Adjust your time offsets

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Now that the Forum Server has changed its daylight saving settings, you will have to change your time offset in your profile to get the right time displayed...

How not to design a user interface (I know it's not Sparx's fault here...)

Paolo

[KP]

And they've been having a good old chat about it over on the YABB forums, without seeming to come to any conclusion about what should be done: http://www.yabbforum.com/community/YaBB.pl?num=1143398152/0

[mikewhit]

Have had a look at the YaBB posts ... absolutely amazing that these issues are unresolved in a product that's been around for a few years !!

I was working on an embedded product in 1996 which had to have a table containing country-specific DST start/end information.

IIRC the algorithm could handle 'dates' such as "3rd Sunday in March", "last Saturday in October" etc.

[Windows & Linux seem to manage it OK !]

Software seems doomed to repeat mistakes of the past, through ignorance; this is a 'problem' that has been solved long ago.

It appears in this case that an assumption is made that server DST switch time is the same as everyone else's.

Doh. S=spec. RTFS.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Yes, you're absolutely right... We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past...

About three years ago, I joined a company that was trying to create a product where I could be here in Australia, observe events in South Africa in either their local time, my time or Head Office time in New York, and render costs in US$ or Rand or AU$.

They wondered why it wasn't working right when they were recordingthe event time in local time to the DB...  ANd they weren't localizing the money at all...

Paolo

[Bruno.Cossi]

I am just dealing with a company whose flagship product (quite high-profile one, too!) assumes that one country = one unique currency, and requires an exchange rate for each currency. As a result, there is a 1:1 exchange rate between German Euro and French Euro etc :-) And for countries with more than one currency (there are some)... well, these countries are setup more than once.... mess!

Bruno

Yes, you're absolutely right... We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past...

About three years ago, I joined a company that was trying to create a product where I could be here in Australia, observe events in South Africa in either their local time, my time or Head Office time in New York, and render costs in US$ or Rand or AU$.

They wondered why it wasn't working right when they were recordingthe event time in local time to the DB...  ANd they weren't localizing the money at all...

Paolo

[mikewhit]

It applies to people too - a new manager on the product I mentioned started requesting a feature so that customers could have timestamps stored in the log in 'wallclock' time rather than UTC.

We tried to tell him that this would produce discontinuities in the log data at start and end of DST, and that we would also need to store against each time whether it had been subject to DST correction.

Also now any equipment installed across different timezones (e.g. in the US) would need to know its own timezone and record this in the log too, so that all data collected centrally could be made consistent.

In the end he thought I was just being awkward and did not renew my contract, much to the team's disbelief.
He did lose his job shortly afterwards though.

[jeshaw2]

I am just dealing with a company whose flagship product (quite high-profile one, too!) assumes that one country = one unique currency, and requires an exchange rate for each currency. As a result, there is a 1:1 exchange rate between German Euro and French Euro etc :-) And for countries with more than one currency (there are some)... well, these countries are setup more than once.... mess!

Bruno

I would love to know the names of some of those countries for my lecture points.

Oh! and are there multiple Euro currencies?

[mikewhit]

Well, there are certainly multiple Euro coins from different countries, which vending machines sometimes appear to treat differently ...!

[Old French 10F works instead of 1 EUR sometimes - higher value, so no-one's losing out ;-) ]

[Bruno.Cossi]

... and I seem to remember that there was some sort of Eastern European coin, can't remember from which country....  but it was the same size and weight of one of Euro coins, though fraction of a value.... great for vending machines! :-)
There is only one Euro currency, one side of the coins/notes is country specific graphics-wise, but it is still 1 Euro.

Countries with multiple currencies... there aren't many, but it happens that a country officially uses it's own currency and a foreign currency as well. Serbia&Montenegro uses both Yugoslavian currency and Euro, Bosnia used to use its own currency plus "convertible Deutschmark". And of course there was the transition period during which EU used local currencies as well as Euro (at least in theory).

Bruno

Well, there are certainly multiple Euro coins from different countries, which vending machines sometimes appear to treat differently ...!