I promised that I'd talk about my little side project. Like most software projects, it came from an itch that I wanted to scratch. The museum has a schedule that I find difficult to use. It works under the assumption that you pick the movie you want to see, then figure out when it's playing. For the people that have a membership pass, we usually want to see what's playing in the time slots that we have.
I took their pages, scrape them and format it into an iCalendar format that is useful to me - works in google calendar AND my iphone. I don't know if it works in Outlook, but I assume that it does. I tested it in iCal as well, but that's the first time that I've opened the piece of software.
I wanted to learn more ruby and for me to find that interesting I needed a "project". As my first foray into ruby, I'm sure that my code was more procedural that "rubyish", but what are you going to do. I used nokogiri for pulling down the html and parsing it out. I used RiCal to create the icalendar file as well as tzinfo for the time zone stuff.
At this point I don't think that anyone else has even looked at the page, and I'm okay with that. It serves my needs right now. But if anyone needs a schedule for the imax moves at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, I hope that this will help them as well.
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