Cron reporting

I've set up a couple of sites using CiviCRM and one of the bugbears for me is getting cron working right (both sites have been on shared hosting which adds to the difficulty).

I couple of ideas on how this could be improved are:

• Add a reporting screen that shows when each of the crons last ran successfully.

(for drupal integration)

• write an implementation of hook_cron that calls the civicrm cron files using curl or something similar.

My preference would be the second option as it is less work for the end user. I can help with this option if thats of any use. Just let me know.