Hacking at 0300 » Microsoft Office

Daylight Savings Time and the AT&T 8525

Danny — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:34:37 +0000

I use an AT&T 8525 smartphone (it's the HTC Hermes TyTN) that a friend recommended (some friend!). I've been pulling my hair out with its daylight savings bug—events have the correct time in Outlook on the computer, but are an hour off or worse on the phone. Outlook stores events in UTC and displays them in the local time zone. Events that take place during daylight savings time occur one hour earlier UTC, but Outlook knows that. Windows Mobile 6 doesn't. Why would a Microsoft programmer creating a calendar program care about daylight savings time? It only affects half the year! So all appointments during DST are listed on the phone as one hour earlier. Worse, all-day events are stored as midnight-midnight, with an extra flag marking them as all day long. The bug shifts the event to 11pm the day before, still marked as an all day event, so Easter Sunday falls on Saturday on my phone!

Solution: Follow the instructions at Microsoft's website: www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/microsoft/daylight-savings-update.mspx. The phone resets itself without warning; that's OK. The times are still messed up. Open Outlook and make sure your contacts and calendar are correct. Now open Active Sync and select Delete Mobile Device from the File menu. This means that everything on the phone that syncs (Calendar, Contacts, etc.) will be erased and recopied from the computer (Microsoft neglected to provide a way to just sync with "computer overwrites handheld" for just the calendar, the way Palm does). Connect the phone. A "Connected" message appears in Active Sync, then the whole program disappears. Disconnect the phone and reconnect. A "Connected" message appears in Active Sync, then the setup wizard starts, and you can sync as usual. Pray that all your critical appointments will be copied correctly (this took 2 hours with my data). The phone calendar now has the correct days for all-day events, but the times are still off. Changing the date to a day in DST (under Settings/System tab/Clock and Alarms), however, corrects the times, both during DST and regular time. Changing the date to the correct date does not lose the correction. Restarting the phone makes it forget the correction, so you have to do the change date hack again.

Liberally mutter or curse while performing this arcane art.

Bottom Line solution:

Don't buy Microsoft products
If you must buy Microsoft products, don't depend on them
If you must depend on them, keep multiple backups and count the days until you can justify buying an iPhone

Turning a table into a list in Excel

Danny — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:29:45 +0000

The yomim tovim are over, so I will hopefully have a chance to play with jQuery again. But on the programming side, one thing I had to do was turn a table of honors, something like this:

	Rosh Hashana 1	Rosh Hashana 2	Yom Kippur
Maariv	Person 1	Person 2	Person 3
Shacharit	Person 4	Person 5	Person 6
Musaf	Person 7	Person 8	Person 9

And turn it into this:

When	What	Who
Rosh Hashana 1	Maariv	Person 1
Rosh Hashana 1	Shacharit	Person 4
Rosh Hashana 1	Musaf	Person 7
Rosh Hashana 2	Maariv	Person 2
Rosh Hashana 2	Shacharit	Person 5
Rosh Hashana 2	Musaf	Person 8
Yom Kippur	Maariv	Person 3
Yom Kippur	Shacharit	Person 6
Yom Kippur	Musaf	Person 9

I used code like this:


Sub createlist()
    Dim source As Range
    Set source = Range("B2:D4")
    Dim dest As Range
    Set dest = Range("F1")
    dest.Range("A1:C1").Value = Array("When", "What", "Who")
    Dim target As Range
    Dim c As Range
    For Each c In source.Cells
        If Not IsEmpty(c.Value) Then
            If IsEmpty(dest.Range("A2").Value) Then
                Set target = dest.Range("A2")
            Else
                Set target = dest.End(xlDown).Range("A2")
            End If
            target.Range("C1").Formula = "=" & c.Address
            target.Range("B1").Formula = "=" & c.EntireRow.Range("A1").Address ' row header
            target.Range("A1").Formula = "=" & c.EntireColumn.Range("A1").Address ' column header
        End If
    Next c
End Sub

The key tricks was getting column/row headers with .EntireColumn/Row.Range("A1"), and appending to the end of a list with .End(xlDown).Range("A2"). Unfortunately, End(xlDown) is too clever; if the region contains only one item (like the column header only), it goes all the way to the end of the spreadsheet and the .Range("A2"), which should get the next line, throws an error. Hence the If IsEmpty(dest.Range("A2").Value) Then.

The If Not IsEmpty(c.Value) Then line allows for blank spots in the original table to be ignored. VBA doesn't have a Continue statement, just an equivalent for break, called Exit For.

Exporting the calendar to Outlook

Danny — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:29:24 +0000

I just got a Windows Mobile smartphone to replace my Palm TX (screen digitizer died). It's an ugly, kludgy and slow operating system (even after upgrading to WM 6). There's nothing as elegant as Luach that integrates Jewish calendar data in the datebook. There's a Jewish Calendar that's nice, but I ended up writing my own program that generates a CSV file with Hebrew dates etc. It allows you to import candlelighting times, calendar info, and even all the Young Israel events into Outlook. It's at http://youngisrael-stl.org/articles/exportCalendarFull.php Next up for that program: Cardinals, Rams and Blues schedules!