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[vlevin]

I would love to have a Hebrew Calendar add-in that would use the settings I have for the Jewish Sabbath and apply it to all the appropriate holidays. Have any users made this up on their own?

[Dan Lawrence]

Not that I know of. You could create a special .axh file for the Jewish holidays and the Sabbath, remembering that the Jewish Calendar is lunar and AHP works on the Gregorian Calendar. AHP allows you to create timers that work 7 days a week, Weekdays only, AM or PM times only, the variety is unlimited.

[vlevin]

Since I have ** no ** programming expertise, are there any x-10 users that do this sort thing that I could hire? I see there have about 25 other looks at my posts, so I have to guess others are interested as well. Additionally we have many friends who also use the x-10 system to accomdate our religious-observance  on the sabbath/holidays so I have to guess there would be a sizable customer base for this.

[Dan Lawrence]

If you have Active Home Pro (AHP), you can create timers in it to control modules. Timers can be set to operate at certain days and times. No programing is needed.

[Charles Sullivan]

I don't do software for Windows or AHP, but for my own edification could you kindly provide more details as to what you are looking for and how you would expect to use it. 

For example, would you expect your Sabbath and Holy Days to begin at sunset  computed for your own locality or for Jerusalem, or expect it to begin on some astronomical announcement?  Would you accept US Naval Observatory computations for sunset, and how close to their  computation would be considered sufficiently accurate for your use.

I assume you would expect to be mixing timers based on the Jewish calendar with timers based on the Gregorian calendar in the same schedule.  Is that correct?

To take a different tack entirely, would it be acceptable or better for your purposes to have the Sabbaths and Holy Days defined by their (variable) dates beginning at time 00:00 in the Gregorian calendar, but understood not to officially begin until sunset  on those dates? Considering that with days measured between sunsets that some days will be longer and some shorter than 24 hours, and years can vary in length, can you provide a few _extreme_ example of how you would hope to be able to program timers.  For example, if I were planning to attend a (western) New Year party and wanted an X10 alert exactly one hour before the official New Year in my locality, I would program 23:00  on 31 December.  But if I wanted to be alerted exactly one hour before Rosh Hashana, programming 23:00 on 29 Elul would be somewhat different than one hour before sunset and therefore technically incorrect.

A lot of the above may seem like nitpicking, but that's what it takes to write software.

[steven r]

...but for my own edification could you kindly provide more details as to what you are looking for and how you would expect to use it. 

For example, would you expect your Sabbath and Holy Days to begin at sunset....

Good job putting the challenge into perspective.

Since the holidays float with respect to the fixed schedule a program such as AHP must use, it is almost like trying to place a square peg in a round hole. The only thing that might be useful addition would be if you could easily import a schedule into the holiday field. (This could even help with non Jewish floating holidays such as Easter.) You would still need to import a "sunset day" to lead into each holiday period as AHP defines a day as midnight (0000) to a sec before midnight of the next day.

BTW.. Does anyone know where holidays that you can edit are stored? Is it a separate file/table or is it merged with the rest of the saved AHP file data?

[Dan Lawrence]

One little biity comment: Easter is NOT a Jewish Holiday.  Passover is, though.

[Charles Sullivan]

One other consideration: In polar regions there are days with no sunrise or sunset and some substitute for using local sunset as the start of the Hebrew day would be necessary. 

[vlevin]

Thank you all for your thoughtful  replies.  In response to Charles' questions:

Holiday and Sabbath commencement would always be 18 minutes prior to local sunset (US Navel Computation is fine)

Since the Sabbath is forever fixed, Friday sundown to Saturday 1 hr + sundown,  I can program the timer functions in the software fairly easily right now and forget about it.  Jewish holidays follow a lunar calendar, they are not tied down in any way to the gregorian, so  prior to each one I would have to manipulate each of the timer settings to include extra days as needed. While this may not seem like such a big deal to other X-10 users, as the head of the household I am very occupied with other holiday preparations (cooking, wrangling children into baths, and don't even get me stated on what has to get done for Passover!).  If there was just someway to  use my Sabbath settings for Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur etc... and there was some other calendar program that knew how to compute it out that would be great.

Idealistically, as an end-user all I would want to see is an extra setting somewhere in the software that would "activate Jewish holidays" and it would know to apply my current timer settings for other days as they come up in the calendar. 

I hope I explained this well.
Regards,
Valerie

[steven r]

...Easter is NOT a Jewish Holiday....

Which is precisely why I picked it as an example of a "non Jewish floating holiday"!
The point I was making was that there were more reasons than just the Jewish calendar to support a way to import floating holidays.

[vlevin]

One other consideration: In polar regions there are days with no sunrise or sunset and some substitute for using local sunset as the start of the Hebrew day would be necessary. 

Actually there are differnet Rabbincal opinions on how to handle this. But I know that sunrise is definitly not used.  I believe that communites that do not a halachically (Jewish Law) defined sunset must use the times for the community most immediately south, on the same longitude that meets the accepatble criteria (having a true sunset)

[steven r]

Other "non Jewish floating holidays": Mother's Day & Father's Day. Both always on Sunday but never the same day of the month.

[steven r]

One other consideration: In polar regions there are days with no sunrise or sunset and some substitute for using local sunset as the start of the Hebrew day would be necessary. 

Actually there are differnet Rabbincal opinions on how to handle this. But I know that sunrise is definitly not used.  I believe that communites that do not a halachically (Jewish Law) defined sunset must use the times for the community most immediately south, on the same longitude that meets the accepatble criteria (having a true sunset)

Thanks for the information! I had never given it any thought till Charles mentioned it.
I'm not Jewish myself but feel for me anyway with respect to my religious rituals it is the ritual more than a strict procedure that is important. I'm glad there is acceptable criteria for those to account for the absence of sunrise and sunset in the poles.
I'd love to see you find a way to use X10 to assist you with your holidays.
Good luck!

[Charles Sullivan]

vlevin:
From what you've described, it would probably be satisfactory for your purposes to use ActiveHome Pro's Holiday calendar, adding the Jewish holidays with the corresponding Gregorian date ignoring sunset.  (This will have to be updated annually every Jan 1st.)   E.g.,  Rosh Hashana begins at sundown on Sep 22nd this year so we would define Rosh Hashana as Sep 22nd.   Then to program an X10 alert at the beginning of the Rosh Hashana observance, you would specify a timer for  "Rosh Hashana" at 18 minutes before Sunset.

While a computer program could be written to perform the annual update of AHP's holiday file (C:Program FilesActiveHome ProHOLIDAY.XML), if you're willing to spend probably no more than 1/2 hour per year you can set this up yourself manually right now.  From the AHP Menu bar, click Tools > Preferences.  Check the box for "Use holidays in timers".  Click the Edit button and add the holidays and dates for this year using the holiday editor.   Then next year just edit the dates using one of the many Jewish calendar sites on the web.

The "Advanced view" in the AHP Timer Designer has a pulldown menu of the holidays.

Note: Be aware that the CM15A clock has a few accuracy issues, especially for downloaded timers and macros.

Notes for using AHP's holiday calendar editor:
Click "Add" and edit the name "New holiday".  Hit the enter key after you've entered the name or else it won't take.

While this may depend on the font on your system, entering "Rosh Hashana" for the name on my system was too long for the pulldown menu window in the Timer Designer, and all you see is "Rosh" until you click on it.  Either scrunch the words together as RoshHashana or use an underscore, e.g., Rosh_Hashana.

Mazel Tov!

[Charles Sullivan]

vlevin:
What I described in my previous message doesn't work very well.  If you edit the dates  for a holiday, the Timer schedule doesn't change unless you scroll off and on again in the holiday menu window for each timer.  What AHP needs for this to work is a button to update the holidays in a schedule.

Sorry about that.