June 2011

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.

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.

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.