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Weedpacket
12-06-2002, 08:14 AM
I mean, GMT+13 hours is a valid timezone, and it's the one I'm in right now... just can't select it as a user option, is all.

jstarkey
12-09-2002, 06:48 AM
Originally posted by Weedpacket
I mean, GMT+13 hours is a valid timezone, and it's the one I'm in right now... just can't select it as a user option, is all.


Whoa!! How's it feel to live on the edge of time?? :D

Looks like 'Western Europe' is the GMT zone.

Weedpacket
12-09-2002, 07:56 AM
Originally posted by jstarkey
Whoa!! How's it feel to live on the edge of time?? :D

Um... I celebrate New Year's before anyone else? I mean, as I write this, it's already December 10...

jstarkey
12-22-2002, 12:29 PM
I'm sorry for the delay.

I misunderstood the question the first time around.

You're in +13, which would be -11 hours, right?

Weedpacket
12-24-2002, 07:00 AM
Originally posted by jstarkey
I'm sorry for the delay.

I misunderstood the question the first time around.

You're in +13, which would be -11 hours, right?
Nope, +13; -11 would be same time yesterday.

Merry Christmas (first post of Christmas day, posted (by my clock, and NIST agrees with me):
2002-12-25 00:00:19!

planetsim
12-24-2002, 03:08 PM
Err Weepacket. Were would +13 be. Like im in +10 but with Daylight Saving its +11. You would be where.. Like New Zealand or Something

Weedpacket
12-25-2002, 01:32 AM
Full marks. :D

planetsim
12-25-2002, 09:09 AM
Do i win a prize then...

Weedpacket
12-25-2002, 09:43 AM
Originally posted by planetsim
Do i win a prize then...
Given what I had for dinner I think the best prize would be that I don't breathe on you. How's that?

jstarkey
12-25-2002, 01:45 PM
Originally posted by Weedpacket

Given what I had for dinner I think the best prize would be that I don't breathe on you. How's that?

Whoa, calm down Mr. You're going to hurt someone with that breath!!

Is setting your clock ahead putting you in the historically correct time? Or is setting it back doing so?

Weedpacket
12-26-2002, 02:13 AM
Originally posted by jstarkey


Whoa, calm down Mr. You're going to hurt someone with that breath!!

Is setting your clock ahead putting you in the historically correct time? Or is setting it back doing so?

If by "historically correct" you mean NZST, that's GMT+12 (strictly speaking, UTC+12, but the difference is never more than a second); thing is, right now I'm on Daylight Saving, which is GMT+13. So when it's 1 AM on New Years' Day in Greenwich, it's already 2 PM here.

(Of course, Greenwich Mean Time is not to be confused with the local time in Greenwich, since England has Daylight Saving, too).

The upshot of this is that whenever I see that a post was made at a certain time (according to the forum) I have to mentally add one hour to find out whe it was really made. Maybe I'm lazy, but if I wanted to do that I'd just stick with GMT to begin with. Besides, its inelegant to have all these different timezones and manage to miss one out.

planetsim
12-26-2002, 05:54 AM
Well to tell you the truth i forgot that NZ had Daylight Saving. But you and other Kiwis must feel left out.

Any no offence to you but its too cold in New Zealand at the moment for me.

jstarkey
12-26-2002, 08:00 PM
I can't tell whether you're serious or not weedpacket :(

I'm not in a different time zone just because we moved our clocks ahead. Geographically, you're still in the same time zone.

Weedpacket
12-26-2002, 10:20 PM
Okay, it's just that all the clocks around here are saying it's quarter past three in the afternoon, but this site says that "the time now is 02:18 PM."

jstarkey
12-26-2002, 10:37 PM
Originally posted by Weedpacket
Okay, it's just that all the clocks around here are saying it's quarter past three in the afternoon, but this site says that "the time now is 02:18 PM."

Oooooohhhhh, it's not the timezone, you want a board that figures in the time changes per country.

Wait, are your clocks ahead, or behind right now?

Weedpacket
12-26-2002, 11:09 PM
New Zealand Standard Time, as implied by the vBulletin time zone options, is GMT+12.

Lessee ... At the moment it's 2002-12-27, 16:00. That's GMT+13 hours (New Zealand Daylight Saving time), so as I write this, GMT is 3:00am. Almost all the clocks I'm using say four o'clock, and for a few reasons I find cause to regularly calibrate the most immediately accessible one (the system clock of my computer and those of a few servers I maintain, and my wristwatch) against the time signals sent out from NIST time servers. All say that the time is four in the afternoon.

The only "current time" displays that I can't put forwrd one hour to reflect daylight saving are those on these forums. They still display GMT+12. I was going to say that this is the only timezone where daylight saving can't be taken into account, but people living where the GMT offset is something and a half hours would also be in peril.

Strictly speaking, you're right - my timezone doesn't change just because it's daylight saving. But the only reason why the option of choosing the timezone is given is so that posts and such can be labelled with the current local time; at present it's failing in that role (at least for me).

Tell ya what - maybe a checkbox to indicate that the time should be "adjusted for Daylight Saving" would do the trick. No more shifting time zones back and forth, and displayed times remain current. It's an idea to perhaps send back to the vBulletin authors.

jstarkey
12-26-2002, 11:24 PM
But, the server is also synced to nist. If we're an hour ahead, and you're an hour ahead, then it should be correct.

You know, I never thought about this and I've worked with vBulletin over several time changes. I guess it's because I'm in the US (about 30 miles from NIST, BTW).

Now my brain is fried.

So are you an hour ahead, or behind? If you were behind, it'd seem that the board time would be two hours off.

Weedpacket
12-27-2002, 06:18 AM
Sorry; I'm lost now. When you ask if I'm "ahead or behind", the question I find myself at a loss to answer is "relative to what"? I'm missing some context.

Right here, right now the time is GMT+13 hours. That's 12 hours for the timezone (the Easternmost edge of the world) plus another hour for daylight saving (it goes without saying that daylight saving happens at different times of the year in the southern hemisphere than it does in the northern).


All my clocks around here are displaying GMT+13. My handy NISTime client says

Local Standard Time - UTC = 13:00

Computer Time: 2002-12-27 (361) 23:10:12 (11:10:12 pm).


(But like I said, the difference between UTC and GMT is not worth noting.)

If I were to post right now though; then when I looked at the time stamp attached to this post in the forum, it would say that it was posted at 10:10 pm.

So, if it's a matter of who's ahead or behind, the clocks on these forums are one hour behind (all the time displays are reading one hour earlier than they should be).

In short, vBulletin doesn't recognise Daylight Saving time.

[Edit: Posted at 11:18pm NZDT; that's 10:18am GMT. vBulletin is saying 10:18pm on my screen]

planetsim
12-27-2002, 06:22 AM
Quite Correct. But can VB do that. I think not. Like you said. US could do there Daylight Saving a week before another country. And someone in the same timezone, can change a week later.

From that its pretty much impossible to get the correct time all the time.

Weedpacket
12-27-2002, 09:20 AM
Which is why most clocks have to be put forward for the start of Daylight Saving (and back again at the end) manually or trained in the local conventions anyway - it's just that I can't do that with this one. Like I say, the appropriate setting is not an option, nor is there some other way for me to tell it that it's Daylight Saving.

Good grief! Don't tell me that I have to wait until it's Daylight Saving in the server's timezone before the clock will go forward! The displayed times will go from one hour behind to one hour ahead!


*Eg. "Daylight Saving is one hour and runs from 0200, 1st Sunday in October to 0200, 3rd Sunday in March" - at least it is for me and my machines.

jstarkey
12-29-2002, 04:56 AM
Originally posted by Weedpacket

*Eg. "Daylight Saving is one hour and runs from 0200, 1st Sunday in October to 0200, 3rd Sunday in March" - at least it is for me and my machines.

We run from roughly the 3rd week in Oct to the 3rd week in April. So, you shouldn't be having a problem right now. You make things so tough, Weedpacket :P

I'll think about this and see if I can come up with something. The problem is: any hacks on vB have to be done before the html tag and posted as a variable in a template, so it's a little tough to modify the time.

Weedpacket
12-29-2002, 08:42 AM
Sorry; just one of the drawbacks to living on the edge of Civilisation, I guess.... Does no-one else ever notice this happening, though?

When I originally asked I thought it would just be a matter of adding a "GMT+13" option to the select - probably a bit naive: it probably isn't hardcoded that way. Hence the later suggestion of an extra DST flag.

Yes, I'm aware that such a change would alter all the displayed times, even those for posts made outside the Daylight Saving period. I can live with that: for it to be otherwise would require maintaining a catalogue of daylight saving rules from around the world and know just which one applies to each user.

I could just use straight GMT I guess ... but after the effort already made to supply a local time option to users....

jstarkey
01-03-2003, 06:16 AM
Originally posted by Weedpacket


I could just use straight GMT I guess ... but after the effort already made to supply a local time option to users....


Version 3 of the board has been in beta for about a month. I'm going to hold off and see if they make any kind of arrangements for this. They're really hard to get ahold of at the moment to find out. As soon as I know something, I'll let you know.