Could you give me some hints for a schedule program? We don't have enough time to experiment much.
For a Windows environment, three options come to mind:
- You could use the Windows Task Scheduler; through the dialog Advanced Settings, you can set a schedule to x times an hour.
With VBScript (Windows Scripting Host) you build a script that uses an infinite loop and pauses with WScript.Sleep milliseconds. Since the argument is an Integer, you must repeat this command several times to achieve a pause of 15 minutes. Note, however, that the Sleep method uses no processor time.
When activated through cscript.exe, it's possible to stop the script with Ctrl+Break.
To get a more interactive program, you could use a semaphore file to trigger the deactivation of the script:
tbxdsr.vbs /start- Checks for the existence of the semaphore. If present: break off execution and display an error message stating: "Already active".
- Create empty semaphore file.
- Begin infintie loop, with pause; every iteration you should check for existence of the semaphore, and if it is no longer present: abort
tbxdsr.vbs /stop- Checks for the presence of the semaphore file, and deletes it (if present).
If you start these scripts through a shortcut, with wscript.exe, no command line will be shown.
With a little tweaking, you could even use the semaphore file to indicate the status of the requestor (e.g., /status says "Retrieving" or "Sleeping"). You could also use a registry key instead of a file.
- Visual Basic contains a simple Timer control. If you create a simple Form with the Timer control (since the timer control suffers the same limitations as the WScript.Sleep method, you'll need to count the number of timer events), and a simple on/off button. You could then start the program/script every (legal) timer event. Given some time, you can incorporate the functionality of the parser in this program as well.