Bear’s Journal

It’s something that always amazes me when I run across sites that don’t do the most basic of sanity checks — most of the links on a site I was just at returned 404’s. The links that did work didn’t seem to have any useful information.

Too bad that the site has something that sounds really cool and interesting, but if they can’t fix their links even when reminded of it in comments on their blog then you have to wonder what the quality of the code is. I hope it’s just a case of too-busy-coding syndrome (and that’s also why I’m not posting the link

I was catching up on the mod_pubsub project’s “blog”:http://www.mod-pubsub.org/blog/index.php and noticed the mention for “S5″:http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ — Eric Meyer’s latest CSS tool.

Basically it is a couple CSS stylesheets and some JavaScript to handle the interaction with the result being a slideshow. Like all excellant hacks, it looks really easy after someone else has brought the various pieces together. But don’t listen to me mangle the description or try to regurgitate Eric’s description — head over to the S5 project page and see it for yourself.

*a css god*

While idling in the Freenode channel #civicspace (which is probably another posting if I could ever get into the habit of doing regular postings) I saw a link to a very cool web app “Webnote”:http://www.aypwip.org/webnote

It is a way to enter notes into a web browser, and yes by itself that’s a “yawn” item, but it also lets you arrange the text boxes visually and apply different colors to them.

Oh, and the best part? It’s a mix of Python and Javascript.

I just had to post about this - pretty cool I think.

In other news …

My favorite season is here - yea! Nothing is more enjoyable than sleeping with the windows open in a bed surrounded by cats and with a couple blankets on top

This idea started simple, as they all seem to do — make the Time plugin for “Tellbot”:http://tellbot.code-bear.com more flexible in the input it recognizes. Currently it really only allows you to request the current time in different timezones.

Simple really.

Then I heard about a feature request over in the Supybot project for a routine that would recognize “fuzzy” or “relative” time values (e.g. “next week”, “tomorrow” or “in 5 minutes”) so I set out first to find some existing code. After some “Google”:http://wwww.google.com searches I found the following:

*Python*: “datetime”:http://www.python.org/docs , “time”:http://www.python.org/docs , “eGenix”:http://www.lemburg.com/python/mxExtensions.html and “DateUtil”:https://moin.conectiva.com.br/DateUtil

*Perl*: “Date::Manip”:http//www.cpan.org

and I’m still looking
Simple. Really.

uhh, yea
So far only Date::Manip supports the freeform style of input - I will have to make sure to compare outputs and borrow any unit tests it uses
What the above libraries do offer is some serious heavy-weight date/calendar manipulation code so once the text is parsed into a date, they will be more than capable for manipulating that date. Even the author of Date::Manip “mentions”:http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~sbeck/DateManip.html#should_i_use_date::manip that many of the other libraries are leaner and faster for core date manipulation.

Since the above list of libraries do date manipulation so well it would be folly for me to start re-inventing the wheel in that area and with the only other flexible parsing library being in Perl, I think I’ll focus on the flexible parsing area and make sure that any of the above Python libraries can be used on the back-end.