From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

Hello everybody!

I would like to announce the March (2026) Ada Monthly Meetup which will
be taking place on the 7th of March at 14:00 UTC time (15:00 CEST). As
always the meetup will take place over at Jitsi. The Meetup will also be livestreamed/recorded to Youtube.

If someone would like to propose a talk or a topic, feel free to do so!
We currently have no proposals.

Here are the connection details from previous posts:
The meetup will take place over at Jitsi [1], a conferencing software
that runs on any modern browser. The link is Jitsi Meet The room name is “AdaMonthlyMeetup” and in case it asks for a password, it will be set to “AdaRules”.
I do not want to set up a password, but in case it is needed, it will be
the one above without the quotes. The room name is generally not needed
as the link should take you directly there, but I want to write it down
just in case someone needs it.

Feel free to repost this in other forums or chats, such as Reddit or
send it to friends!! >:D

Best regards and see you soon!
Fer

[1] https://meet.jit.si/AdaMonthlyMeetup
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

Fernando Oleo Blanco wrote:

I would like to announce the March (2026) Ada Monthly Meetup which will be taking place on the 7th of March at 14:00 UTC time (15:00 CEST).

14:00 UTC is 15:00 CET or 16:00 CEST.
In the Ada spirit of preventing preventable mistakes, you can prevent
this kind of mistake by writing time offsets as hours from UTC instead
of cryptic acronyms. What "UTC+01:00" or "UTC+02:00" means is obvious.
To use "CET" or "CEST" you have to remember or look up what offset it
stands for.
Björn Persson
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:10:13 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:

In the Ada spirit of preventing preventable mistakes, you can
prevent this kind of mistake by writing time offsets as hours from
UTC instead of cryptic acronyms.

UTC is good. Next best is to use timezone names from the tz database.
E.g. “CET” works (regardless of daylight saving) as a shorter
alternative to “Europe/Brussels”, as do things like
“America/New_York”, and “Pacific/Auckland” (hello).

If in doubt what names to use, have a look in /usr/share/zoneinfo on
just about any Linux system or compatible.

Here <https://gitlab.com/ldo/conv-date> is a simple (less than 100
lines) shell script that will show and convert times using any of
these valid timezone names. See the accompanying man page for details.
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:10:13 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:

In the Ada spirit of preventing preventable mistakes, you can
prevent this kind of mistake by writing time offsets as hours from
UTC instead of cryptic acronyms.

UTC is good. Next best is to use timezone names from the tz database.

That's how you configure your computer to display your local time, or
program a world clock to show the current time in various places. The
system clock runs in UTC under the hood, and rules from the timezone
database are used to calculate the local time to display. The timezone
database is well designed for its purpose, but timezone names are not
good for agreeing on a meeting time.
First, it requires people to keep track of how other countries play
with their clocks. How many people in Auckland know offhand whether
Lisbon and Madrid keep the same time, or when the clocks jump in
Asunción?
Second, it's sometimes ambiguous. 2025-10-26T13:30 in Pacific/Auckland
was 02:30 in Europe/Brussels – and an hour later, 14:30 in
Pacific/Auckland was also 02:30 in Europe/Brussels.
When a time is given in UTC, each recipient only needs to know their
own offset from UTC, and it's never ambiguous.

E.g. “CET” works (regardless of daylight saving) as a shorter
alternative to “Europe/Brussels”

In the timezone database, that alias makes some sense. If you tell your operating system that its timezone is "CET", then it's reasonable for
the operating system to assume that it shall swap back and forth between
CET and CEST according to the EU's Dumb Silly Time rules.
In a meeting invitation, specifying the time as "CET" when CEST is in
effect will cause misunderstandings, especially in March/April and
October. A recipient might assume that you mean UTC+01:00 and that there
won't be any Daylight Saving Tomfoolery at that time.
Björn Persson
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From Newsgroup: comp.lang.ada

On Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:49:40 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:

In the timezone database, that alias makes some sense. If you tell your operating system that its timezone is "CET", then it's reasonable for
the operating system to assume that it shall swap back and forth between
CET and CEST according to [daylight saving].

Write it this way:

TZ=CET

That’s how you set it as your timezone, anyway. E.g.

ldo@hypatia:~> TZ=CET date -d "now + 6 months"
Sun 23 Aug 2026 01:32:49 CEST
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