Unix "remind" file for US holidays (Shallow Thoughts)

Unix "remind" file for US holidays

Am I the only one who's always confused about when holidays happen?

Partly it's software, I guess. In these days of everybody keeping their schedules on Google's or Apple's servers, maybe most people keep up on these things.

But being the dinosaur I am, I'm still resistant to keeping my schedule in the cloud on a public server. What if I need to check for upcoming events while I'm on a trip out in the remote desert somewhere? (Not to mention the obvious privacy considerations.) For years I used PalmOS PDAs, but when I switched to Android and discovered how poor the offline calendar options are, I decided that I should learn how to use the old Unix standby.

It's been pretty handy. I run remind ~/[remind-file-name] when I log in in the morning, and it gives me a nice summary of upcoming events:

DPU Solar surcharge meeting, 5:30-8:30 tomorrow
NMGLUG meeting in 2 days' time

Of course, I can also have it email me with reminders, or pop up a window, but so far I haven't felt the need.

I can also display a nice calendar showing upcoming events for this month or the next several months. I made a couple of aliases:

mycal () {
        months=$1 
        if [[ x$months = x ]]
        then
                months=1 
        fi
        remind -c$months ~/Docs/Lists/remind
}

mycalp () {
        months=$1 
        if [[ x$months = x ]]
        then
                months=2 
        fi
        remind -p$months ~/Docs/Lists/remind | rem2ps -e -l > /tmp/mycal.ps
        gv /tmp/mycal.ps &
}

The first prints an ascii calendar; the second displays a nice postscript calendar complete with little icons for phases of the moon.

But what about those holidays?

Okay, that gives me a good way of storing reminders about appointments. But I still don't know when holidays are. (I had that problem with the PalmOS scheduling program, too -- it never knew about holidays either.)

Web searching didn't help much. Unfortunately, "remind" is a terrible name in this age of search engines. If someone has already solved this problem, I sure wasn't able to find any evidence of it. So instead, I went to Wikipedia's list of US holidays, with the remind man page in another tab, and wrote remind stanzas for each one -- except Easter, which is much more complicated.

But wait -- it turns out that remind already has code to calculate Easter! It just needs a slightly more complicated stanza: instead of the standard form of

REM  1 Apr +1 MSG April Fool's Day %b

I need to use this form:

REM  [trigger(easterdate(today()))] +1 MSG Easter %b

The %b in each case is what gives you the notice of when the event is in your reminders, e.g. "Easter tomorrow" or "Easter in two days' time". The +1 is how far beforehand you want to be reminded of each event.

So here's my remind file for US holidays. I make no guarantees that every one is right, though I did check them for the next 12 months and they all seem to be working.

#
# US Holidays
#
REM      1 Jan    +3 MSG New Year's Day %b
REM Mon 15 Jan    +2 MSG MLK Day %b
REM      2 Feb       MSG Groundhog Day %b
REM     14 Feb    +2 MSG Valentine's Day %b
REM Mon 15 Feb    +2 MSG President's Day %b
REM     17 Mar    +2 MSG St Patrick's Day %b
REM      1 Apr    +9 MSG April Fool's Day %b
REM  [trigger(easterdate(today()))] +1 MSG Easter %b
REM     22 Apr    +2 MSG Earth Day %b
REM Fri  1 May -7 +2 MSG Arbor Day %b
REM Sun  8 May    +2 MSG Mother's Day %b
REM Mon  1 Jun -7 +2 MSG Memorial Day %b
REM Sun 15 Jun       MSG Father's Day
REM      4 Jul    +2 MSG 4th of July %b
REM Mon  1 Sep    +2 MSG Labor Day %b
REM Mon  8 Oct    +2 MSG Columbus Day %b
REM     31 Oct    +2 MSG Halloween %b
REM Tue  2 Nov    +4 MSG Election Day %b
REM     11 Nov    +2 MSG Veteran's Day %b
REM Thu 22 Nov    +3 MSG Thanksgiving %b
REM     25 Dec    +3 MSG Christmas %b

Tags: linux
[ 14:07 Nov 18, 2014    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]