual user since the days of Mandrake 7 and Fedora Core 1. But ever since Canonical Ltd started releasing versions of it, I’ve been hooked.

I tried out all the versions and watched as they’ve progressively gotten better and better. With the release of 7.04 I found it working very well out of the box, so much so I installed it on my laptop and forced my wife to use it (she wasn’t exactly happy about that but got use to it).

But like most OS’s in my house they come and go with a base install of Windows generally dominating the machines. The only real reason is for games. Other than that, Linux (Ubuntu more specifically) works out just fine. Even more so now!

Posted in Computers, Linux, Nerdom, Programming, Regular Express 2 Comments »

Granted, I’m not trying to sound like a smarty pants here because I really know absolutely nothing about cron and how it works.

So let’s start from the beginning (moves hands to symbolize starting a flash back sequence)

From Wiki

In computing, cron is a time-based scheduling service in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name is derived from Greek chronos (??????), meaning time.

cron has been recreated several times in its history.

Say you want something to automatically run on your server (linux/unix) at certain timed intervals, and example would be, oh say a backup or other routines that need to be run at certain intervals. On a Drupal site I run, they have a built in script to update things using cron. It will update a list of rss feeds and other routine maintenance items. So I first started out with looking at the Drupal site for any documentation (shhhh, it’s not like I asked a guy for directions) on how to set it up. There were plenty of examples shown, but didn’t make a whole of sense to me.

Posted in Bash, Programming No Comments »