I took another look at time zone data in iCalendar, to see if I could include time zone info in my downloaded Oracle Calendar data. This isn’t a super high priority thing, as the only thing that it affects is how my Palm displays my meetings. The meetings are displayed correctly, but they include a UTC time identifier at the end. Not a huge deal, but if I can get rid of it easily, it’d be a win.
A quick Google search on “vtimezone” turns this helpful page up. Based on the info therein, I was able to craft a working VTIMEZONE section for US-Eastern, that includes daylight savings rules for both pre-2006 and post-2006. To wit:
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:US-Eastern
LAST-MODIFIED:20060101T000000Z
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:19671029T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10;UNTIL=20061029T070000Z
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20071104T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=11
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:19870405T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=1SU;BYMONTH=4;UNTIL=20060402T070000Z
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20070311T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=2SU;BYMONTH=3
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
END:VTIMEZONE
Now, this is great, but the problem remains that all of the times I pull out of Oracle Calendar are in UTC. So I guess if I want to take advantage of this, I’ll need to manually convert all of these times from UTC to US-Eastern. This seems like too much work for too little gain, so I’m just going to leave it the way it is.