The best single source of information I found was
Sources of Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data, which points to the definitive (if unofficial) archive of time zone data and code. But to use any of that information, I’d’ve needed to write some C code, or at least have a C compiler, so I kept searching.
And I found The Worldwide Holiday & Festival Site, which has a very good page on the
Hebrew calendar, including the civil dates for all Jewish holidays (major, minor, and trivial) for the next few years. The site also has a world-wide calendar of holidays which could be useful in planning travel and meetings.
But that still wasn’t what I needed, so I kept looking, and found World Time from PawPrint.net, which is a wonderful and free Windows program to show the time anywhere in the world — this is very handy for me, since I’ve found myself calling people all over the world lately, and it’s embarassing to have to ask them what time it is (I’ve managed to avoid waking anyone so far, though).
Even better, World Time interacts with the Windows registry to display Windows’ idea of timezone information — and that was exactly what I needed, since my goal when I started this exploration was to be able to convert times that I see on airline schedules to a consistent timezone (UTC, most likely) so that I could enter them into my Lotus Notes calendar. So with that hint, I did some registry exploration and found where Windows keeps its time zone definitions (of course, it’s not the same place in Win9x and WinNT/2000), so with a little effort, I should be able to take advantage of that information and not have to come up with yet another way of asking users to identify timezones.
Not exciting, but at least I feel I accomplished something useful today. Tomorrow, I’ll spend at least half the day on conference calls, which limits my odds of doing much in the way of programming. Still, even that’s better than spending two days on airplanes.