john.layt.net

It's been a few weeks, so what's up in the KDE Clapham office? (I'm pretty sure I'm the only KDE hacker in Clapham so can safely claim 'office' status, if I'm not, meet me for a pint down the Abbeville pronto!).

I'll be at Fosdem this weekend, so if you're there be sure to drop by the KDE stand for a chat, I promise not to bang on about calendars too much :-)  (Well, unless you happen to be a Gtk/Gnome/Evolution hacker wanting to talk about shared standards for calendars and holiday files, then I'm all mouth).  Just don't ask me about license stuff, you'll be wanting that weird bloke down the other end of the hall... I'll be in Brussels from 10am Friday wandering the streets in search of waffles, so if you're getting in early and looking for the same let me know.

Speaking of calendars (yeah, you knew it was coming) I decided on a whim to have a play with KHolidays in kdepimlibs to see if I could hack in support for holidays defined in non-Gregorian calendars, something I've been threatening the PIM guys I'd look at for ages.  After about a weeks intense hacking, cramming on Bison and Flex (blech!), and dredging up long suppressed university lectures on LALR grammars (it's been almost 20 years now!  And no, I didn't  understand Richard's last post either...) I had a new experimental parser working. I waved it in the direction of the PIMsters to see if they were interested and next thing I know I've been anointed a Maintainer.  Whoops, wasn't expecting that :-) So in 4.5 look for some improvements in how we handle holidays, in particular the ability to have non-Gregorian holidays like Jewish and Islamic religious holidays in the Plasma calendar and KOrganizer.

On that front, could I just ask for people in those countries and communities that use a non-Gregorian calendar to drop me a line with a list (or pointers to an official list in English) of both your official public holidays and the main religious holidays, and especially the rules about how they are calculated?  I'm particularly interested in the more complex to define holidays, the ones that need special or long calculations, so I can see if the new code supports them.  (We already have the KOrganizer Jewish Holidays plugin that I can crib from, but that's C++ and I'd like some English explanations).  I'm john @ my domain name.

Oh, if you use the Hebrew calendar, sorry I've messed up the Hebrew numbers support in 4.4, I should have a fix in place before it goes gold.

What else?  Oh yeah, there was some noise around the whole turn-of-the-decade thing, and Ade rightly pointed out we shouldn't be so pedantic about not having a year 0 to count from, especially with those 'lost' 10 days still to be found down the back of your sofa.  In fact it's worse than that.  It wasn't like on 1/1/1 that everyone suddenly woke up and decided "Hey let's start a new millennium!".  Nope, the Romans didn't even use proper year numbering.  It was some bloke called Dionysius Exiguus in 525 who came up with the idea to count consecutively from the birth of Jesus, except he got his maths wrong. And it wasn't until 731 that the Venerable Bede popularised using it. Later Gregory came along and decided to chuck away a few unnecessary leap days.   And somewhere in there New Years Day moved around various dates before settling back to 1st January. And...

So the whole year numbering scheme is entirely arbitrary and retrospective and open to being revised and refactored at will or whim.  As with the millennium, nobody's actually celebrating the passage of a fixed number of years.  No, we're all just looking at that car odometer click over to a neat line of 0's.  That's what we celebrate, and it's as good a reason as any for a beer.  Just imagine if we had evolved fewer fingers, we'd be doing it more often :-)  But if you really insist on being pedantic, then I will just point you at the ISO standard for calendars and dates where they arbitrarily declared the year 0 to exist for their purposes.

Speaking of which, my own clock ticked over to one of those 0's recently.  Life supposedly begins this side of the great divide, I'll let you know...