Microsoft is a trainwreck. I used to abhor the desktop monpolist as an evil threat to standards-based open source innovation. But in the last decade they've been screwing up so badly I almost feel sorry for them. As much as you can feel sorry for a massive corporation that is.

One thing that puzzles me in particular is how Microsoft fails to grasp that their efforts to compete with Google in the search space are a pointless waste of countless billions and a lethal distraction that has allowed Apple to wipe the floor with them in the post-PC era.

I caught myself today repeating a few basic operations by hand what seemed like a zillion times. Over and over again. I didn't really notice it at the time but it was really slowing me down.

For example, after committing to tklbam I would create a tklbam testing package, copy the package to one of my test machines, install it and remove the archive.

I just fixed a broken cron job. It turned out it was a PATH issue. By default cron doesn't have /usr/local stuff in the PATH.

Tips on how to debug cron:

• change the schedule for the cron job so it runs every minute. It's harder to debug something that happens infrequently.

• Make sure syslog sends cron logs to /var/log/cron.log. On one of our servers this line was commented out for some reason: