Nevis Calendars

There are four calendar software packages installed on the Nevis web server... and three sets of calendar URLs for you to remember. This web page describes the different calendars and their uses:

Meeting-room reservations

As the name suggests, the purpose of the meeting-room reservation calendars are to reserve space in the meetings rooms at Nevis and in the Nevis Annex; there's also a "room" defined to schedule when the Nevis van will make the trip from the Columbia campus to Nevis Labs.

The use of these calendars is mostly self-explanatory. If you need any assistance, click on the Help link near the top of every page.

Here are the distinguishing features of this calendar software (the MRBS package) compared to the others discussed on this page:

• These pages are public. Everyone in the world can see them.

• Only users with an account on the Linux cluster can add, change, or delete entries on these calendars. Use the same account name and password that you use to read your mail; if you see a message about a certificate, accept it permanently.

• If a given user creates an event on one of these calendars, only that user can edit or delete that event.

Shared public calendars via WebDAV

Recently, a number of programs have become available to create and share public calendars. They can share files in the iCalendar format shared via WebDAV; typically the files have the .ics extension. Among those programs are:

• Sunbird, a free program from Mozilla, the same organization that makes the web browser Firefox and the mail program Thunderbird. This calendar software is also available as an extension to Thunderbird called Lightning. There are versions of this program available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

  This is the program that I recommend for you to use; apart from cross-platform compatibility, this program is more robust than the other programs listed below. There's one exception: Sunbird cannot yet synchronize with an device like a smartphone.

• Apple's iCal. This program runs only on Mac OS X.

• Microsoft Outlook can access WebDAV calendars.

To use these programs to share calendars at Nevis, you'll want to either publish your own calendar or subscribe to an existing one. Here are three calendars to which you can subscribe:

https://www.nevis.columbia.edu/calendar/university-holidays.ics	Columbia University holidays (complete through mid-2011)
https://www.nevis.columbia.edu/calendar/seligman.ics	WilliamSeligman's schedule, including vacation days (you can also type finger seligman on any machine on which he has an account) and other significant systems-administration activity.
https://www.nevis.columbia.edu/calendar/other.ics	Other dates of interest at Nevis.

Notes on Apple's iCal (and possibly others as well):

• You may have to use webcal:// instead of https://.

• If you get messages that the program cannot connect, access, or accept the server, it may be that you have to add the Nevis certificate to your system; follow the directions on this page.

You can create your own calendars; if you'd like them to be added to above list, let me know.

Here are the distinguishing features of this calendar software (compared to the others discussed on this page):

• Only users with an account on the Linux cluster can even see these calendars. They cannot be generally viewed by the rest of the world. (Use the same account name and password that you use to read your mail; if you see a message about a certificate, accept it permanently.)

• If you want to create your own calendar files to share, you can. Just "publish" or "subscribe" to a calendar using the same naming scheme as the files above: https://www.nevis.columbia.edu/calendar/<whatever>.ics. Note that the file name must end in .ics, otherwise it will be rejected.

• By default, anyone at Nevis can add, modify, or delete events on any of the calendars that have been published using the above method.

• If you contact me, I can arrange for a calendar file to be restricted so only a single user (or a small number of users) can edit the calendar. For example, only I can edit the seligman.ics file.

• There's a hint of "security through obscurity" here: If you don't know the name of a calendar file, you won't be able to subscribe to it. However, you can see a list of available calendars through the calendar viewing page described in the next section. Just take the name you see on that page, add https://www.nevis.columbia.edu/calendar/ before it, add .ics after it, and you have the name to which you can subscribe.

Shared calendars via CalDAV

CalDAV is a more advanced of the WebDAV calendar-sharing system; it's the same system used at Google Calendars and Apple's MobileMe. There's a CalDAV server at Nevis, which can be used if you want to synchronize your calendars on smartphones or other multiple devices.

If you'd like to use the Nevis CalDAV server, contact the me and I'll set it up.

Viewing public calendars

If you don't have access to a computer that has a program that can edit a shared calendar, at least you can view them in a web browser. The link is http://www.nevis.columbia.edu/viewcal/.

Here are the distinguishing features of viewing calendars this way:

• Only users with an account on the Linux cluster can access the calendar viewer. They cannot be generally viewed by the rest of the world. (Use the same account name and password that you use to read your mail; if you see a message about a certificate, accept it permanently.)

• The navigation buttons and links are not as intuitive as I would like. For one thing, they're all at the bottom of the web page; scroll down if you don't see them. (I'm using the PHP iCalendar package.)

• By default, you see everyone's calendar. You can restrict the list using the "Preferences" link on the viewer page.

• As noted above, you can only view calendars, you cannot edit them.