parsedatetime 0.8.6 released

The new dayjob has been keeping me very busy so I’ve neglected working on parsedatetime.

An email reminding me that I had checked in 0.8.5 with the damn debug flag still enabled gave me the poke I needed to go thru the Issues listed (wow - people have been filing bugs!) and generate a new release.

See the Changes.txt entry for 0.8.6 for details.

It can be found via the Python Package Index, Google Code or my own
website.

Thanks to Bernd Zeimetz (Debian maintainer) for submitting a patch to localize parsedatetime for the German (de_DE) locale!

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Ted hired by Sun - wooo!

One of the best people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for/with has just been hired by Sun - Ted Leung. cNet seems to have broken the store here.

We knew something was up just from some of the questions he was asking and some of the trips he was making - after all you can’t be someone of Ted caliber and not stay un-hired for long :)
Glad to see he landed at a great company and I hope that Sun is ready for him ;)

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AOL testing XMPP server to bridge AIM/ICQ - sweet!

Saw a serious flurry of JDev chat-room messages earlier today and was wondering what the fuss was all about and then I read this post by Florian and just about wet myself ;)
That is great news that AOL, one of the bastions of closed-source’ness is adopting an open-source protocol (and XMPP to boot!)

While it’s still alpha quality, I look forward to ditching all things Oscar from my code.

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New year brings new challenges

I tend to not take any holidays, just don’t ever think about that stuff and with taking care of my father-in-law we never know when I will need to be away from work like when he had his gall bladder removed.

So I end up with almost all my PTO time at the end of the year and this past year was no exception: my boss basically told me that I had to take time off so I ended up spending the last 3 weeks on holiday.

My first day back tho was rather eventful for a Monday - the OSAF staff went thru a major restructuring and I found myself looking for a job. For some reason it didn’t seem to be bad news to me, sure I was on the phone talking to other team members about it and wondering WTF and the usual, but I decided to take it as a chance to change things up.

I have been helping the dev team of Seesmic work out some Jabber and Atom/RSS Feed issues and was getting the feeling that I could change my part time help to full time so after dealing with the news on Monday I took Johann up on his offer and joined the Seesmic team!

I’m going to still be active with Chandler and the OSAF staff as I feel passionately about the calenderaing and open-source world as I do now for my new job.

Here’s to a very eventful 2008 !!!

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Leopard changed default partition table type breaking makediskimage.sh

Not sure where exacly I found makediskimage.sh, heck probably saw another project using it, but for sure it has saved a lot of hassle back when I was learning how to create disk image files.

Unfortunately it doesn’t have any author or history so I never knew who to thank :(
With the Leopard upgrade it suddenly stopped working. The HFS format step was failing and was just outputing it’s help text. Looking at the line just above in the script that generated that output, I noticed that the echo output was not correct:

...
created: /tmp/20096.dmg
Creating HFS partition Chandler_iosx_debug_0.7.3.dev-r15733 on /tmp/20096.dmg at

usage: newfs_hfs [-h | -w] [-N] [hfsplus-options] special-device
options:
...

The line that starts “Creating HFS partition…” should end with “at /dev/disk5s1″ - what drive the HFS formatting would have happened on.

The bash script segment responsible for that is:

DEVICES=`hdid -nomount $TMPFILE`
DEVMASTER=`echo $DEVICES| awk '{ print $1 }'`
DEVHFS=`echo $DEVICES| awk '{ print $5 }'`
echo Creating HFS partition $NAME on $TMPFILE at $DEVHFS
newfs_hfs -v "$NAME" $DEVHFS

The line of interest is the output of hdid - up until Leopard it would output something like:

oliver:~ bear$ hdid -nomount /tmp/bear.dmg
/dev/disk2          	Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk2s1        	Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk2s2        	Apple_HFS

Which shows the drive and two partitions, but under Leopard it now outputs:

imac3:~ bear$ hdid -nomount /tmp/bear.dmg
/dev/disk5          	GUID_partition_scheme
/dev/disk5s1        	Apple_HFS

When you pass that to an environment variable (which, remember, removes all line feeds and makes it into a long string) you now get:

DEVHFS=/dev/disk5  GUID_partition_scheme  /dev/disk5s1  Apple_HFS

Instead of

DEVHFS=/dev/disk2  Apple_partition_scheme  /dev/disk2s1  Apple_partition_map  /dev/disk2s2  Apple_HFS

Basically to try and get to an actual point :) - when

awk '{ print $5 }'

is run on the new output there isn’t a fifth item so you get nothing back.

The fix is to switch to a method that isn’t dependent on the layout of the columns *and* the lines:

DEVHFS=`hdid -nomount $TMPFILE | grep Apple_HFS | awk '{ print $1 }'`

Now we take the raw output, grep for the line we really want and grab the first column of that. With the extra bonus of it working now on all OS X’s I could get my hands on to test.

Anywho, just wanted to post this in case someone else runs into their makediskimage.sh script suddenly start to fail.