The U.S. is out of sync with Europe (more than usual)

Executive Road Warrior reports on the increasingly erratic fluctuations between the U.S. and Europe in when they implement and remove Daylight Savings Time. Check those calendars carefully!

iCloud and Windows Outlook woes reported

I'm still working through my use of iCloud -- my corner case involved making my Apple ID password more secure and getting River to upgrade to OS X Lion to get around a bug in the way iCloud and OS X Snow Leopard interacted -- but the much more common scenario of Outlook for Windows and iCloud has produced its first major report of woe at Office Watch.

I've always thought Apple makes its iStuff for Windows just barely usable to help drive sales of Mac computers. Perhaps in the case of iCloud, it's even less barely usable, especially for the MS Office crowd.

Time Zone Database back up at new ICANN home

The Associated Press reports that ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is now hosting the Time Zone Database which had been shut down due to a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit continues, but with ICANN prepared to "deal with any legal matters," it should be possible to keep this database up and running for the foreseeable future.

iCloud Day 1: First steps

I couldn't let this day end without weighing in on iCloud, since it could drain a portion of the Swamp. I avoided the installation problems that others reported, but I will need to decouple my iPhone calendar from Google Calendar before I can hook it up to iCloud. Fortunately I found a way to this. I'll report on my progress in the next day or two.

CalConnect: Time zone database outage "will cause significant harm"

The time zone database crisis grows as CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, calls for reinstating the database. Key quote:

"Disruption to the publication and availability of the Timezone database will cause significant harm to individuals and organizations using computer systems, either directly or indirectly. This harm will get worse over time as changes to timezones and daylight savings time rules fail to be tracked by the database. Computer systems will continue to use the last available database, or perhaps even splinter into groups who manage their own updates separately. The later situation will cause even more confusion as different systems may have different times even though they are in the same location."

Time zone database is down

Via Stephen Colebourne, there's word that the maintainer of an important database of worldwide time zones took it down based on a copyright dispute. Someone is bound to replicate it, because no one can possibly own a list of worldwide time zones -- right?