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On scripts and cronjobs....

I now have the web-scraping script that I posted in my
previous phlog entry running as a cron job, but it took a
little doing and I learned some new things.

1. I had to add a path to the beginning of the script, right
after the #!/bin/bash

The line is:

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

2. Another thing I did (I'm not sure if this was required
now, because I made a number of changes) was add a line at
the top of my crontab, so that it would execute the script
using bash rather than sh. So I'm told anyways.

That line is: 

SHELL=/bin/bash

3. Someone, somewhere on the internet also mentioned that
cron *may* not play well with scripts with an extension, so
I changed the script name from lxer.sh to lxersh



My Thoughts on HPCs, Operating Systems, etc.

In a response to my previous comments on the HP Jornada,
Jynx over at the Raspberry Pi of Death mentioned that he
never connected with Windows CE. I get that. Some OS's feel
better than others. I really liked the hardware and design
of the HPC devices. The OS was never much of a draw. I
didn't mind the plain old Windows design. I like simplicity.
But Windows CE always seemed clunky ... every response was a
little delayed and the whole experience seemed .... I can't
think of a word better than 'cheap'. Oddly, a snappy
response is one of the things I liked the most about two
much-maligned OS's: Windows 3.1 and BlackBerry OS 7.1 (the
final, polished versions are actually very responsive).

If I like something, I tend to stick with it. I used Windows
3.1 until 2002. Yet I wasn't the dinosaur of my workplace. 
One of the secretaries refused to give up her Wordperfect 
for DOS (she knew all the keyboard shortcuts) and forced the 
IT guys to install it for her until she retired in 2008. I'm
sure it drove them crazy to set her up for printing.

As for OS design, I liked webOS the most. The gestures and
the material design (before Duarte made up the word) just
made sense. When you use it, it feels so natural.

On my laptops, I've always liked the simplest designs.
Today, I run a customized version of LXDE, designed to look
like Gnome 2. I suppose sometime I'll have to switch to LXQT 
or XFCE, but I hope that LXDE is retained through one more 
version of Debian.