Ok, so I know Google calendar has been around for ages but I’ve just got around to playing with it. More specifically I’ve started to play around with the API so that I can create events programatically. I’m using TCL, for no other reason than because it is the language that I use at work. Like most modern scripting languages it has all of the packages needed (http, tls) to be able to connect up to the calendar API so its just been a matter of following the instructions / examples in the Google documentation and working out where I had gone wrong! My initial attempts produced a ‘ prolog cannot contain data’ error which I eventually sussed out was caused by my assuming that the XML message containing the event needed to be encoded; it didn’t. Once I’d got that fixed then my code would write events quite nicely. The next bit of code I want to write will allow events to be read, modified and deleted. Once thats done I’ll release it for the world to play with.
Posts Tagged ‘TCL’
Google Calendar
Monday, March 2nd, 2009Stretching the brain
Thursday, September 4th, 2008I’m currently working my way through the problems Project Euler as a way of stretching my brain and also refreshing my C++. The actual problems can be solved in pretty much any language and judging by the forum they have been. I’m using C++ not because it is the best language for the job, which it isn’t, but because my coding skills in it are getting a bit rusty. I’ve spent most of my time over the last 3 years coding in TCL with some brief forays in to Java. But before that I was a C++ coder for over 5 years and I don’t really want to let the skills slip away….you never know when it might come in handy!
On a related note I met up with a colleague from the place where I used to do the C++ coding and it was good to catch up with him and hear what had happened to everybody. Sometimes I wonder if I could go back there and use the knowledge I have acquired since leaving to update the software. I would love to be able to incorporate a scripting language like TCL or Python into the main application and use scripts to drive it. The application was for controlling a high performance mass spectrometer and I actually wrote a sort of scripting language to provide some high level control of the sample introduction and data measurements. It was horrendously complex under the hood and was also multi threaded which meant that not many people could work out how to use it. With hindsight it didn’t need to be multi-threaded except in maybe one or two cases and even these could be handled by a single threaded script.
Who knows…may be one day I’ll get to do it. Until then I’ll keep the brain ticking over trying to remember ‘A’ level maths.