A crontab is normally running one command on each line. EG:

# m h dom mon dow command
01 00 * * * /home/cronscripts/vine-warn-when-large-user-profile
05 00 * * * /home/cronscripts/vine-get-remote-pc-backup.sh
01 01 * * * /home/cronscripts/vine-samba-users
01 02 * * * /home/cronscripts/vine-database-backups

So the above jobs run at 00:01, then 00:05, then 01:01am then 02:01am.

Instead, I can run these cron tasks one after the other by putting && between each task. EG:

# m h dom mon dow command
01 00 * * * /home/cronscripts/vine-warn-when-large-user-profile && /home/cronscripts/vine-get-remote-pc-backup.sh && /home/cronscripts/vine-samba-users && /home/cronscripts/vine-database-backups

So these jobs start running at 00:01am. When vine-warn-when-large-user-profile finishes, vine-get-remote-pc-backup.sh starts immediately, and so on.

Why is this useful?

I have several backup scripts for our linux servers. Each script creates a tar archive of a directory, compresses it, SFTP's it off site, then deletes the tar archive from the server.

If the scrips all run at the same time, the server runs out of disk space. I need them to run one after the other. I can't effectively guess when to start each one. The backup can't start until after midnight and must be finished by 7am when users are likely to start work again. Some directories can take minutes to archive, compress, send, delete. Others can take 2 or 3 hours. One server also collects backups from a couple of other places, so that script has to complete before others start too.

Running this scripts concurrently means no useful transfer time is lost and I don't have to guess the time each script will take to run.

For some reason, it installed as cciss_vol_status (using underscores instead of hyphens).

:primary_key,
:string,
:text,
:integer,
:float,
:decimal,
:datetime,
:timestamp
:time,
:date,
:binary,
:boolean.

Options that I can use in my migration
I must remember to specify the decimal precision I need!
:precision [1..63], :scale [0..30]. Otherwise Mysql Default is (10,0).

* :limit - Requests a maximum column length. This is number of characters for :string and :text columns and number of bytes for :binary and :integer columns.
* :default - The column's default value. Use nil for NULL.
* :null - Allows or disallows NULL values in the column. This option could have been named :null_allowed.
* :precision - Specifies the precision for a :decimal column.
* :scale - Specifies the scale for a :decimal column.

These came from: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/ConnectionAdapters/TableDefinition.html

If you open a multi page tif using 'Windows Picture and Fax viewer' (the default unless another program you've installed has taken over as your preferred tiff viewer) you get an extra little drop down box at the bottom of your screen, that allows you to choose which page you'd like to view. When you go to print, you're shown a preview of each page and can choose (by tick box) which pages you'd like to print.

Our fax to email scanner creates these multipage tiff's.

This is 'Deco by Night', an image created by visual designer Albert Keifer. If you look really closely you can see our holiday picture in that image.... no I struggled too. The nice chap emailed a series of images to show me...

So here's our original holiday photo. The city of Sydney, it's wide blue river, Opera House, distinctive bridge and some of the email Albert sent asking if he could use the image.

I am an illustrator, visualiser and I was approached yesterday to enter in this contest. I had the shape lying around and started working on rendering it from different angles and see how I could build an atmosphere. I was coming to a stage where I felt it needed some nice atmospheric background city to put this monumental shape in its correct feel of 'being very big and aloft'.

So I started a Google Image search on birds eye view and that's how I came across your Sydney image. It immediately struck a chord and I went on to integrate it into the picture. I did not want recogniseable features since this is supposed to be a futuristich 'somewhere' place and a landmark building like the opera house would immediately distract from that and root it back to a well known place. That's why I started to do a quick manipulation (which is also part of what I do for a living) and that's how this image ended up the way it is now.

I asked nicely if I could post it on my blog (OK, it's taken almost 2 years for me to post, but I've finally got to it!) so he emailed me some of the interim images to show how the steps used to crate the image.
Click on the images to see them full size, you'll probably need to do that to see the detail of the changes

The first image is 'the-beach' which is used for the skyline and low sun.

The second image is 'the-city-base-added', click and see the full size image and you can see how it's been flipped, cropped and laid on top of the first image.

In the third image 'city-remodeled' you can see how Sydney has been transformed into a generic city, losing the landmarks of the harbour bridge and opera house.

Finally, the computer generated image of futuristic chrome petal shapes is the top layer.

1. Useful Windows Shortcut key to show Desktop is still number - This was written for XP but the shortcut works in Vista too.
2. Margins and Markups - what the difference is and how to calculate them.
3. Red mushroom with white spots - a photo I took while walking
4. BBC iPlayer and it's built in Kontiki software - though I must make a new entry about this, as the iPlayer has moved on since 2 years ago. We're now watching iplayer via our Ninendo Wii! Nicola used it to watch Gavin and Stacey for the first time to see the kitchen I designed (it's the maple one, in the house set in Essex).
5. Welcome to the Christmas Party season - a review of our 2007 works christmas party.

It may be apparent I've not been typing a lot lately. Well, I have, just not in the blog. Having caught up with work and other real life fun things I'm hoping to post several entries that are overdue. Before I do that, some suitable geek humour that had me in fits of laughter (good job I'm the only one in the office).

from: http://xkcd.com/149/

(funnier for me perhaps, 'cause sudo refers to the 'root' user.... hey, it's geek humour, it'll mean nothing to 99% of the population so you'll not be perfectly normal not to understand it)

To find out where he is now, or where his last section finished, follow this link: http://www.mapmytracks.com/explore/author/davidjroot/latest , or visit his blog for anything else he uploads (he's going to try and geotag his photos.....).

Special thanks to the developers of mapmytracks.com, it wasn't possible to link directly to the latest route yesterday so I sent an email asking for it to be added to the wish list. Less than 12 hours later and they've added it already!

To find out where he is now, or where his last section finished, follow this link: http://www.mapmytracks.com/explore/author/davidjroot/latest , or visit his blog for anything else he uploads (he's going to try and geotag his photos.....).

Special thanks to the developers of mapmytracks.com, it wasn't possible to link directly to the latest route yesterday so I sent an email asking for it to be added to the wish list. Less than 12 hours later and they've added it already!

I use googlemail (actually, google apps but let's not get pedantic).
I have a friend with several email addresses, (work, other, home, other, other).
Recently she asked for emails not to go her work address (unless they're really urgent).

When I use gmail to write an email just to her, it's easy to choose which address it's going too (and I know roughly which address is most appropriate at the time), but I have a contact group set up with her in it and those emails were always going to her work address.

There was no option when creating the group to choose which of her email addresses should be used by default. The address being used (work) was also the address that came up first when composing a message and including her specifically.

I guessed that this apparent default email address was the first contact address I'd entered for her and when I checked it was showing on the top of the gmail list of addresses for her contact record. I replaced the top of list email address with the prefered 'other' address, added the work address to the bottom of the contact list. Created a new email and using the contact group and gmail used the 'other' address' instead of her work address.

I later read 'googlemail defaults to using the first email address of a contact....'

The old server ran Colfusion MX 6.01, the new server is running Open Bluedragon, the near equivalent to Coldfusion 7 or 8. (Colfusion MX6.01 doesn't work properly with Apache 2, or more recent linux operating systems and I couldn't justify the upgrade cost to the latest version of coldfusion. My next big project will be to rewrite the Roots web site into an open source language though as Open Bluedragon runs coldfusion code and is open source, I might be able to develop rather than re-write from scratch, anyway, enough of that background).

Things change between program versions and to my horror I found the shopping cart wasn't working yesterday. The blame lies with me, I didn't properly test and I should have spotted it before the server move. Hey ho, 3 hours to debug and fix, and the problem was with

<cfset this = val(evaluate(listgetat(
   form.FIELDNAMES, listcontains(
      form.FIELDNAMES,"_ID_"))))>

The Fieldnames are coming out as all lowercase, and the original code was written to handle the form.FIELDNAMES returning all uppercase.

If i've a bottle of white wine at home, I'll open it and have a glass to celebrate my satisfaction :-)