61–70 of 466 posts
What I like about the tz database is that's it's technically a diff of a diff. It stores the difference across history, of the difference of each timezone with UTC. Right? So it's a diff^2. But! The tz database gets updates! So those commits are diffs of diffs of diffs, or diff^3. Can we go further? You bet! It has a changelog, and that changelog is stored in git, so commits to the tz changelog are diff^4: they are c…
In my opinion, the best way to see it is not to pretend their are weird timezones. It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted. This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australi…
Eh? Most of the world don't do summer time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?
The decision to not support it isn't "arbitrary" per se; it's a function of utility vs cost to implement (which a healthy dose of fudge). "Standard software" for timekeeping is far more useful precisely because it is used by far more people.
I kind of thing a half hour daylight savings difference instead of an hour is a pretty low bar for the weirdest timezone. Almost any of the others are weirder: Antarctica/Troll definitely sounds weirder. The Moroccan and Gazan timezones that can't be expressed by the system as it was written because at least that means that they have some different kind of a rule, even if lunar time is well known. Same with the ones…
> But I do agree with leap seconds: it's absolute trivia, not a useful thing for a programmer to know. By and large, I agree with this. But I've always found it a bit funny when a large organisation [1] says "our servers have sub-millisecond timing accuracy, thanks to GPS synchronization and these PCIe rubidium atomic clock cards we've developed" while at the same time saying [2] "we smear leapseconds over the course…
The relation between that time and what the rest of the world thinks the time is is actually less relevant.
Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
Hard-coded yearly transitions for a particular region, because they just have to have their own, special rules? Transitioning to DST on Sunday at -01:00 (minus one o'clock)? Or at 24:00? Honestly, the IT world has a certain amount of influence. There comes a time where we could collectively just say "no". No, you are not that special, use any of the already incredibly flexible options that you have.
I’ve found the best way to deal with TZ conversions, is to use UTC as a common fulcrum. I convert the target TZ to UTC, using my local utility, then use my local TZ utility to convert from UTC to local. But I write iOS software, so I have very solid local tools at hand. It might be more problematic, on, say, a webserver. On a related note, I wrote this utility[0], some time ago. It uses the TZ map from the TZ Boundar…
I kind of thing a half hour daylight savings difference instead of an hour is a pretty low bar for the weirdest timezone. Almost any of the others are weirder: Antarctica/Troll definitely sounds weirder. The Moroccan and Gazan timezones that can't be expressed by the system as it was written because at least that means that they have some different kind of a rule, even if lunar time is well known. Same with the ones…