CronniX: Fills a Hole in OS X
One feature missing from "The world's most advanced operating system", is the ability to schedule tasks. This is, admittedly, not something most users would notice since most software designed to run on a schedule like backups, e-mail retreival and the like come with the ability to schedule themselves. Windows has included a task scheduler since Windows 95. Most users don't even know this for the same reason. For us hardcore geeks, a tool for running tasks on a schedule is something we don't need that often, but we need one nonetheless. That's why I was very surprised to learn OS X doesn't include a scheduling utility. I've been a Mac guy for almost three years and it took until a week ago to make this discovery. It's just not something I need that often.
This all came about because I couldn't keep a Western Digital MyBook external hard disk from going to sleep. WD includes this "feature" to spin down their disks after ten minutes of non-use to save power. The problem is, none of my Macs would wake the silly thing back up. This caused all sorts of problems with OS X. When the WD would go to sleep, my iMac would "beachball" for one or two minutes, completely locking up Finder. This would make my machine almost unusable until Finder timed-out and displayed an error message about not being able to find the external drive. The machine would also hang on a reboot until I unplugged the firewire cable from the drive. After an hour on WD's support site and searching forums I discovered there was no official fix from WD but there was a workaround to keep the disk from sleeping.
This is where it gets geeky. To keep the disk from going to sleep, you have to access the device once within a ten minute period. There's a handy UNIX command, "touch", to access a file and change its modification date. It looks like this:
touch /Volumes/MYBOOK/filename
Where "MYBOOK" is the name of the WD drive and "filename" is a file on that disk. I tested this manually using Terminal and sure enough, it kept the drive from sleeping. This is when I went looking for a way to schedule this simple command to run automatically. There is a built-in UNIX process called cron used by OS X to schedule tasks at given intervals or at specific times. To add tasks to this process, the crontab (short for cron table) needs to be edited. Doing this requires making the transition from geek to full-blown nerd if you want to tackle it from the command line. That's when I went looking for a GUI tool to do this and found CronniX. (If you want to know how to edit crontab from the Terminal there's a good quick-n-dirty how-to here.)
While not nearly as user-friendly as Windows' Task Scheduler, Cronnix will get the job done if you understand just a little about crontab's format. It's not hard to figure out and Cronnix is absolutely free. It presents you with a straight-forward interface to execute a command on a schedule you configure.
I scheduled the above "touch" command to run every five minutes and now my WD external drive doesn't go to sleep. Its a shame to have to do this, but like many hardware vendors, Western Digital doesn't do Macs very well. Cronnix, while not elegant by any measure, gets the scheduling job done in OS X without turning you into a complete nerd.
And Now, A Real iPad Prediction...
I’ve spent the last couple of days combing through all the fuzz and digesting Wednesday’s iPad announcement. I probably listened to 8 hours of punditry on top of watching the recording of the event itself. I’ve read Mossberg, Pogue, Doctorow and the like to see what their vision of the iPad looked like. My last post questioned whether or not Steve Jobs had another homer in his well-worn bat and after all this pondering I think I’ve come to a moment of clarity concerning the iPad.
This is rev 1 of a true game-changer! The iPad is the device I think Mr. Jobs has always wanted to make. It just took until now for the technology to catch up to his vision of a ubiquitous computing appliance. Something powerful, something easy, something beautiful, something fun. A computing device that is as comfortable on a coffee table as it is on a boardroom table. A device that does 90% of what anyone would want it to do and as easy for my grandmother to use as it is for me. In short, this is a device that will appeal to everyone. People who would never consider sitting on a sofa with a laptop, people that can’t bear dragging out a computer while sitting in coach on an airplane, people that skip a step while making a new recipe because they didn’t want to stop and look up an ingredient list, people that prefer pen and paper to take notes in class because a laptop is too bulky, too distracting or just too inconvenient, people who are intimidated by computers in general plus people like me. You know, geeks. I can’t think of anyone who would not want an iPad, especially at $499!
For us geeks the realization of a truly functional device like the fictitious ones wielded by the Enterprise crew is almost a dream come true. We would buy one just to fulfill our fantasies. For Apple fans, all the iPad needs is the logo. Done deal. For everyone else, the iPad’s potential for practical use and unparalleled convenience will eventually win them over. It may take a while, but sooner or later applications will be written that pull everyone’s particular chain. The possibilities are truly limitless.
For all these reasons I predict iPad sales will make even the astronomical iPhone numbers pale by comparison. Some day we will look back on January 27th, 2010 as the day everyone became part of the technological revolution.