Geeky Ninja » Tips and tricks

How to schedule tasks in GNOME using gnome-schedule

Sharninder — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:14:47 +0000

Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does.

The problem with cron is the cryptic syntax which tends to scare away most new users and the fact that a user has to use the terminal to create a new job.

In this tutorial we will explain how to use a graphical front end to cron, called gnome-schedule.

Gnome-schedule is a graphical front-end to cron and at, another utility to execute commands at a specified time . It is completely GUI driven and the user does not need to have any prior knowledge of cron or it’s syntax.

Installing Gnome-schedule

To get started with gnome-schedule on Ubuntu/Debian, install it using the apt-get install command:

apt-get install gnome-schedule

Once, gnome-schedule is installed, it can be launched from the Applications -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks menu entry.

Scheduling a new Task

To schedule a new task, click on the New button in the menu bar.

There are three options to create new tasks, either create a recurring task (This will use cron at the backend), or create a one time task (This will use at at the backend) or use a template.

For our purpose here, we’ll create a recurring task. Click on New -> Recurring task and you should see the following window which will let you define the task.

The advanced radio button will let you chose exactly when do you want the task to be run. ‘*’ here stands for ‘all’. So, the above task will be run on Day 1 of every month at 0 hours and 0 minutes. The handy preview, in case you didn’t notice, tell you exactly what option have you selected.

You don’t need to manually enter the times. Click on the Edit button next to the text field and you will be able to select the exact time of the task using a simple GUI.

Once a task has been created, the gnome-schedule application can be closed and cron will take care of executing the task at your chosen time and interval.

gnome-schedule also lets you create templates for tasks that you schedule frequently. Although, I don’t use this option a lot since I don’t really have that many tasks to be scheduled at any given time, some people might find this option useful.

gnome-schedule is an absolute time saver and negates the need to learn the complex cron syntax for newbies. It presents almost all the power of cron to the users with a nice and easy to learn interface.

Are there any other scheduling applications that you guys use ? Let me know in the comments.

How to display word count in Microsoft Word 2007

Sharninder — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:53:59 +0000

If you’re writing an article or a thesis where you need to keep track of the number of words written, you basically have two options to count the number of words, either count the number of lines and multiply that by the average number of words / line or use something other than Microsoft Word for the purpose.

That changed with the release of Word 2007. Microsoft Word 2007 can now count words, lines, paragraphs and even characters in your document. This tip will tell you how to enable this feature.

To know the current word count of a document, open the document and right click on the status bar at the bottom of the Word 2007 window. The context menu which comes up will have an entry named “Word Count” which will tell you the current word count.

Click on “Word Count” and you can then have the count displayed in the status bar at all times.

If you want to find the word count of a particular paragraph or a line, Just select that portion of text and you will be able to see the word count in the status bar.

If you’re interested in more statistics about your document, like the number of paragraphs, lines or the number of characters in your document, Go to Reviews –> Word count from the menu bar. That should give you all the statistics that you’d ever need.

Use Windows Notepad as your electronic diary

Sharninder — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:30:04 +0000

Who knew the humble Windows Notepad was capable of anything other than, well, taking text only notes.

If you’re searching for a simple application to write a diary or take daily notes, look no further than Notepad. So, what’s new you ask ?

Well, with this tip you can make notepad automatically add the current day and time to a document as soon as you open it and save you the headache of doing so yourself.

To accomplish this:

Open Notepad (START->Run->notepad.exe)
Type “.LOG” on the first line of the new document.
Save the file and close Notepad.

Now when you open the same file again, you’ll see that Notepad would have added the current Date and time to the document automatically.

Write your entry for the day and close the file. Everytime you open the file, Notepad will add the current timestamp on a new line saving you the effort to do the same.

Turn off deep linking in yahoo search results

Sharninder — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:00:10 +0000

According to wikipedia, deep linking is defined as:

Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on another website, instead of that website’s main or home page. Such links are called deep links.

Yahoo search recently turned on deep linking and images from wikipedia for any queries that result in a wikipedia page. For example, for the following query (“blog”), this is what yahoo search comes up with as a part of the results.

Notice how the wikipedia entry is different from the others. Yahoo search included four useful links from the wikipedia page, a summary and an also an image.

Yahoo was already using deeplinking for a couple of other popular websites like flickr, yelp and linkedin.

I, personally, think that this feature is pretty useful, especially the image that is shown along with the search result, but if you’re not interested in the links that yahoo provides, you can disable deeplinking in your search preferences. Just click the remove button in front of the service name that you want to disable deeplinking for. Yahoo will never bother you with more than what you searched for.

Let me know what you guys think of this feature in the comments.

Geeky Ninja » Tips and tricks

How to schedule tasks in GNOME using gnome-schedule

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How to display word count in Microsoft Word 2007

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