Towner
90
2009/11/18
2009/12/25
2010/01/01

Which tells my script to create an iCal event every day for 90 work days named “Towner, Day ##”, and don’t count Christmas or New Year’s day as work days.

Not shown is the bit at the end that uploads the resulting .ics file to a web server, which then allows Lnorigb to simply subscribe to it in iCal. So if I make any changes in the output, like skipped days, increasing or decreasing the total count, or just general improvements, her calendar will automatically reflect the changes.

This is isn’t the best code I ever wrote, but it gave me an excuse to put a syntax highlighting plugin on the blog. And it’s not like I’m expecting to have to do a lot of maintenance work on it. Of course now that I’ve said that, it’s obviously going to cause me grief for many years. Eventually I suppose it will need a full fledged scheduling application, complete with payment calculators for her workers based on facial recogonition of the posted pictures on her blog, auto-blog posting, twitter updates, a related facebook application, and RSS feed generators. All of the above will be driven by the nine million state version of the stupid little state machine parser at the top of the script.

Yeah, don’t write code you’re not willing to maintain.

(Code follows after the break.)

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#!/usr/bin/env python
from icalendar import Calendar, Event, UTC
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import sys, os
 
skipdays = []
adddays = []
# Read a file in this format:
# Project name
# Total # days to count
# Start date
# Skipped days, one per line
baseproject = os.path.basename(os.path.splitext(sys.argv[1])[0])
 
f = open(sys.argv[1], 'rb')
state = 1
for line in f:
    line = line.rstrip()
    if len(line) == 0 or line[0] == '#':
        continue
    if state == 1:
        project = line
    if state == 2:
        count = int(line)
    if state == 3:
        startday = datetime.strptime(line, "%Y/%m/%d")
    if state == 4:
        if line[0] == '+':
            adddays.append(datetime.strptime(line[1:], "%Y/%m/%d"))
        else:
            skipdays.append(datetime.strptime(line, "%Y/%m/%d"))
        # About to increment the state otherwise
        continue
    state += 1
 
f.close()
 
days = {}
days[0] = startday + timedelta(-1)
 
cal = Calendar()
cal.add('prodid', "-//Tildee's project day counter//rumsey.org//")
cal.add('version', "2.0")
 
for i in range(1, count + 1):
    day = days[i - 1]
    day = day + timedelta(1)
    while (day in skipdays) or ((day.weekday() == 5 or day.weekday() == 6) and not (day in adddays)):
        day = day + timedelta(1)
    days[i] = day
    event = Event()
    event.add('summary', '%s, Day %d' % (project, i))
    event.add('dtstart', day)
    event.add('dtend', day)
    event.add('dtstamp', day)
    event['uid']="D%d/%d%d%d@rumsey.org" % (i, day.year, day.month, day.day)
    event.add('priority', 5)
    cal.add_component(event)
 
    print "Day " + str(i) + ": " + str(day)
 
output = '/tmp/%s.ics' % (baseproject)
f = open(output, 'wb')
f.write(cal.as_string())
f.close()

But that’s not why it’s gadget day.  I posted a while back about the conditions under which Honorary Gadget Girl could drop the “Honorary”.  I have been remiss in not posting that she got an  iPhone for Christmas and so has not been Honorary for a month.  But today she met the other condition as well.  There’ll be “music” in the “air” tonight.

I’m so glad my Mom knows about this blog.  Hi, Mom!

Me: “That’s a speck of dust”

Her: “…”

Stop by and join in, or just say hi, if you’re around.

Taming online scaling issues is closely related to taming lions. Whips and wodden chairs are involved, and every once in a while someone suffers a disfiguring accident.

I have 2TB online now. I didn’t even notice when that happened. It was less than two years after I hit 1TB, maybe less than one year. And I didn’t notice until someone else mentioned that they had 2TB online. Not only that, but half of it is free space. I have 1TB+ of free space and I didn’t even notice that.

Of course, not many people hook a 750GB firewire drive up to a Mac Mini and use it as their media center “PC”, but that’s just the kind of guy I am.