CalConnect announces special registration fees for CalConnect XXII in Prague

CalConnect has announced special reduced registration fees for some participants in the upcoming CalConnect XXII event, hosted by Kerio Technologies in Prague, Czech Republic on October 3-7, 2011. The special rates are:

• Non-members may register one person for the Interoperability Test Event, the Roundtable members meeting (as an observer), or both, for a single fee of $350.
• Members who are not calendaring vendors may register one person for the Interoperability Test Event for $350.

For more information please see CalConnect XXII or contact CalConnect via or website by e-mail at contact@calconnect.org.

Registration open for CalConnect XXII in Prague

The next CalConnect event will be held the week of October 3-7, 2011, in Prague, Czech Republic, hosted by Kerio Technologies. This will be the first full CalConnect week held outside North America.

To allow for additional time for planning and arranging for international flights, we have opened registration for this meeting early. Please see http://www.calconnect.org/calconnect22.shtml for more information including hotel booking which is also available.

This will be a full CalConnect week including Interoperability Test Events the first part of the week, and a Roundtable (Members’ Meeting) in the latter half. We also expect to host two introductory symposia on subjects such as CalDAV development, calendaring standards, etc., for people new to CalConnect and perhaps to calendaring standards.

Schedule optimization and finding habitable planets: The Kepler Mission

At Roundtable XXI last week at NASA Ames, Charlie Sobek, the Kepler Mission Deputy Project Manager, gave us a presentation on the Kepler Mission to find habitable planets. The presentation highlighted the scheduling and mission optimization issues facing the project, including issues such as scheduling time between multiple projects on the Deep Space Network and the challenges of managing the spacecraft over a multi-year mission, such as changes in the networks, missions and priorities and how these are resolved.

The presentation is available at Kepler Mission Operations Scheduling.

CalConnect XXI: Timezones by Reference

This post could also be titled “Doing Something about Timezones”. The biggest problem (from CalConnect’s perspective) with the change in 2007 to Extended Daylight Savings Time was the widespread problems with updating (or failing to update) several hundred million desktop systems, servers, and so forth with the new start/stop dates for DST in the U.S.. The results were widespread and messy; just in calendaring, many thousands of scheduled events were off by an hour across people’s calendars. And although EDST was an isolated phenomenon in the U.S., in some countries the start/stop dates for Daylight Savings time change every year, often with very little notice.

The core problem is that for most implementations timezone data is embedded in one way or another; in calendar scheduling it is even embedded in the event data. While the timezone id is necessary, having the data itself included is a recipe for disaster — and there is no obvious fix other than removing the timezone data and making it available via an internet access.

That’s what CalConnect finally concluded: timezone data should be available from timezone servers across the internet rather than embedded into systems, somewhat analogous to Network Time Protocol. With timezone servers, the only thing actually neded in the scheduling data would be a timezone id.

As a result, CalConnect’s TIMEZONE Technical Committee developed a Timezone Service Protocol, now an internet draft at the IETF at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-douglass-timezone-service/. This protocol was first tested at the Interoperability Test Event this last week at CalConnect XXI at NASA Ames. Two timezone server implementations were tested, along with several clients, and the preliminary results were very encouraging.

Clients were tested in part to see what the effect on them would be of receiving event information with only a timezone id and without actual timezone data embedded, as this will affect the ease of implementing timezone servers and “Timezones by Reference” going forward.

We will expand our timezone service protocol in TC TIMEZONE over the next months, and we expect additional implementations and testing at the next Interoperability Test Event in Prague this October.