I do admire OpenOffice.org, and use its products on Linux. I’m starting to use them on Windows aswell, recently. However, I’d be the first to admit that OpenOffice needs quite a bit of polish. The basic features are all there now, it just feels rather clunky. So it was with interest I read the product concept for version 2 of the suite. If they manage to do all that the document says they hope to, OpenOffice will become a lot more pleasant to use. Version 1.1 has improved things, but the ideas for 2 are leaps and bounds ahead of the current version. Good luck, guys!

ShellOn, SharpMenu, dWall, dClock and dCron are all living in CVS now. Feels that little bit more, well, proper and less “on the edge” I guess. Now, I guess I should set up dCron to have a job to backup the CVS repository. (More news on my dCron progress later…)

dCron has come on quite well over the weekend. You can now specify weekdays, dates and months to run programs in. The app also supports named days and months as well as ranges, for example “mon-fri” and “oct-may”. Seems to be near a release. I’m going to leave it running quietly this week to see what happens, whether it silently does it’s job or wakes me up at 4am one day rather than 7am =)

It looks like Zeldman has also been hit by the spamming attack that hit me with fifty emails this morning. So I’m not the only one.

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 ;)