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:

Remember this posts title. It not only rhymes. It's the law!

Sometimes the truth is a bit counterintuitive. Conventional thinking is that more is better. More features. More choices. More options. More is more right?

When we first tried redesigning the Hub's front page we made this mistake. We were so proud of all the big and small features that made the Hub easy to use we listed all of them. As a big wall of text no less. In retrospect I don't know what we were thinking.

SMS is an important tool in the arsenal I use to fight my never-ending war with productivity-destroying distractions.

Colleagues, friends, mailing lists, foes, viagra peddlers and nigerian princes send me in aggregate about 300 pieces of of e-mail every day, most of it not really that important. All of this noise can eat up an enormous amount of my attention so when I really need to concentrate I'm pretty much forced to ignore e-mail altogether for sometimes weeks at a time.