DSA Practical Driving Test search script

I’ve recently had to hastily pass my practical driving test as my theory test certificate was about to expire. It’s a little well known fact that some areas are well known for their long waiting periods. Hello Isleworth in London. There’s a 1-2 month waiting list as standard for that test center, which is just too long and would tip me over my theory expiration date.

So I decided to book any date (to have a failsafe, plus a booking reference is required to update a booking), and whip up a little script that logs into the DSA booking service, search for better dates in 2 areas (Ashford and Isleworth for me) and email me if anything good pops up.

The script is written in Python and uses the great BeautifulSoup library. It’s a little rough around the edges as I didn’t plan on releasing it, and I’m certain that the code is nowhere near its potential beauty and elegance. My apologies!

Download: dsa.py

I haven’t tested it on Windows (and doubt it would work on it without some tweaking), I’ve only tested it on Linux and Mac OS. If you need a hand at running it, leave a comment. I found and booked a test in Isleworth that was 10 days away on the 2nd day of running the script.

The Future of Online Advertising Conference

Ryan Carson has kindly given me a free ticket to attend this years Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference in New York. I’m really looking forward to meeting and discussing a few ideas with other attendees and speakers. A few names pop to mind right now: Steve Rubel of the MicroPersuasion blog, Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners and Jay Adelson of digg.

Obviously the list of interesting people doesn’t stop there, and I look forward to meeting many more creative minds at the event.

Hello World

So I’ve finally decided to give this Blogging malarkey a go. I’ve thought about the topics I hope to be discussing on the blog, and have narrowed it down to these main areas:

• Web Development
• Business Development
• Personal Development

That’s a lot of “development” I hear you say, and I agree. Then again, people do recommend to “talk about what you know”, and seeing as those are the topics I enjoy studying/doing, I didn’t have to think hard about the focus of the blog. I just hope you find at least one of those topics interesting, otherwise you’ll find it very boring here at litobac.com!

Well, that’s all for now. See you around!