Comments on: gcalcron

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:46:45 +0000

Have you tried using this with something more open and portable? Specifically I’m wondering if you’ve tested it with CalDAV (RFC 4971) — Apache’s mod_caldav, DAViCal, or similar.

By: PFS 3.0 » gCalCron

PFS 3.0 » gCalCron — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:46:27 +0000

[...] allow me to respond to a few of the comments about the project (left both on Lifehacker and the gCalCron project page right [...]

By: Lars Kellogg-Stedman

Lars Kellogg-Stedman — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:18:07 +0000

Re: security

Note that instead of using the account username and password, you could use the “magic cookie” authentication method (see http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/data/1.0/developers_guide_python.html#AuthMagicCookie).

While this does still involve storing credentials “in the clear” on the user’s filesystem, the credentials only allow you to access a particular calendar, which seems far better than access to the entire account.

The changes required in the code are minimal; the examples in the documentation should be sufficient to get folks started.

To make life easier on the user, you can simply have them paste in their “private XML feed” URL and parse out the userid and magic cookie in your code.

By: PFS

PFS — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:23:44 +0000

Thank you, all, for the interest and kind comments. I've posted some general answers to your questions (re: security, mostly) in this post. Specifically, though: Chris Shultz, the depreciation warnings are normal. If the command works and but the cron job doesn't work from the command line, I'm guessing it's a cron problem. There's no logging, but try running gcalcron.py manually (that is, not via cron) with the verbose switch (-v) to see what's happening behind the scenes. Chris Snyder: the prefix switch can be used to automatically limit the commands being run to a certain directory. However, I realized since this can easily be circumnavigated by using && followed by an arbitrary command. If I have time to work on this in the summer, I'll address it. If you've got any more questions, please do post again, or drop me a line.

By: almost effortless » Weekly Digest, 3-29-09

almost effortless » Weekly Digest, 3-29-09 — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:37:31 +0000

[...] gcalcron This is a fun kind of "get your toes wet with linux" type of project that you could suggest to your "I want to learn about linux, but I’m not ready to junk my MacBook just yet" friends. The gist is that you "install" this cat’s .py script on your remote machine and this script acts as an interface between the box and a Google calendar you set up. You enter bash commands into the calendar entries and it uses the times you set with the gCal interface to tell cron when to pop them off. What it lacks in simplicity (by being an incredibly convoluted "work around" for spending 10 minutes with the cron man page) it makes up for in colorful, user-friendliness. [...]

By: Chris Snyder

Chris Snyder — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:52:48 +0000

This would be MUCH safer, and almost sane, if instead of putting shell commands directly into the calendar you used keywords so that the calendar was limited to a short list of allowed commands.

Visual cron is brilliant, though. Great idea!

By: Chris Schulz

Chris Schulz — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:55:44 +0000

Hey there,

This looks awesome. Unfortunately my initial tests have failed

I get some deprication warnings which I will assume arent a problem… but gcalcron doesnt seem to find (or activate?) the specified command.

I scheduled a job for 11am to finish at 11:30am sydney time. The cron job runs (and reports the deprication warnings) but the command either does not run or is not found. I tried to run the cron job from the command line with no luck. I have verified that the command works fine by itself (it just sends a teet)

here is the command from the description field:

is there a log somewhere?

any help appreciated

By: MianoSM

MianoSM — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:39:50 +0000

Very interesting concept, I really like the ingenuity.

By: Michael Rubinstein

Michael Rubinstein — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:33:41 +0000

Brilliant concept!

By: Brendan le Foll

Brendan le Foll — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:11:03 +0000

Shame the script runs as root in the cronjob by default but otherwise very nice script, does a very good job.

Also your test case only works for the next noon if it is allready past noon in the day. – would probably be easier to say that in the README than let people guess

Cheers,
Brendan