Link to irclogs.ubuntu.com

[Nathan Handler]

Lernid is aware of the start times of sessions. It would be useful if it could link sessions that have already been given to the logs at irclogs.ubuntu.com. While irclogs.ubuntu.com does support linking to specific time stamps, I would probably avoid doing this. If the session does not start exactly on time, or if any of the clocks are slightly off, you will end up with a link that does not work as expected (since time stamps are only created when a message is sent, not at every minute).

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

I'm afraid I'm not following here. I gather the idea is to populate a column in the schedule for older sessions with links to irclogs, but I don't see a way for any program to exactly know when the session changed vs. a session running over. Is this done programatically, somehow, within recording mechanism for the irclogs? What advanced knowledge does lernid have?

I suppose we could record the time of the first message received after the time the class started--but that would only work for sessions where lernid was running and still might not really mark the beginning (and, more importantly end) of the preceeding session as speakers are sometimes given extra time to finish up.

Can you clarify this for me?

[Nathan Handler (nhandler)]

A new column would not be needed. Just turn the session title itself into a link. I would probably assume that sessions are not going to run over (if we see that they are, we typically adjust the calendar, but this is not common during big events). Lernid currently displays a schedule of sessions. This schedule shows the time that each session starts at. So a link to something like http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/07/11/%23ubuntu-classroom.html would be trivial (that only requires knowing the date of session). I've thought about ways to link to the specific start of the session on the log page, but it is rather tricky. There are so many different schedules and clocks involved that is is very likely that one of them might become a minute or so off. This means that a link directly to a specific time like http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/07/11/%23ubuntu-classroom.html#t05:35 could easily break. Linking to just the right irclogs.ubuntu.com page should be sufficient, and it will still make the lives of users easier.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

For 0.8.5 I plan to include the links to irc logs in the Schedule tab. To increase the usefulness of that change I plan to let the schedule go back in time more than the week as originally carried out.

There's no extra overhead--the calendar has to be parsed as a whole, and I've improved the scrolling in this next release so that the schedule scrolls to the bottom if there are no future events. In other words the schedule always scrolls to the current time, so the past events don't even get noticed unless the student consciously decides to scroll backwards to see them.

This is contrary to a previous blueprint so I've subscribed Jono.