Patrick F. Spear » Posts

Last Monday I was very excited to hear from a friend (who made it to his RSS feeder faster than myself) that Lifehacker had written an article about gcalcron. This is definitely the widest exposure this site is yet to see, so I’m pretty happy. Champagne all around.

That said, allow me to respond to a few of the comments about the project (left both on Lifehacker and the gcalcron project page right here).

First off, I do realize that the script, as it is, operates in root space. This is largely because a lot of the functions that would be desirable at a distance (shutdown, reboot, rsync to a remote server, etc) reqiure root access, and balanced against the chance of google account intrusion, I thought the tradeoff would be worth it to the average user (whose most valuable data- photos, music documents, etc, are stored in user space anyway). I also figured that those who disagreed about this decision would be able to fend for themselves…seems I was right.

As for security concerns…I completely agree that there are concerns with regard to Google accounts. However, I did try to note the ones that I could foresee in the README. Remember, this project is meant less as a permanent solution for graphical remote scheduling, and meant more as a proof-or-concept that such a thing could be achieved simply through a mashup of tools- to the point that a 5k python script would do the job just fine. Neat stuff, no?

Thanks again to Lifehacker for the exposure and detailed coverage. I’m very impressed that Kevin took to truly investigate the tool and pass on good information to LH’s readers, so if I feel I come up with any other projects of interest in the future, I will be sure to give them a tip first. Look to them if you don’t visit here directly.