I'd really like to find an open source command line editor for iCalendar (ics) files. I generally maintain my calendars using iCal on OS X, but the iCal client does not allow write access to calendars you've subscribed to even if the server settings allow it. So sometimes I want to edit a calendar directly on the server and all I have is ssh terminal access.

I've gone on google hunts (and sourceforge, rubyforge and freshmeat hunts) for this several times but somehow can never come up with one even though I know one must exist. I could probably write one in under an hour using a ruby or perl library, but there has to be a more robust full-featured one than I could do in an hour out there.

Anyone know of one?

This gave me a chuckle: I can tell you are a math guy from Jack's Technical Blog

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
• You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
• Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
• You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
• All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
• You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
• All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.

On Monday night I went to a Ruby on Rails Meetup for Newbies. I'm not new to rails but I thought I could help answer questions plus it would be a good way to see if there are any coders who are new to ruby but talented. I am hiring after all. It was a good meeting, I ended up spending more time proselytizing Agile methodologies (Test Driven Development, Pair Programming) than Rails specific things, but met a lot of interesting people and had some good conversations.

The only uncool part was a recruiter (who didn't identify herself as such) and her boyfriend who pretended to just be interested in learning to code ruby, but snuck out soon after the meeting started when it became quite obvious that the ruse wasn't going to pan out very well. Note to Vanessa: if you're going to recruit, do so honestly and actually engage with the geeks. We're ok with recruiters and newbies, but don't much like dishonesty.

One of the cooler things I ran across that evening was Debate Graph which the host, Mark Carranza pointed out after I started talking about my Belief Graph pipe dream. It's a system for structuring debates/beliefs in a way that is more productive than a common verbal argument. I'm quite excited to look into it more, hopefully during vacation next week. The subject came up because Mark is working on a very ambitious cognitive software project called blissn that reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project. It's not public yet but he has a couple of working prototypes that are quite interesting. He's been recording and linking his thoughts for quite some time now and has a large number rapidly available at his fingertips. Looking forward to more from Mark. Plus he was a great host for the meetup.

The news has broken that Pivotal Labs has taken on the task of fixing Twitter's notorious performance problems, or as the VentureBeat article described it "Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure". I think this is a smart move for Twitter. During my two years at Pivotal I was constantly impressed by the level of engineering excellence exhibited there. It was by far the smartest group of software engineers I had ever worked with and the highest quality of code I've ever had a hand in producing. I truly believe they are the best Ruby on Rails shop you can find anywhere. That's why now that I've left Pivotal to lead the engineering effort of a web startup, I'm back at Pivotal as a client. I know where to go for excellence, and apparently so does Twitter. I'm really looking forward to seeing this team crush the Twitter issue.

Note, depiction is not necessarily the actual Twitter team at Pivotal, but they are some of my favorite Big Guns there :)

The news has broken that Pivotal Labs has taken on the task of fixing Twitter's notorious performance problems, or as the VentureBeat article described it "Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure". I think this is a smart move for Twitter. During my two years at Pivotal I was constantly impressed by the level of engineering excellence exhibited there. It was by far the smartest group of software engineers I had ever worked with and the highest quality of code I've ever had a hand in producing. I truly believe they are the best Ruby on Rails shop you can find anywhere. That's why now that I've left Pivotal to lead the engineering effort of a web startup, I'm back at Pivotal as a client. I know where to go for excellence, and apparently so does Twitter. I'm really looking forward to seeing this team crush the Twitter issue.

Note, depiction is not necessarily the actual Twitter team at Pivotal, but they are some of my favorite Big Guns there :)

History meme.

[dav:~] $ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
128 ruby
75 cd
57 ls
35 rm
25 sudo
13 rake
10 vi
10 ssh
9 ping
8 cat

Wired has posted an article about MySpace offering an opt-in sharing of four key portions of your MySpace account with other web sites. It was inevitable that some big site would come to their senses and do this. I'm just surprised it wasn't Facebook. As I said years ago:

I've long ranted about how Friendster blew an incredible opportunity to become the social network maintainers of the entire globe. Despite being a crappy application, they were in a position to become the center of everything if they opened up their database of connections to external application developers. Countless applications (both desktop and web-based) would have been tapped into that system and presumably sharing profits with the Friendster corporation. Having a Friendster account would have been as basic as having an email account.

Now MySpace, despite being a crappy website, are in a position to become the center of everything.