bday
[![/space/balloons.jpg](/space/balloons.jpg)](http://netmeister.org/apps/bday/)

My memory is
worthless, so I use lots of memory aids. One of them, Jan Schaumann's
[bday](http://netmeister.org/apps/bday/), is a birthday reminder that emails me
when my friends' birthdays are coming up.

Here are a few tips for using bday.

bday and bdayd, the reminder daemon, are somewhat inconsistent about where they
assume [Perl](http://perl.org/) is installed. If you get _Command not found_
errors when running bday or bdayd, make sure that their first lines point to
your Perl installation, most likely /usr/bin/perl.

Also, bday doesn't validate its user settings very well. If you see this error:

    Argument "" isn't numeric in addition (+) at
    /usr/local/bin/bdayd line 96, <PEOPLE> line 1.

then bday has a blank for the number of days in advance you'd like to be
notified of birthdays. Just run bday again, change your user preferences, and be
sure to enter a valid number.