Why are you not using cron? You seem to use some unixish programs, so cron should be available to you.

If cron is no option, I found it convenient to more or less write my own crond in Perl by using Schedule::Cron - this has the advantage of still keeping all the configuration data more or less in crontab format. On Windows, I wrote Schedule::Cron::Nofork because the fork emulation stopped working (and forking) after three days or so, which was inconvenient.