The BDAY Handbook

Jan Schaumann jschauma@netmeister.org 
Version 0.1 , Sat June 24 18:55:30 EST 2000


This Handbook describes BDAY Version 0.1


1. Introduction

2. Installation

     2.1 How to obtain BDAY
     2.2 Requirements 
     2.3 Compilation and installation 

3. Usage 

4. Copyright

5. Misc

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1. Introduction

BDAY is a set of perl scripts intended to remind you of upcoming birthdays. If
you're anything like me, then you constantly forget your
friends/families/partners/co-employees/dictators birthday, and this usually
leads to:
a) awkwardness when meeting them
b) family fights
c) the need to buy an more expensive gift that you had in mind had you not
forgotten the birthday
d) gossip
e) a war

BDAY sets up a small "database" with the names and nirthdays of the people you
can't forget and sends you an email a certain number of days before that birthday 
comes up as well as on that specific day.

In other words: BDAY saves your ass!

BDAY is based on YPLib (Your Personal Library - available at
http://www.netmeister.org/apps/yplib/index.html).

The latest version of BDAY and the information from this document is also
available at http://www.netmeister.org/apps/bday/index.html

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2. Installation

2.1 How to obtain BDAY 0.1

BDAY 0.1 can be obtained from http://www.netmeister.org/apps/bday-0.1.tar.gz or
alternatively from
http://guinness.cs.stevens-tech.edu/~jschauma/bday-0.1.tar.gz

2.2 Requirements

In order to use BDAY 0.1, you need the following programs installed on your
machine:

	* perl5.x available at http://www.perl.com
	# sendmail available at http://www.sendmail.org/

2.3 Installation 

tar zxvf bday-0.1.tar.gz
cd bday-0.1

If "sendmail" does not live in "/usr/sbin/sendmail", open "bdayd" and change
the path in the following line:
$sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";

If Perl does not live in "/usr/bin/perl", open "bday" and "bdayd" and change
the very first line according to the location of perl on your system.

Save the files and then

make install

You need superuser privileges for this step.
Should you run into problems, report them to the the author at jschauma@netmeister.org


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3. Usage 

You need to run "bday" first. The program will set up a directory "~/.bday/"
where it keeps its files. BDAY collects the necessary information, which
can be changed at all times, by itself.
BDAY 0.1 will present you the following, rather self-explanatory menu:

	1. Change User Preferences
	2. Show current settings
	3. Add a person to your list
	4. Show all people on your list
	5. Remove a person from your list
	6. About BDAY 0.1
	7. Quit

Once you exit out of this, edit your crontab to contain the following entry:
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bin/bdayd
Referr to crontab(5) for more information on how to edit your crontab.
This needs to be done only once and NOT every time you run "yplib". From now on,
you can run yplib whenever you feel like it.

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4. Copyright

BDAY 0.1 Copyright 2000 Jan Schaumann, jschauma@netmeister.org 

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version. 

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public
License for more details. 

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 


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5. Misc

Please take the time to visit these websites:

     http://www.aclu.org
	 http://www.amnesty.org
     http://www.worldwildlife.org
     http://www.ncadp.org

Take the time to think about it.

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