[conspire] July schedule posted

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Hell, maybe I should just make a daily cronjob to run that Python script
> as-is, with a local parse on /var/www/cabal/index.html, and a wget fetch
> of the output of http://linuxmafia.com/bale/index.php .  Buggy and a
> little odd, but arguably better than nothing.

I see two obstacles worth mentioning: 

1.  Omitting (or rather saying "bad start: 0" for) events with
non-numeric or null placeholder data in the start-time / end-time
fields.   It can't be that difficult to use whatever iCal understands to
mean "beginning of day" and "end of day".

2.  Breaking horribly on calendars crossing the year boundary -- and in
general not handling years.


The root cause of badness #2 is that the BALE and CABAL pages don't 
bother to mention years.  They're designed to be parsed by humans,
who (generally) know what year it is, and that "January" events seen
near the end of a calendar that starts in November or December are next
year.

Tony's script went for the low-hanging fruit by saying "just assume
2009, for now" -- which is great for prototyping, but needs to be fixed
for production.  I have no idea how, offhand. 


On the bright side, PHP iCalendar solves a bunch of other problems.  
My installed version, 0.9.4 beta, is ancient.  The current 2.31 release 
(notably) supports the user's choice of RSS version 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0,
neatly sidesteps that religious issue.

I've never used http://linuxmafia.com/calendar/ as part of my production
environment, just as something I've played with -- but that can easily 
change.