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Some progress info on dCron. I’ve still not decided whether to change the name or not. Things like Bluebox and bb4win get by with similar names the the project they were imitating. On the otherhand, they also got pretty close to the imitated item. Which I doubt dCron will, having done some more reseach on the power of cron last night.

The coding side of things is progressing okay at the moment. I have got the app to read from a file the times of jobs along with the command to run. Right now only the time of day is used to determine which job to run. This means that all jobs run every day at a given time. The next thing on my list is to add code so that you can choose days to run jobs, say every Tuesday and Thursday. This means that I can get my mp3s to start playing later at the weekend so I don’t get woken up as early ;)

At the moment I am using a fairly basic hash table to store the jobs, using the time as the hashkey. This seems to work quite well. Collisions are handled using a linked list (as I said, very simple!) but I may change to double hashing later. The design is fairly modular, so it shouldn’t be a problem. As I mentioned before, this project is as much about messing with data structures as creating a useful app.

Hopefully should be a usable app in a couple of weeks, maybe a little longer. Right now it’s good enough to start Winamp playing at 7am each day, a reasonable start I think.