I’m not sure if there’s still a custom in our primary schools to go on a few days long school trip at the end of last year. I know there used to be one when I was there.

We went to Vis , a small and beautiful island in Croatia, which back then was still in the same country. It was the end of May, when sea is still very cold, at least if you’re not used to that sort of temperatures. We weren’t and were basically stuck for a few days in a small village with nothing to do. That was back in the days, when there was no gameboys, portable DVD’s or whatever entertains kids today. However there was an ice cream parlor, where a scoop of ice cream costed only 1000 DIN compared to 2500 DIN back home.

So for three days my friends and I were regularly visiting that shop, buying copious amounts of ice cream. I haven’t spent even 1 DIN on it back home, because I thought it was too expensive. I spent more than 100 000 there, because it was so ridiculously cheap and I wasn’t alone doing it.

Lucky for me I didn’t get a bellyache, but I did get a lesson on how cheaper pricing doesn’t necessarily equate smaller profits. Odd that music industry still refuses to accept this.

We use MoinMoin for all our documentation needs, since it simplifies almost all related tasks. It’s nice when everything is available at one place through a familiar and easy to use interface.

This is why I also wanted to use it to build a FAQ for our site, which is more needed with each day. There’s an abundance of software for building and managing such documents, but I haven’t found anything that would match our needs. Apart from using wiki pages as the source of wisdom, I also wanted:

1. A good and fairly easy integration with our site (but not automatic).
2. A very malleable solution, where it would be easy to change FAQ organization as requirements change.

At the end I decided to build our own thing using Beautiful Soup , a python package I raved about a while ago. Since we wanted each question to have a permanent link that could be bookmarked, we had to give them an identifier that wouldn’t change even if we rephrased the question or changed the answer. The simplest way was to assign a unique number to each question as it can be seen on a sample FAQ page . This way it’s easy to add and remove questions as long as you can count.

MoinMoin produces very sensible HTML that is easy to work with. Here’s a proof of concept module that extracts information from a page like the sample one and packs it in a dictionary with identifiers as keys and a list [ question, answer ] as value.

It’s not something very useful on its own, but I think it’s a nice example of what can be done quickly with existing tools like MoinMoin and BeautifulSoup.

Notes: In principle there’s no need to use MoinMoin as long as produced HTML fits following assumptions:

1. FAQ is stored inside a div element with id set to content .
2. Questions are inside a heading element which also acts as a delimiter between them.
3. Identifiers are integers.

If it doesn’t, you’ll need to change code a bit.

To me the most annoying business habit is calling someone when it’s not urgent, even though you have his email address and it should be obvious from your relationship that he prefers email to other means of communication.

I hated phones since I was a wee lad, but I dislike them even more now, because:

1. They break my concentration; rarely for a good reason.
2. They are invasive and inconsiderate. Just because it suits you to call me now, it doesn’t mean it suits me.
3. Whatever is said on the phone can be denied later and sometimes is.

Leave a trail or fuck off.