# 22 Sep 2016, 03:09PM: New Essay: "Toward a !!Con Aesthetic":
Over at The Recompiler, I have a new essay out: "Toward A !!Con Aesthetic". I talk about (what I consider to be) the countercultural tech conference !!Con, which focuses on "the joy, excitement, and surprise of programming". If you're interested in hospitality and inclusion in tech conferences -- not just in event management but in talks, structure, and themes -- check it out.
Christie Koehler also interviews me about this and about activist role models, my new consulting business, different learning approaches, and more in the latest Recompiler podcast.
[announcement cross-posted from Geek Feminism]
# 26 Sep 2016, 09:33AM: iCalendar Munging with Python 3, Requests, ics.py, and Beautiful Soup:
Leonard and I love seeing movies at the Museum of the Moving Image. Every few months we look at the calendar of upcoming films and decide what we'd possibly like to see together, and put it on our shared calendar so we remember. And for every showing (example) the MoMI provides an iCalendar (.ics) file, to help you add it to your electronic calendar. But it's a pain to individually download or refer to each event's .ics file and import it into my electronic calendar -- and the museum's .ics files' DTEND times are often misleading and imply that the event has a duration of 0 seconds. (I've asked them to fix it, and some of their calendar files have correct durations, but some still have DTEND at the same time as DTSTART.)
Saturday morning I had started individually messing with 30+ events, because the MoMI is doing a complete retrospective of Krzysztof Kieslowski's films and I am inwardly bouncing up and down with joyous anticipation about seeing Dekalog again. And then I thought: I bet I can automate some of this tedious labor!
So I did. The create-fixed-ics.py script (Python 3) takes a plain text file of URLs separated by newlines (see movie-urls-sample-file.txt for an example), downloads iCalendar files from the MoMI site, fixes their event end times, and creates a new unified .ics file ready for import into a calendar. Perhaps the messiest bit is how I use a set of regular expressions, and my observations of the customs of MoMI curators, to figure out the probable duration of the event.
Disclaimers:
- It can be a bit slow as the number of URLs adds up -- it took maybe 5 minutes to process about 31 events. I oughta profile it and speed it up. But I usually only need to do this about six times a year.
- This script is not careful, and will overwrite a previously created .ics file at the same address (in case you're running it twice in one day). It has no tests and approximately no error-checking. This was a scratch-my-own-itch, few-hours-on-a-Saturday project. No Maintenance Intended.
- Absolutely not an official project of the Museum of the Moving Image.
Much thanks to the programming ecology that helped me build this, especially the people who made RegExr, Beautiful Soup (hi Leonard), Requests, ics.py, and the bpython interpreter, and the many who have written excellent documentation on Python's standard library. Thanks also to Christine Spang, whose "Email as Distributed Protocol Transport: How Meeting Invites Work and Ideas for the Future" talk at Open Source Bridge 2015 (video) introduced me to hacking with the iCalendar format.
# 28 Sep 2016, 04:43PM: Analogy:
At MidAmericon II I got to shake hands with Dr. Stanley Love and tell him that I liked his speech (he had accepted the Campbell Award for Best New Writer on behalf of his friend Andy Weir). When I later recounted this to friends I found myself saying things like "I reassured an astronaut, which means I will surely go to heaven" or "I couldn't lie to an astronaut! That's a sin!"
This led me to realize that astronauts are, vaguely, to the general US public now as Catholic nuns (at least schoolteacher nuns) were to previous generations. They are cloistered away to be closer to heaven. They have to live in close quarters and collaborate under conditions of micromanagement. They go through arduous selection processes and care a lot about education. Nuns had Rome, astronauts have Houston. We are in awe of their dedication and endurance and altruism and grace. And just the sight of one of their uniforms/habits triggers that reaction of awe.
(Your mileage may vary, conditions may apply, vanity, vanity, all is vanity.)
