The second Philly Build Guild meetup was tonight and like the first, we all had a great time.

One notable difference from the Philly.rb meetups is the higher number of entrepreneur-programmers who attend. There was a guy there tonight who talked at length about a Series A round his company was supposed to get, only to fall through at the last minute. Most of my knowledge of that realm is through Paul Graham’s essays and accounts on HackerNews; it was nice to meet someone who has actually gone through it.

One amusing stat which I forgot to mention last time was that someone asked “Is there anyone here who doesn’t have an iPhone?” and only 1 out of the 12 of us had that dubious distinction.

Oh and how in the world do you pronounce Django?  Duh-jango? Deh-jango? Jango? What a name.

I had a simple goal: run a python script every 15 minutes throughout the day. I read up on cron and expected to move on to the next task in no time…

Four frustrating hours later, I nailed it down:

For those of you Googling for a solution, here it is:

crontab -e:

Some pointers:

1) Use the full path to the Python interpreter.

2) Make sure the path is to the correct Python interpreter.

Some of the third party modules my script imported weren’t loading because my script was looking in the wrong place.

For example, one of my earlier attempts I tried using:

/usr/bin/python

But that interpreter wasn’t the same as the one I normally get when I simply type “python” at the terminal. The correct one for me is located at:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin/python

3) When referencing files from the Python script, use the full path.

Bad:

text = open(‘hn_source.html’, ‘r’).read()

Good:

text = open(‘/Users/Matt/Programming/python/tests/hn_source.html’, ‘r’).read()

Bottom line: When using cron, ensure that you explicitly declare where everything is located.