Bear’s Journal

The following code connects to the NOAA using pyMETAR to retrieve a
weather report and then connects to the Twitter Jabber bot and sends a message as me. Believe it or not the hard part was figuring
out that the Twitter IM bot was ignoring normal messages and that I needed to send a chat message

import time, pymetar, xmpp

# Philly International KPHL

metarRF     = pymetar.ReportFetcher("KPHL")
metarRP     = pymetar.ReportParser()
metarData   = metarRF.FetchReport()
metarReport = metarRP.ParseReport(metarData)

weather     = "looks out the window: %s, %s F (%s C)" % (metarReport.getWeather(),
                                                         metarReport.getTemperatureFahrenheit(),
                                                         metarReport.getTemperatureCelsius())

print 'weather: %s' % weather

jid = xmpp.protocol.JID('you@jabber.org')

to_list = [xmpp.protocol.JID('twitter@twitter.com'),
          ]

c = xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain(), debug=[])

if c.connect():
    a = c.auth(jid.getNode(), 'password', resource=jid.getResource())

    if a:
        print 'authenticated using', a

        for j in to_list:
            print j, '::', c.send(xmpp.protocol.Message(j, weather, 'chat'))

        time.sleep(1)
    else:
        print 'error authenticating', a

    c.disconnect()
else:
    print 'error connecting'

While sitting here waiting to see if the rollback I just did is successful, I was catching up on some blog reading. I won’t go into messy details about why I had to rollback some changes or the fun fact that my own “quick fix” caused the tree to go red for a couple hours - nope, won’t go into it

Instead I’ll echo the sentiment that preed said last week in his blog posting A Builder in a Build Land — it’s hard finding either current or relevant to open source information about build/release methods and/or tools. Like preed, I tend to find either really large cumbersome commercial options or “hey! this is what I did this past weekend” items.

Not that there isn’t any good information out there, there is and I’ve been slowly building up a list of bookmarks that I always scan when I have a problem to solve. But that’s not the current point of my ramblings.

The current point is a question I have to ask myself - do I step up and try to help solve this issue? Now I’m not talking about being the end-all to the world of SCM — heck, there are a lot of commercial vendors in that space. Instead I’m talking about the world of Bonsai, Tinderbox and the like. Those tools that small shops try out because they can’t (or don’t want to) spend half their development budget on SCM.

It’s a tough call, my personal time is already slim as it is (heck, I still have to finish the Bonsai SVN changes) and work is keeping me very busy (thankfully :).

But I think that’s the answer also - work is keeping me busy because of the fact that I’m running around dealing with little changes here and there to support the different environments that are found at OSAF. Maybe if I started to map out some common features, things that cause me to wince and out-right deficiencies I would find out that my list is very similar to preed’s.

If you think about it there are a myriad of little tools (and some big ones) that are good and just need some thought but I have also found that there is a bunch of tools that are being used just because they work just enough so as to be below the damn-this-sucks-I-have-rewrite-it threshold.

One thing I would have to do is put myself even further into the info-stream that has become the google-verse and deal with the issues that brings along, another is that I would have to get my shit together and do more than my job. Posting and trying to change the build landscape is a lot harder than just keeping OSAF’s builds running.

gotta chew on it some

Well sure, it’s being used by Chandler, but I mean now it has non-OSAF users and one of them has actually filed a “issue” (code.google.com speak for a bug). In the issue he (Alan) wants parsedatetime to support “Aussie” date formats, i.e. dd-mm-yyyy.

I’ve always had it in my head that this kind of support would be necessary and knew that I would be doing the code sooner or later. Looks like it was sooner

With the changes I recently made to support PyICU and locales in general a lot of the hard work has already been done. What was left was figuring out how to convert Darshana’s parseDate() code (she had extracted some of the code I was using in a couple different spots and made it into a function) into something that could be data-driven.

First I needed to solve the issue of how do you figure out programatically what the order is? Oh sure, for the pdtLocale classes I create manually when PyICU isn’t available I can just specify the order, but I wanted to be able to also figure it out for PyICU and since I had already come up with a way of extracting from the short time format the time separator and optionally the meridian text, I kinda figured I could use the same thing for dates.

Here’s the code that extracts the order from PyICU’s short date format:

      # grab the ICU date format class for 'short'
    o = ptc.icu_df['short']

      # ask ICU to build a date string using the given datetime
    s = o.format(datetime.datetime(2003, 10, 30, 11, 45))

      # because I used unique values, I can replace them with ''
      # which *should* leave only the date separator
    s = s.replace('10', '').replace('30', '')

      # extract the separator, or default if nothing found
    if len(s) > 0:
        ds = s[0]
    else:
        ds = '/'

    ptc.dateSep = [ ds ]

      # now that I have the date separator
      # parse the short date format string
    s        = ptc.dateFormats['short']
    l        = s.lower().split(ds)
    dp_order = []

    for s in l:
        if len(s) > 0:
            dp_order.append(s[:1])

    ptc.dp_order  = dp_order

The above code will return [’m', ‘d’, ‘y’] for en_US and [’d', ‘m’, ‘y’] for en_AU.

With the order determined, the following code takes the values returned from the regex’s and builds the appropriate values

      # v1, v2 and v3 are initialized to -1
      # this lets 0 values in the text pass thru
      # so they are flagged as errors downstream
    v = [ v1, v2, v3 ]
    d = { 'm': mth, 'd': dy, 'y': yr }

      # run thru the dp_order list in sequence
      # and replace the value in d if it's not -1
    for i in range(0, 3):
        n = v[i]
        c = self.ptc.dp_order[i]
        if n >= 0:
            d[c] = n

    mth = d['m']
    dy  = d['d']
    yr  = d['y']

Pretty nifty if I may say so myself but I want to run it by people like Phillipe (pje) to *really* find out if it’s a good python algorighm.

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