The Formula One calendar commences in Sydney, Australia next week. If you already knew that, chances are you’ll be quite interested the latest addition to the KickOff series of sports calendar web apps…

F1 Calendar is a quick way to check Formula One race times and dates for the entire season, either on the website or directly from your own calendar application.

Similarly to the previous KickOff services (which include Six Nations Kickoff, Euro Kickoff and World Cup Kickoff), all the dates and times can be downloaded straight to Outlook, iCal or even your iPhone - basically any software or mobile device that can recognise the industry standard ICS file format.

Not only can you download the race times but - if you’re software or hardware allows - you can subscribe to the remote calendar file which will automatically update as and when any changes are made to the schedule.

F1 Calendar also introduced full support for world time zones, changing all the times to your local settings. It also remembers your recent selections so you can go straight to the upcoming times quickly and easily.

Not only that but we’ve also allowed a level of customisation to your calendars: you can even decide whether to include just the race times or the qualifying rounds as well.

Working with Andy Higgs this time round - an amazingly talented web designer & developer - we approached the project with a relatively simple design, targetting the typical demographic who are interested in Formula 1. By incorporating the existing grey and red image associated with racing, it established a familiar look for the intended audience.

Focussing on the core functionality as getting the data quickly and easily, the most prominent feature was the Download and Subscribe functionality. We didn’t want to isolate the users who just wanted an online reference though so the schedule list had to be present and simple to understand. Each event focussed on the actual race but the user could easily drill down to qualifying times by clicking on the event title.

It was great to collaborate with Andy on this project as it was the first time we had worked together since meeting at The Multipack several years ago. Andy was a joy to work with, showing huge enthusiasm for the topic and real initiative throughout the development process. No doubt I shall work with him again on future projects.

If you like F1 Calendar and find it useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or any other social network you’re on.

There is also a dedicated @f1cal Twitter account so feel free to follow us for updates or send us any suggestions.

I worked with a colleague this week to create a standardardised email signature for all the users on our internal Microsoft Exchange.

The signature template was already defined so it was just a case of tapping into trhe LDAP to extract each user’s individual profile and use the data in there to create their personal signature.

After a bit of Googling, we couldn’t find any scripts that automated the process of:

1. Connect with LDAP
2. Create a text-based signature
3. Create a rich text signature
4. Create an HTML signature
5. Automatically apply the rendered signatures to the user’s Outlook profile

With a bit of digging around, we managed to create a single VB Script that would be processed when the user logged on to the Exchange. Using this method, the signature should automatically be updated if any of the information is updated on Exchange such as new telephone numbers, job titles or department moves.

I’ve uploaded the script to Github so it is available for anyone to use. Find all the details and latest revisions on the Profile Based Exchange Signatures repository.

If you find this useful, leave a comment below. It would be great to know if this script has been used elsewhere.

Also, feel free to contribute to the repository, such as tidying up any loose code. The whole exercise was a few hours work so it’s not perfect but does the job.