The drush script which provides command line access to drupal functionality emits an error message when run as a cron job

tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified

Debian Etch has been serving me well for a few years with wonderfully easy and infrequent maintenance.

However it’s at the end of its life

http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121

So I’ve upgraded to Lenny following these instructions

It’s great that Amazon actually offer a version of their MP3 downloader for Linux - just a shame that it doesn’t work for many distributions.

Fortunately clamz is available

It’s a great little command line utility with a very forgettable name.

Test the hard drive with

smartctl -t long /dev/hd?

This may take hours to run and will do so as a background process.

I recently bought a Sony e-reader, the main Linux package to support this is calibre but I found that it wouldn’t automatically sync my ebooks.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/user_manual/faq.html#what-devices-does-app-support The FAQ says

The linux kernel can export two version of SYSFS, one of which is deprecated.

Debian has a very strict policy on free and legal software. This helps keep everyone honest, but sometimes a pragmatic approach is called for. MP3 is a file format that is patent encumbered - but also in universal use.

I’ve just installed Debian Lenny and generally am impressed with how well things are auto detected and configured - so much easier than a few years ago - and in many ways easier than a Windows install where you have to constantly find 3rd party drivers to get things working.

However getting wifi running was a bit trickier (largely because of FCC regulations  affecting licenses and default settings).

This document got me most of the way

I just read an interesting article about Windows 7 - it will include a virtual machine to run windows XP for backwards compatibility.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132177

The article points out that this has the drawback of extra maintenance.

Kdesvn and Kompare are two very nice tools providing rich GUI’s for svn and file comparison respectively.

In order to show the difference between two revisions using Kompare, change the default external diff settings to:

While creating websites I often find the need to manipulate files in all sorts of ad-hoc ways.

Things that are hard to do by hand, but you don’t want to write a whole program for - you’ll just use it once and throw it away.