Today I got an email message from a helpful stranger telling me that all the links in my entry for ParseTime on PyPI were broken. Indeed they were. I had submitted the information about ParseTime to PyPI when I first developed it, and the software led a quiet and happy life on my Web server until the early summer of 2004, when I lost a rather significant amount of data in a hard drive crash (the most powerful lesson in proper backup procedure). This little slip of a Python extension module was one of the more significant things lost.

But in March of this year, I found the time to recreate this bit of code out of my memories and the wisps and scraps I had managed to glean from Google's cache shortly after the hard drive catastrophe. I dare say the second time around ended up with an implementation that is more concise, more robust, and more clearly written. But somehow, I never got around to tying the last bits of ribbon around the module's packaging, and so I never made the code accessible through the Web. I soon forgot about the whole thing, since the it was done more out of curiousity than out of any pressing need on my part. So until today, all the references to ParseTime on the Internet remained invalid. Thanks to this kind reminder, though, I've revived something that someone may find useful in their adventures in programming.

The small irony of the situation is not lost on me: a significant part of my job is to nag other people about broken links to their software. The cobbler's kids go barefoot.