Present Perfect

Hey web, lazy is my middle name.

I am in the market for a piece of software that lets me read RSS feeds. Lots of them exist. For my usual RSS feeds, I am actually completely happy with BlogLines. It just works, and being web-based it saves my read status as I move from machine to machine.

What I now want is a piece of software that I can trust with a bunch of private URL's (for example, for bug trackers of private projects) that I would not trust any online service with. I want to get RSS feeds of all my TODO items in various bug trackers and other places. I want to keep the same advantage - whatever computer I use (under my control) I want to save the state of what I've read. Two obvious ways of doing that are 1) having it be web-based and/or 2) having some sort of - preferably text-based - state of what's been read that I commit to svn (as I do for my todo list).

I would give this application only my todo RSS feeds, to resist the urge of reading other stuff that aren't my tasks :) But I want to have an easy tool to get a glance of the state of items assigned to me.

Anyone using anything that fits the bill that they recommend ?

Hey web, lazy is my middle name. I am in the market for a piece of software that lets me read RSS feeds. Lots of them exist. For my usual...

This weekend, with the help of Zaheer, I was trying to write an application that calculates the bonus for our support guys.

The idea is pretty simple. We have one Google Calendar in which they assign themselves support duty. The idea is that every moment is covered and no shifts overlap. They put their name in the summary, and that's it.

Another calendar contains "factors" - support duty on Christmas has a higher factor than during the day.

So, the idea was to write something that scans both calendars, counts each person's support duty, totals them, and prints out what we should be paying them. Simple enough, no ?

After a bunch of hacking and rewriting, I've come to realize that I don't really understand what the goal of UID: in the iCalendar RFC is.

Specifically, this UID is supposed to be "globally unique" to the creator of the event.

Now, in our case, I'm getting an ics file from the Google Calendar that contains entries with duplicate UID's. After some experimenting, I nailed it down to the following sequence of events:

• create a new calendar
• create a two-hour event on monday, ask it to repeat all weekdays, and have the rule be active for only a week - scheduling 5 two-hour events
• now move the first instance of this event one hour down. It might or might not ask you to update all events in the series - choose to update only the one event

Visually, you now see the first event at a different start time, and the other four as they were.

Now, export the calendar - download the private ics URL. The ics file contains two events. Both have the same UID. One event is the first instance, which was moved. The other is a recurring event as you defined it originally - including the first event as it originally was!

So, Google Calendar seems to think that the first entry for the first instance is somehow more specific than the recurrence rule, so does not consider the recurrence rule to apply on the first day.

I tried importing the ics in Evolution - as I expected, it only shows the first event, and none of the instances of the second (recurring) event. I think this is correct behaviour, in the sense that it ignores additional events with the same uid.

So, any iCalendar experts out there that can comment on what's going on and how my program can detect that it should not schedule an instance of a recurrence rule on a certain date, because some other event has the same UID ?

This weekend, with the help of Zaheer, I was trying to write an application that calculates the bonus for our support guys. The idea is pretty simple. We have one...

I'm seriously considering going to This ATP festival in the UK. I've missed Explosions in the Sky on several occasions, and now they've assembled a pretty good line-up for a festival.

Long shot, but anyone else thinking of going ?

(Come on, Rombo, you know you want to...)

I'm seriously considering going to This ATP festival in the UK. I've missed Explosions in the Sky on several occasions, and now they've assembled a pretty good line-up for a...

Every time I am watching a DVD and am being forced to sit through these stupid legalese warning pages (don't you absolutely HATE it when you get criminalized exactly when you are doing everything legally ? Why do I get these stupid anti-piracy trailers every single time I go to the cinema and pay to watch a movie ?), I am completely baffled as to why "they" specifically chose to add "oil platform" to the list of places where you're not allowed to see the DVD in group.

I mean, seriously. In French, the words "plate-formes petrolieres" take up almost a complete line of the twenty they're showing. Who writes this stuff ? Who thinks "oh dear god, we almost lost millions of revenue by not excluding the oil platform people ?" Who gets the extra Christmas bonus for getting those two words in there ? What do the tens and tens of oil platform workers think about this ? And more importantly, do they even care ?

In unrelated news, the Buffy "smashed" episode probably has my favourite all-time love scene. Buffy and Spike duking it out, tearing a house down, and suddenly, bam. They get into it as the house collapses around them. The foreground noise cuts out, so you don't hear any of the house collapsing, just their noise, and the moodsetting music. Nicedly edited.

Every time I am watching a DVD and am being forced to sit through these stupid legalese warning pages (don't you absolutely HATE it when you get criminalized exactly when...

I spent the last day of 2007 on a board in the snow boarding from Switzerland to Italy. A most excellent way to wave out the old year.

New Year's Eve party was a bit funky, 11 Belgians and 11 Italians, lots of food and a bottle of spritzy stuff per person. Apparently this is Italian tradition, just like the pig legs with lentils dish that none of the Italians actually touched.

Time to defrost and bum around the country house....

Happy new year everyone!

I spent the last day of 2007 on a board in the snow boarding from Switzerland to Italy. A most excellent way to wave out the old year. New Year's...