Admin Note: Rahul is a long time friend of mine, and is a well known geek amongst his friends and colleagues. I’m happy to announce that he will be enriching this site from time-to-time as a guest editor/author. First up is a small tid-bit of a script that he wrote to ease up his life between installations and reinstallations of everyone’s favourite OS: Ubuntu. Over to his post..

Have you ever had to reinstall your ubuntu installation, and then bear the pain of manually installing the applications you’ve come to love (i mean use :)) everyday? If yes, then cheer up buddy, because all you really need is some magic (read scripting), some typing and spend some time digging the package names of your favourite applications.

The question that we will be answering today is: Q2: Cron? Using tar, making up the script file is enough command line for me. Isn’t there an easy way? Cron is a tool that can schedule any kind of tasks for you, and here we are using it to run our backup script automatically, so that we can concentrate on blogging. Now, most of us are phobic of anything that has anything to do with command line. And we already have enough of command line stuff in this series. So, you can breathe a sigh of relief for a few moments because atleast the cron part can be made Web/GUI based for you (The command line method for cron was given in the first part). The details that I’m going to present here are relevant for cpanel but it might differ for you (very minor to very major) as your webhost might have a different panel for you (e.g. vdeck) or even your cpanel might look very different. But the basic concept remains the same and with a bit of common sense, you can apply this concept to your site easily.

“Alpha to Bravo, over. Come in, Bravo, over.. We are under attack, over.. Send reinforcements asap. over and out”.

Well, if you dream about conversing like this, then you are better off playing something like COD4 or BF2, but if you are into a little bit less intense military warfare, and are a fan of games like worms, tanks, etc (I’m a convicted Worms World Party addict on my HTC Wizard) then you are in for countless fun-filled, sleepless nights. With Wormux.

If you thought that a webcam is just for getting in visual touch with your distant friends, then you could not be more wrong. There are many other uses e.g., making videos, rudimentary security systems, etc. But I didn’t know that it’d be as simple as a a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks, until I stumbled across this article on Linux.com - Five fun ways to use a Linux webcam. It lists out the following five things that can be achieved ever so easily with a webcam and your linux box:

jeffro2pt0 has a little contest going on his blog, giving out coupons to wpdesigners.com which lets you get atleast 12 WordPress themes for just 5$. Only thing you have to do is give a unique idea that could help improve wordpress. Now, I don’t want anymore themes (actually I’m a cheap-skate who can’t spend even 5$ for a theme, unless one of you decides to get me one ), but I got a few ideas instantly.