A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Python ETR and Google Code Hosting

Earlier tonight I was talking to Nick a friend of mine who I've been working with recently on a ETR script. He's one of the webmasters for the University of Arizona Baja Racing Club.

I had already written my own ETR script for easy entry of time records from my google calendar to the ETR form website at my job. So I figured that i could just as easily modify it to work for him.

The main structure for his particular needs will be a main google account which the script will authenticate with. All of the users that he wants to keep time records for will simply create and share a calendar with that account. Then when the script is run it will simply authenticate with the gdata api and retrieve a list of events and their descriptions for each shared calendar on the account. All of this data is then written to a csv file of the same name of the calendar along with the work week it was done in.

The script is more or less in proof-of-concept stage and still needs a lot of polishing but in the middle of doing this I found myself wanting to have a way to organize changes and revisions. I've briefly used subversion before this and never really made a habit of using it even though I should have. I suddenly remembered that Google Code Hosting provides subversion access to open source projects. So I went ahead and made a project of the name pythonetr.

It took about 15 minutes for me to download and install TortoiseSVN, a windows shell integrated gui for SVN. I then imported the first revision of the project to the subversion repository of the project on google code. After that I sent Nick a link to the page so that if there were any feature requests, bugs anything he wanted me to know about for the project he could just submit them as issues there.

Shortly after that I made some modifications to the code since the gdata api was only returning events between specified dates only if their cooresponding UTC time was within the date range. This breaks things if you expect only events between the date ranges that are returned are within your timezone. So I made all the changes and committed the new revision.

It's really satisfying to have a personal record of all changes made to code and I really should do this more often. I'd upload all my other projects but I believe there's a lifetime limit of 10 projects total for google code hosting.

If you're interested in checking out a copy of the project, you can do so with the following command: