Dev-Picayune

(now updated with some pointless Python code)

This is perfect for this little blog concerned with trivial and small things. I noticed that my Peanuts calendar on my desk is essentially a reproduction of the 1990 calendar. Obviously, they all have to be reproductions because Charles Schulz died in 2000. So looking more closely, I realized they’d chosen 1990 primarily because the dates and days of 1990 match 2007. So a quick hack with the ‘cal’ program under linux and I was off and searching for what will most likely be next year’s calendar. Since 2008 is a leap year and obviously 1991 is not, I knew that wasn’t going to work.

First I generated target calendar with:

cal 2008 > cal2008.txt

Then, I just manually (although I could have written a script) looped through a few known leap years and found that 1980 seems to match perfectly as well.

cal 1980|diff - cal2008.txt

Obviously, what we’re looking for is a diff of only the first line, the year. Side note: the selection of 1952 (also a match), would seem to be fairly unlikely.

For 2009, there are a bunch of choices including: 1953, 1959, 1970, 1981, 1987 and 1998.

Why am I posted this? I don’t know other than it was fun to use ‘cal’ and ‘diff’ to anticipate which Peanuts calendar would be next.

UPDATE

I couldn’t resist doing a Python solution to this little problem. I know this isn’t as efficient as someone else could make it, but it was entertaining for me to do it. It took about 5 or 6 minutes to write and ran correctly the first time (matching my previous results):

import sys 
import datetime
def matchCals(inputYear,minYear,maxYear):
    sDayOfWeek = datetime.date(inputYear,1,1).weekday()
    eDayOfWeek = datetime.date(inputYear,12,31).weekday()
    for testYear in range(minYear,maxYear+1):
        if (sDayOfWeek == datetime.date(testYear,1,1).weekday() and eDayOfWeek == datetime.date(testYear,12,31).weekday()):
            print "Match Found... %s = %s" % (str(testYear) , str(inputYear))
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    matchCals(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2]), int(sys.argv[3]))

Here I just check the day of the week on the first day of the year, and the last day of the year. If both of those fall on the same day, I assume the calendars for those years are the same. And since we’re dealing with a limited set of dates (valid complete Peanuts calendars running roughly 1951 to 1999, it handles a min and max year for input as well. So to run it for 2008, you just type in:

python ./caltest.py 2008 1951 1999

Of course, there is no error checking… so if you enter a string or an invalid year… that’s your own problem. I just wanted to see how quick I could do it. Obviously, I’ve waisted more of my time… and more of your time.