Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#1

Post by tjriley82 » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 10:24 AM UTC

Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time
nytimes.com

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#2

Post by rmc » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 12:23 PM UTC

It's cases like this that show that you should use a proper timezone library in your code. Too often I see websites where the timezone field is given as "+/- X from GMT". Just store everything in UTC, and use tzdata fields (e.g. "Europe/London") to convert to something nice to show the user, and People Cleverer Than You™ will make sure everything works.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#3

Post by naz » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 12:45 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #2

It's cases like this that show that you should use a proper timezone library in your code. Too often I see websites where the timezone field is given as "+/- X from GMT". Just store everything in UTC, and use tzdata fields (e.g. "Europe/London") to convert to something nice to show the user, and People Cleverer Than You™ will make sure everything works.

Would timezone libraries handle this specific case? Genuinely curious, not being sarcastic.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#4

Post by ars » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 1:01 PM UTC

I'm quite curious if local churches will follow along with the change.

I know Jews wouldn't, and I doubt Muslims would, but I don't think there are any Jews there anyway, not sure about Muslims.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#5

Post by jeltz » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 1:06 PM UTC

naz wrote: post #3

rmc wrote: post #2

It's cases like this that show that you should use a proper timezone library in your code. Too often I see websites where the timezone field is given as "+/- X from GMT". Just store everything in UTC, and use tzdata fields (e.g. "Europe/London") to convert to something nice to show the user, and People Cleverer Than You™ will make sure everything works.

Would timezone libraries handle this specific case? Genuinely curious, not being sarcastic.

Yes they will, but this time they seems to have missed it so the updated database will be released after the change. See the thread about this in the Olson database mailing list.

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-December/008457.html

EDIT: Correction, that thread was about Tokelau and not Samoa. The Samoan change seems to already be in the latest version of the database.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#6

Post by Pelayo » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 1:19 PM UTC

And they become the first to celebrate the new year on the last new year there will ever be.

Re: Samoa cancels Friday 30th and travels one day forward in time

#7

Post by qntm » Fri, Dec 30, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

It's actually quite lucky that the world has a sensible longitude upon which an International Date Line can be dropped. Imagine if there was an unbroken ring of industrialised nations going all the way around the Earth, I can see a situation where each nation wants to do business with the nation to its immediate west so badly that they just adjust their clocks forward and forward over the course of decades. Eventually, every nation on Earth has done it, and an entire day has essentially disappeared from the calendar - except that the UK is at UTC+24:00 now.