BuzzLog

Well, "woes" might be a little dramatic; let's say cron-plications. The cool "cron" tool can be used to schedule items to be launched or run at specific times, but its interface is too cryptic for the average user. I set out, with the help of Buzzer Brent Newhall, to create a GUI interface to cron, to allow users to easily schedule items to be run on whatever basis they need; a tool that will be of great use to broadcasters using the TuneTracker System who need to have newscasts downloaded, etc. We have run into a little snag though, in that items our program saves to the cron tab file don't seem to launch properly, even though the syntax in the saved file itself appears to be perfect.

As an example, we scheduled an alert once-per-minute that said "Hi" and it successfully ran every minute. Then as a second test we used the GUI to delete that first entry and created an event that caused an alert every 20 minutes, with the wording, "every twenty minutes." For some strange reason, the "every twenty minutes" alert popped up once-per-minute. Yet, when we check the tab file, it looks like a normal event scheduled for every 20 minutes.

????

If anyone has some experience with cron and can lend a hand, we'd really appreciate it. We've got to get this solved! We have invested almost a year in the GUI and would HATE to drop the whole thing now!

If you have any insights or can help on any level whatsoever, please write to me at: dane at beosradio.com .