I live by my organisers, e.g. the calendar on my desktop, iCal, and that on my PDA (e.g. iPhone and before that Palm) rather than the UKC paper diary. The diary has (at least) one advantage however: it specifies the week numbers. I have long found it a pain to enter all of these by hand into my organiser. So I've written a little Perl script to generate a set of regularly spaced dates (e.g. the week number on the Monday of every week) into a format that can then be imported into a calendar. It supports two formats: vCal which is widely used and annother wich can be converted into datebook .dba (which I needed when I used the Palm Desktop on Windows).
Here's the weeks for this academic year in vCal format, ready to be imported into your calendar.
To do this yourself, you'll need (1) Perl. If you use a Mac that's it, but Windows users will need (2) a little DOS tool called convdb. I got a copy from here. It's a pretty flexible if rather fragile tool for converting from plain text to the Palm .dba format. As an example, here's the terms 2006/07 in datebook .dba format.
events.pl [-h] [-v] [-l label] [-p period] [-s start] day/month/year repeat...
events.pl expects groups of pairs of arguments. It will generate a list of dates
for each group, starting with the date given and repeated repeat
times.
-h |
Print this message and exit. |
-v |
Use vcal format. |
-l label |
Print each event as "label N" where N is the number of the event.Default: "UKC Week". |
-p period |
The repeat period. Default: 7 |
-s start |
The starting number for the label. Default: 1. |
First, generate the dates in vcal format. E.g.
events.pl -v 24/9/2007 12 14/1/2008 12 5/5/2008 6 > ukc0708.vcs
will produce a list in plain text for the the three terms of UKC 2007/8 academic year.
Then, import it to your organiser (e.g. via iCal).
First, generate a plain text list of dates in a format convdb can read. E.g.
events.pl 24/9/2007 12 14/1/2008 12 5/5/2008 6 > ukc0708.txt
will produce a list in plain text for the the three terms of UKC 2007/8 academic year.
You then need to convert it to .dba format with convdb; the .dba file
will be called output.dba.
Finally, rename output.dba to something sensible, e.g. ukc0708.dba and
import it to your organiser (e.g. via the Palm desktop).
It would be nice if convdb was translated to something portable, e.g. Perl.
Richard Jones, August 2007.
Modified: September 2008.
Modified: September 2009.