Note: This page is now linked from the Novell BrainShare official site. I certainly appreciate the vote of confidence.
 

In 1999, I had a simple problem--it was my first BrainShare, and I had just gotten my Palm III, and I thought it would be cool to get my conference schedule in my Palm. So I wrote a Perl script and used the convdb utility to make a .DBA file that Palm Desktop could import. I was the talk of the town. I skipped BS2K, but decided I would be going to BrainShare this year. Since then, they've completely changed the way you register for tutorials. When I wrote this, they didn't have a way to output the schedule into a simple text file. Furthermore, the copy of convdb currently on the net would just crash on any system I ran it on. So I needed something else. This year's Perl script takes the saved HTML source from the "Schedule Print View" of the online scheduler, and produces a vCal file. This has the advantage of not just working with Palms (although you do need Palm Desktop 4.0 to read .vcs files directly into your device) but with any scheduler app that accepts vCal format. So it's even more useful. As of March 2nd, there are now also options to export the schedule as a CSV or tab delimited file, but these don't have room numbers, which I would find useful; however, I will probably make a version of this script that generates vCal from those files, too, though. (this weekend?) You can run it on Perl for any platform, I'd think (I've tested Linux and Win32). Here's what you do: 1) Use Internet Explorer to do your BrainShare schedule (that's that they recommend anyway.) When you're all done, select the "Schedule Print View" option on the left. 2) You'll get a printer-friendly version of the file. Go to "View/Source", which pulls up the HTML file in Notepad. Save this source as a text file. Do NOT save the HTML page itself--the source view changes line breaks and makes the code easier to parse, and I was lazy writing the script. 3) Use bs2palm1.pl like this: bs2palm1.pl schedule.txt schedule.vcs This will create schedule.vcs from the text file. You can then import the vCal file into any vCal-aware program. For Palm Desktop (version 4), you can do this by being in the Date Book view, selecting File/Import, changing the type to "vCal file," and importing. Be aware that if you change your schedule, you'll have to manually remove all the events for the week if you reimport--unfortunately if you don't you'll have duplicates and the old ones will still be there too. If anyone figures out how to use this file to delete events, let me know. Download bs2palm1.plx (you may need to right-click and select "Save Link As" and change the extension from .plx to .pl) Download ActiveState Perl for Win32 Download Palm Desktop 4.0   There's more detailed info in the top of the Perl script.   Problems?  Email me.

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Last updated:  Friday, 02-Mar-2001 16:29:54 EST