arthur richards

Serious nerd alert - but if you use Drupal and/or Subversion, you'll likely find this interesting. Lately I've been dealing with a Drupal module called 'dbscripts 'that helps me track changes made in a database with Subversion (SVN). Besides a few moments requiring banging my head against the wall, it's a pretty slick module - before this, keeping track of database changes and making it easy to roll back to a previous version was not something easy to do. But one thing that's been tricky to manage with the module is remembering to add/delete the files it generates/deletes in my Subversion repository. This has had nasty consequences of forgetting to check-in a newly added database table or causing conflicts by regenerating a supposedly deleted database table during a database restore... Shell scripts to the rescue!

While trying to get some songs off of a 160GB iPod Classic (to a different computer from the one the iPod is registered with), I somehow managed to corrupt the iTunesDB file. This is a most important file, as it tells the iPod what songs are on it. Normally you can just plug the iPod into the computer it's registered with - when it synchs with iTunes, the iTunesDB file will be restored. In my case, that computer is 1500 miles away. After unsuccessfully trying a bunch of stuff on an OS X machine, I turned to Linux and GNUpod to save the day. Read on to see how it's done.