After much pain and suffering, I managed to wrench an iCalendar format out of the ApacheCon schedule database. Given that I haven’t touched iCalendar format in about 4 years, I’m actually quite pleased that I was able to get this to work.

So, if you have iCal, or any other calendaring application that understands the iCalendar format, you can subscribe to the ApacheCon schedule at http://apachecon.com/2005/EU/html/sessions-ical.php

Of course, if you just load that link in a browser, it will look like garbage, and that’s completely expected.

I’m also not entirely sure about the timezone stuff. Timezones are so irritating. Can I produce iCalendar in a timezone-neutral manner? The events in this calendar are timezone Europe/Berlin, and when I sync them with my Palm, it shows up with the correct offset. But when I arrive in Germany and change my timezone setting, will it display them appropriately? Experimentation suggests not. I really hate timezones.

If I just have it output US/Eastern as the timezone, everything works fine. For me. I expect it would be messed up for everyone else.

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Ok, upon further investigation, it appears that I can make the events timezone-agnostic, so that they work for everyone. So it should be all good now.

I really hate timezones.