Let me start with a little bit of history: I spent many (*many*) hours as a young person sitting in front of my parents computer writing code with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. I formed almost all of my skills and habits using those tools including the code,build,test cycle that is now all the rage but back then few tools could allow you to do. The Turbo family of tools hold a place in my heart like most people have for their first car or first dog :)

Ok, so now that you know I’m a certifiable geek ;) I’ll let you know whey I’m so excited!

DevCo, aka The company that finally escaped the corporate clutches of Inprise, is bringing back the Turbo family of products! http://www.turboexplorer.com/homepage.htm

Sure, it may be the same “explorer” version they offered before, but just the fact that the team is thinking back to their roots and offering free versions again to me is a great sign

parsedatetime

I must admit I’ve been having fun doing all the little things that are required to support a library/package. There has already been a couple of questions on the mailing list for parsedatetime and even a feature request! Which I was able to implement and it should be in the next version.

Part of the fun is all the little things that were put into the “I’ll do that when it’s ready to be released” pile that suddenly I realized needed to be done: generated docs, make sure the API is as clean and simple as can be, read the code like your a user, etc.

All basic stuff but it needed doing and with even more unit tests I can make sure that each round of cleanup doesn’t introduce subtle bugs – good stuff.

WWDC 2006

It was fun watching the WWDC Keynote speech tonight — a lot of little bits of code-candy to look at now, but I think the really fun stuff is happening tomorrow when some of the OSAF crew are helping to demo the CALDAV connectivity that sounds like will be a part of the new OS X version.

Most of what they were showing were “meh” items to be honest. Sure they really looked good and you know that the feature sets will be pushing the right buttons, but really – did we really need HTML templates for mail? But for sure the demo of TimeTravel and also of the new ToDo and Notes features was *very* cool. I couldn’t help but notice how the ToDo and Notes toolbar icons looked a lot like, and behaved like, the stamping items Chandler does :)

The latest version of epydoc (0.3alpha) is very nice – a lot of little improvements over the previous version. I have been getting posts from the epydoc mailing list so I kinda new that things were improving, but nothing beats sitting down and using the latest version to really make the point :)

So with the latest version installed, a step made painless and very simply by running easy_install epydoc, I set about adding the various epydoc related items t the docstrings, cleaning up the code some more and then generating the docs.

Total time from install to generate about an hour, then it was time to upload them to the web server and create some links.

So now the parsedatetime project page has a nice shiny new API Docs link.

I decided to take a look at the Python Cheeseshop entry for
parsedatetime just now and yowza! There were non-zero numbers in the downloads column!

Now sure, it’s only 7 right now, but for my first public python module ever I am delighted ;)

Of course this means that the todo list for documentation just got bumped up on the list as currently the only thing that shows how to use it is a single line in the README :(

Nothing like someone using your code to *really* make you want to fix it :)

For the past couple of weeks Darshana has been using, breaking and refactoring parsedatetime. Her changes have really shaken out the weak points and helped expand what the code does. Some of the changes are very Chandler specific but I’ve been trying to merge them into my code-base in as generic a manner as possible. It helps that no one uses this code yet because we have broken the API a number of times :)

Also because of this use I’ve had to get serious about packaging as the code is now listed as a dependency for Chandler and since I’m the build person I have no one to blame but myself for any build/integration issues!

Now that I’ve done some of the dirty work you can get parsedatetime as either a source tarball or a
Python egg and the source is available via SVN from
code.google.com. I’m not quite ready yet to put it up on
Python’s Package Index as that gets a little too much visibility right now and I don’t think I’m ready for a public peer review.

Some of the changes Darshana has made has moved more constant text back into the main code so I know I have to make a round of refactoring to move it back to the consts module – otherwise localization will be impossible. Also in the i18n context I really want to look into having the consts module sense if
PyICU is available and use if if so – this will make it more robust (I hope.)