strawdog \ Circular Calendar
Calendars... we use em every day. But I find that the square, month by month representation causes us to miss important relationships between events in time. The circular calendar represents a complete year as a circle.
Heres an example showing important computer scientists birthdays for the year 2012.
Calendar/Calendar_overall_2012.png
Circular Calendar

Calendar/Calendar_close.png
Calendar (2011 version), close up

(Did you know that Linux Torvalds and John von Neumann had the same birthday?)


Download the calendar as a single page PDF maker_calendar_2012.pdf here, or spread onto two pages maker_calendar_2012_2page.pdf, four pages maker_calendar_2012_4page.pdf, or six pages maker_calendar_2012_6page.pdf.
I find the calendar useful for showing relationships between complex ranges of dates. For example, here are the moose hunting seasons for Quebec, for 2011. Complicated, but i found this easier to use than a table.
Calendar/Calendar_moose.png
Moose hunting seasons, Quebec
Again - the calendar may be downloaded as a single page PDF moose_calendar.pdf here, or spread onto two pages moose_calendar_2page.pdf, four pages moose_calendar_4page.pdf, or six pages moose_calendar_6page.pdf.
The script to create the Circular Calendar can be obtained here
svn co https://svn.assembla.com/svn/CircularCalendar/

Thanks to Silverbyte for pointing out that the script requires the following packages

Its also worth noting you need to be using the GNU version of awk, rather than plain vanilla awk. On Ubuntu, you can get this by installing the gawk package.
If you decide to use it, i'd love to hear about it at strawdog3 at gmail dot com. In fact, since my documentation efforts have been minimalistic at best, i recommend that you contact me for a bit of advice about how to get going with the script.