meeting-scheduling software

[cellio]

I just used MeetingMaker to schedule a weekly meeting. It requires that you specify an end date -- or you can just check "ongoing". Doing the latter causes it to fill in an end date of 12/31/2039. (Which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering. My recurring meeting is on Tuesday, so one could argue that it should have set the end date differently.)

It quickly reported the two dates this year that some attendee isn't available. This made me wonder whether it was, in fact, searching a sparse calendar all the way through 2039, in which case it gets points for speed but maybe not for appropriateness, or whether it has some built-in limit for how far ahead it will search for conflicts.

By the way, the odds are very good that the room in which my 34-year recurring meeting occurs will cease to be available later this year.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Huh. Now, admittedly, modern computers are REALLY fast, so a search through 10,000 days like that would be darn fast. But I'm betting it has a list of their events, rather than hashed by date, so it's really just doing an n^2 compare with all their events and seeing if they are ever on a Tuesday. Since most things either have a handful of dates, or recur on particular DoWs, this should be fast...but things like "every 15th" could get trickier.

You could test it out by scheduling something that'll only conflict once in a blue moon...say, on Tuesdays that are Feb 29th...

I also like the fact that evidently the Windows universe ends on 2039. Hey, at least it's a year later than Unix, right? Somehow I think my retirement may be filled with Y2K38 bug fixing..."What, you know a *programming language*, old feller?"