“The Times, They Are a-Changin”

Although I promised in my most recent posting, “Read Any Good Timezones Lately”, that I had left the topic of timezones behind, an editorial in the January 23, 2011 New York Times, “Time Banditry”, leads me to renege on that short-lived promise.

The NY Times editorial, brief as it is, really captures essence of many of the issues associated with timezones. The proposal in front of the British Parliament, “a bill to require the Secretary of State to conduct a cross-departmental analysis of the potential costs and benefits of advancing time by one hour for all, or part of, the year; to require the Secretary of State to take certain action in the light of that analysis; and for connected purposes”, is reminiscent in some respects, of the provisions in ”The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT 2005)”, which changed the start and end dates of daylight saving time (DST) in the U.S., and also directed the U.S. Congress to determine if there was a positive effect on energy usage or conservation.

We can infer from a calendaring and CalConnect perspective:
1. As I observed in “Timezones and How They Get that Way”, “Time is the most ethereal of our measures, and, perhaps, the one people have the most intimate, personal, and complex relationship with. Attempts to measure and manipulate time have evoked strong emotions and reactions, and the relatively brief history of timezones is no different.”

Scotland, whose northernmost settlements in the Shetlands are roughly 650 miles from London and at roughly the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, is less enthusiastic about the potential daylight saving time changes than perhaps those in southern Britain.

2. Timezones and daylight saving observances are dynamic and subject to review and reevaluation at any time for any number of reasons.

3. The work of CalConnect’s Timezone Technical Committee is timely, relevant, and important. In the words of one of my CalConnect colleagues,

We live in a world where events have to span multiple timezones – since those can change independently of each other at very short notice it is imperative that a proper definition of the “base” timezone for an event be present. … There is no getting away from timezones. There are things we can do (and indeed are doing in TC TIMEZONE) to alleviate many of the problems of using timezones in iCalendar – in particular the standardized timezones, timezone service, and “pass-by-reference” work address most of the key issues.

As the Times editorial concludes, “In our split-second, coordinated world, the only place time is still kept that old-fashioned way is in all the rest of nature.” The times will always be “a-changin”, and CalConnect’s mission is to allow the technology to accommodate those changes as transparently as possible.

References:

DST in Britain:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/world/europe/21inverness.html
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/daylightsaving.html
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm101203/debtext/101203-0001.htm#10120330000001
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24mon4.html?ref=opinion
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmbills/007/11007.i-i.html

CalConnect’s technical work in timezones:
http://calconnect.org/pubdocs/CD0707%20CalConnect%20EDST%20Reflections%20and%20Recommendations.pdf
http://calconnect.org/CD1007%20Timezone%20Service.shtml
http://calconnect.org/CD1008%20Timezone%20XML.shtml

Gary Schwartz
President, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

Check out CalConnect at CalConnect XX in February

Even if your organization is not currently a member of CalConnect, our upcoming event, CalConnect XX, in February is a perfect opportunity to learn more about CalConnect, and our activities, first hand. As the Bay Area is local to many of you, attending these events, hosted this time at UC Berkeley, would be very convenient.

Three times a year, we hold a CalConnect Interoperability Test Event (C.I.T.E.) from Monday morning to Wednesday noon (February 7-9), and a members meeting (called a Roundtable) from Wednesday through Friday afternoon, (February 9-11). C.I.T.E. participants don’t have to be members — and the members meeting are open to observers. Many of our present members decided to become active participants in CalConnect after attending a Roundtable as an observer.

Come to the Roundtable and find out what’s going on in CalDAV, mobile calendaring, iSchedule, event publication, iCalendar and XML, and other areas CalConnect is working on. Here’s a chance to decide if you want to part of the work, and help drive the future of calendaring and scheduling. Our goal for calendaring and scheduling is ubiquity and seamless interoperability.

For more information about CalConnect XX, see http://calconnect.org/calconnect20.shtml. For more information about our nonprofit consortium, see http://www.calconnect.org. You can e-mail us at “contact at calconnect.org” or call at 707-840-9391 with questions. (Please note, that, not surprisingly, there are separate registration fees for attending these events, for members and non-members alike.)

We look forward to welcoming you in February!

Dave Thewlis
Executive Director, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium

Read any good timezones lately?

“I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature” – Donald Knuth, 1984

In a previous posting, I have written about various aspects of timezones, which are perhaps the sine qua non of interoperable calendaring. This posting, mercifully my last on this topic, looks at timezones from a different perspective.

RFC 5545, the iCalendar specification, has much to say about timezones, including two “curious” notes:

This document does not define a naming convention for time zone identifiers. Implementers may want to use the naming conventions defined in existing time zone specifications such as the public-domain TZ database [TZDB]. The specification of globally unique time zone identifiers is not addressed by this document and is left for future study.

and

The specification of a global time zone registry is not addressed by this document and is left for future study. However, implementers may find the TZ database [TZDB] a useful reference. It is an informal, public-domain collection of time zone information, which is currently being maintained by volunteer Internet participants, and is used in several operating systems. This database contains current and historical time zone information for a wide variety of locations around the globe; it provides a time zone identifier for every unique time zone rule set in actual use since 1970, with historical data going back to the introduction of standard time.

The “public-domain TZ database [TZDB]” is sometimes referred to patronymically as the “Olson” database, after Arthur David Olson, one of the founding stewards of this project. As Paul Eggert has maintained the timezone data for many years, perhaps “Olson-Eggert database” would be a more appropriate title.

With Arthur David Olson’s announcement of his retirement in 2012, TZDB has become a topic of significant interest. In addition to his stewardship of some of the programs and utilities used to maintain TZDB, Mr. Olson also brokered an arrangement to have the TZDB and associated mailing list hosted by NIH, his employer. A number of proposals are circulating which speak to the various aspects of making the TZDB infrastructure more robust, while at the same time preserving much of the culture which has made it successful.

A recent conversation with a calendar developer put me onto another path with respect to the future of TZDB. My colleague noted that TZDB was more than just a collection of timezone rules, names, and regions, but also provided commentary, much of which would be of interest to people not otherwise invested in timezones or perhaps even calendaring. It occurred to me that in a post-Olson world, it would not be inconceivable that this parenthetical marginalia might no longer part of the TZDB distribution.

This reminded me of an analogous situation in the library world in the mid 1990’s which was incited by an article in the New Yorker written by Nicholson Baker. In “Discard”, Baker, who was not a librarian by training, argued at some length for preserving the physical card catalog records even as libraries migrated to what were then called “Online Public Access Catalogs”, or OPACs. Baker maintained that notations and other marginalia added to the cards by both librarians (officially) and patrons alike (unofficially), provided invaluable historical data, data which was being lost forever as the catalogs were being converted to electronic versions. Baker went so far as to argue that the physical condition of the cards – the wear and tear, and the dirt and smudges, were also significant parts of this historical record.

It is hard to imagine today the stir, the debate, the acrimony, resulting from Baker’s article, which from many perspectives is worth reading today. My university developed our own OPAC (Infotrac) which went live on our mainframe in the early 1980′s. The removal and ultimate disposition of the card catalog a few years later, without the foresight which would be provided by Baker some 10 years later, went unrecorded for posterity.

I found this aspect of TZDB interesting enough to write about, until I discovered that Jon Udell had beaten me to it in his 2009 posting, “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database”. Udell closes with “So is Olson/Zoneinfo/tz a database or a document? Clearly both. And its synthesis of the two modes is, I would argue, a nice example of literate programming.” “Literate programming” refers to a concept developed by Stanford computer science Professor Donald Knuth, which he implemented as part of his TeX typesetting system. Earlier in his piece, Udell refers to the “Talmudic scholarship” found in TZDB, and perhaps that is a more apt description than “literate programming”.

Although the stewardship and/or editorship of TZDB largely rest with Paul Eggert and Arthur David Olson, the timely TZDB of timezone changes through the world would not be possible without the network of volunteers who ferret out these changes in myriad, resourceful ways in the absence of some sort of organized oversight of timezones across the globe.

The volunteer networks which produced compilations of the Oxford English dictionary (19th Century) and Wikipedia (21st Century) might be considered logical (but otherwise unrelated) antecedent and consequent kin to TZDB.

I will be interested both personally and professionally in following the future (if such a thing is possible) of TZDB and the new projects which may arise to provide interoperable calendaring support for timezones.

References for this posting:

Literate Programming:
http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf

TZDB and timezones
http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzoneinfotz-database/
http://calconnect.org/CD1007%20Timezone%20Service.shtml
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lear-iana-timezone-database-01

Nicolson Baker v libraries:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/04/04/1994_04_04_064_TNY_CARDS_000365934
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365210.html
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/10/14/1996_10_14_050_TNY_CARDS_000375994
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/07/24/2000_07_24_042_TNY_LIBRY_000021310

Oxford English Dictionary
“The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” By Simon Winchester

Gary Schwartz
President, The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium