shell

I wanted to keep some programs running, which is to say restart them if they crashed, but I also wanted them to be able to exit normally. The platform is Linux, the problem is compiz, the solution is a very small shell script. Surely the internets will let me know if there is something grossly wrong with it. This script is not meant for long-running daemons, there are plenty of tools for that already.

Have you ever wanted to launch an Android app from the shell, but you were confused as to how to go about it? Me too, but after a bit of searching about I found a couple of posts that explain how to do it. Short short form, you use aapt to find the activity you want to execute, and then you can use the am command (on the device) to launch the program.

I guess this should have been obvious to me long ago, but if you have shell access you can near-instantly upgrade drupal like this:

wget (new drupal release)
tar xfz (new drupal release)
cd drupal-(new drupal version)
rm -rf sites
rsync .htaccess * (your drupal root)

If you need it spelled out a little more closely, here's what the commands look like for me for 7.18, which seems to be a security update...