HOWTO: Shift MS-Exchange users to sane (TZID) time zones

All invitations I got to a specific (MS using) company were shifted ~10 hours.

Since I was pretty familiar with MS software time-zone related oddities I ignored it for a while. But then as a curiosity I decided to look into the attached meeting content (vcs file). Lo and behold, it was saying: "Pacific Standard Time" ... as if our life at the middle east were really pacific ;-(

MS inventing their own "standards" is..., well, pretty standard. However, being a KDE user I was thinking if I can make korganizer understand their terminology:

• An strace proved korgranizer was obediently trying to convert the time by searching for /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific Standard Time
• So I tested a simple workaround (which worked):

ln -s America/Los_Angeles "/usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific Standard Time"

• A little search showed some organization already made a formal map between LaLa-Land and the real world (even including an XML representation).

It was easy enough to generalize it by creating a small package that install a links-farm to do all these mappings. It simply uses the XML data together with a small perl script to create these links during build.
(hint, hint, review, review ;-)

People from other distros can grab the script here.

If all MS kinks were as simple as this...

[BTW: I am fully aware that this can be generated by modifying the source of tzdata -- I was looking for a simple solution with minimal disruption of existing packages].

MS: new products, old tactics.

..."Microsoft seems to intend to deter customers from leveraging virtual machine mobility (a technology which Microsoft does not have) by levying an economic tax on the use of such functionality."

Same old MS, same old tactics. Just to show how (in)effective is the judicial supervision that supposedly "controls" their behaviour.