[conspire] July schedule posted

[Tony Godshall]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

If you want to keep editing the calendar as HTML, I guess.  I'd argue it's
simpler to maintain the calendar in a more vim-friendly format.  But I don't
want to start a editor-religion war on this list.


> 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".
>

Yeah, those events looked like they were coming from elsewhere anyway
(canned calendars from ??) so it didn't make much sense to try to deal with
them in the time alloted


> 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.
>

Yeah, well, again I intended it as a one-time one-way hack.

If we wanted it to be production, I'd clean up old events and then do a
heuristic that says any month before this one is next year.

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.


Ah, RSS is part of the spec?  That makes it more complicated.  I'd say
calendars are specialized enough you'd want something that can read
icalendar/vcalendar instead.  But then again, if someone already wrote a
good tool that supports that, OK, cool.  I'm not up on the RSS wars and not
particularly sure I want to be.  Sounds like a huge time-sink.  (timesync,
heh)
...
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