Daylight Savings And Then Conference Rooms

This week started out on a sour note with messing around with some daylight savings issues. Apparently some fully patched Suse operating systems still are not working correctly with Evolution syncing with GroupWise calendar data. I poked around and was able to get it working well enough to make it until April. They moved the daylight savings time back to save money and resources, right? :)

Solveig Haugland is here this week teaching OpenOffice classes. The user community has for many years posted paper monthly calendars on the conference rooms with future meetings. This data is helpful, but of course is obsolete the second a new meeting is booked in the room. I have had an idea in my head for a while to place a flat panel monitor in the hallway to perform the same function. So I wrote a small routine to take GroupWise resources and generate a screen showing the current meeting, meetings later in the day, and future bookings. In the case of our IT training room, this allows people walking up the hall to see future computer training opportunities. It's very simple, you just log into an account that has a muted wallpaper and hides the gnome-panel and it kicks off a process that reads the right .ics file. It then sorts and parses the data and then uses ghosd to display the information to the screen. It flashes and reloads every minute. It's kind of cool to watch the classes shift and move up as time progresses through the day.

Shot below of what people see in the hallway on the flat panel monitor: