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Timezone Maintainer Retiring
linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."
I keep refreshing, but there are no comments. How am I supposed to learn anything about this subject if there are not comments?
You know you're awesome when IANA have to develop a transitioning strategy when you retire.
someone finally told him that time is an allusion.
now is the time to replace timezones with a countdown...
...assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not.
So it was magical server elves all along!
All rites reversed 2010
If you're concerned and/or interested about this, you need to get with calconnect.org. They have a technical committee devoted to this.
....and thanks for all the zones.
The "literary appreciation" article is really first rate.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
The database itself is updated approximately twenty times per year, depending on the year, based on information these experts provide to the maintainer.
Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.
It's looking like a better guess than time ending in 2012.
Figure the confluence of Wikileaks/Successors, Anonymous/Successors, Facebook gets hacked/sells their entire database of real people's names and info, everyone into hypertracking, and on.
We're only at March 2011 and the Day is somewhere in December 2012... 20 months to go at this pace?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I would expect US NIST Time & Frequency division or US Naval Observatory Time department would be more than willing and able to host the zoneinfo database. Otherwise the time-nuts would likely step in and offer their support. A number of them being long time Unix folk, they wouldn't be total strangers to IANA or various national time authorities.
No disrespect to the man and the effort that must have gone in to creating this, but from a rational perspective we shouldn't need more than one more update ever. Unfortunately as a population we seem to be far too dumb to handle the idea of moving away from something we've done for a long time to something that makes more sense.
Here's all we need for a logical, permanent time solution:
I'm sure there are a few odd cases where exceptions to these guidelines would make sense, and I'm not against it in those cases, but the way we handle time zones now is completely irrational.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I think they have some time to deal with it. The only thing I can find that substantiates this is an old post:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/2822
I think I can speak for all software developers in expressing a certain amount of disappointment that we were practically one guy-hit-by-a-bus away from switching everyone to UTC once and for all and we missed our chance. =)
...
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
- E. A. Poe
http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/The_Bells.htm
...omphaloskepsis often...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel
He managed the DNS Root Zone until the US government stole it from him.
...
Gah, totally off topic, but there's the rabbit hole this thread has lead me down.
Where's the brain bleach...
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Have a happy retirement "Father Time". I wish Arthur David Olson well and a good time off.
Thank you Arthur David Olson for keeping all of the timezones in the world for this many years which is thankless and somewhat of a painful job which has to navigate through all of those governments in the world.
Again thank you Arthur David Olson/
We only need it until 12/21/2012!
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
I believe something similar happened when Jon Postel signed off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel). For a while, he *was* the IANA.
You know your technology has stopped being a frontier when pioneers like these get replaced by commitees. Globally, it's not necessarily a bad thing, just a sign of times.
-- Sig down
under his desk, with a note taped to it that says "DO NOT TURN OFF".
That time in 1994 when some clod spilled coke on his desk almost brought it down, but TZ Guy was able to dive under his desk with his shirt off to soak up the spill before it started screwing things up...
I have seen countless examples of bad Business Programming for time, all while knowing that Windows had some elegant rules handling it at the Win32 API level. (So to speak.)
When DateTimeOffset came out, I heard it was supposed to eliminate all the problems. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to use it.
Well finally between TimeZoneInfo.GetUtcOffset(DateTimeoffset) and TimeZoneInfo.ToOffset(DateTime, TimeSpan), I have a half-sane wrapper that gives me the accurate times. I put in 3/13/2011 2:00 AM -05:00, and it nicely gives me 3/13/2011 3:00 -04:00 as the "real time." There's even a helper called IsInvalidTime that tells me that 3/13/2011 2:00 AM isn't really a real time. I'm still trying to learn how to use IsAmbiguousTime.
The problem is I now am beholden Microsoft to do all this for me, and thus I don't REALLY understand how to do it. I guess I'll have to use Reflector to peek at the implementation.
I feel better today than I did yesterday. Bugged me for years.
Eliminate useless crap like Daylight Savings Time.
Yes, what is this daylight savings times thing anyway? I do know what daylight saving time is though
And for which time zone would it be set?
Wait! How about just moving to UNIX time stamps. " I'll meet you at 1299198176 at the coffee shop...give or take a few thousand."
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
What is that supposed to mean?
I remember looking at the source for this package when I was in New York City to run the marathon. It was held the morning the clocks went back to standard time, and I was wondering if my computer was up to date. I looked at the source of the timezone data package and it was filled with all sorts of gems. For instance
# From Paul Eggert (2001-03-06):
# Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin
# in his whimsical essay ``An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost
# of Light'' published in the Journal de Paris (1784-04-26).
# Not everyone is happy with the results:
The comments are very instructive and the rules are all in plain text so I could easily discern that, yes, my system was up to date so that it would switch back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. (I gave up though when I realized that I wasn't sure what my cron daemon would do!)
On Debian just do apt-get source tzdata.
Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date" and follow the "Date input formats" node.
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system.
Great easter eggs in Unix.
Penny - plain text accounting
When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.
But...but...it's OPEN SOURCE! That can't happen.
Like 98SE and ME
Meet the new Timelord, same as the old Timelord?
In our new era of collaborative social networks such as wikis and issure-trackers it may seem logical to some to think that Arthur David Olson's post might be replaced by an automated process.
Rest assured, the faithful group of volunteers that have helped the good Doctor all these many years are in no danger of being replaced by daleks.
We wish you a fond farewell Mr. Olson.
(Perhaps now you'll have time now to fix the Tardis' broken "chameleon circuit" and get it off that bloody conspicuous police box disguise.)
The reason time shifts in daylight savings is to try to extend the evening hours of daylight, reducing energy use.
What studies show that daylight saving time reduces energy use in practice?
I estimate you can get global political agreement on timezone consistency shortly after global peace imposed through evidence of porcine aviation.
In other words, "when pigs fly". In 2009, swine flu.
I say find someone who completely understands Primer and put that person in charge. Clearly, such a person has already demonstrated the ability to understand absolutely anything about time changes.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Isn't it time we retired Time Zones? They are a total waste of time, effort and energy. Let's just have one world-wide time standard.
I Am Not A What?!?!?!?!?!
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Seems to have a bit more than that: Olson posted the original draft to the tz list last October. He seems to be carefully not taking a position, but the fact that he posted it means that he hasn't dismissed the IANA proposal out of hand (and that he was right in expecting it to take a couple of years for them to get something organized and transitioned, since it apparently took a year to get a concrete proposal from anyone).
Is now a good time to bring this up again?
It tracks all of the changes. If a train left Paris at 12:06pm on Jan 12, 1936 and averaged 60mph all the way to Moscow, you can't tell when it arrives in Moscow just by knowing the timezones now and the length of the track. You need to know what the timezones were at the time. And, you need to know exactly when they changed -- especially if they changed during the journey.
All this time he was vigilant and never zoned out on his self appointed duty.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
$ date -d 'November 16, 1999 PST' +%s
942739200
$ date -d @942739200
Tue Nov 16 00:00:00 PST 1999
Mod parent up, since I'm losing that ability to post a better history.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=roff&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html#HISTORY
Osanna first [roff] version was written in the PDP-11 assembly language and released in 1973. Brian Kernighan joined the roff development by rewriting it in the C programming language. The C version was released in 1975.
[...]
After Osanna had died in 1977 by a heart-attack at the age of about 50, Kernighan went on with developing troff. The next milestone was to equip troff with a general interface to support more devices, the intermediate output format and the postprocessor system. This com- pleted the structure of a roff system as it is still in use today [...]
As a follow up to Wikipedia's deletion frenzy, from TFA:
Most of this Talmudic scholarship comes from founding contributor Arthur David Olson and editor Paul Eggert, both of whose Wikipedia pages, although referenced from the Zoneinfo page, strangely do not exist.
I guess they were not notable enough....
The secret of this record isn't about setting your clock right NOW... The secret is you can use the HISTORICAL record of changes to work out how many seconds have elapsed between midday on the 7th July 1988 and "now" or, to put it another way. You can work out at precisely which local time satellite ABC123 was directly overhead at any given location.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
There's no control environment to measure it against
Would Arizona vs. New Mexico count as a control environment? Indiana vs. Illinois used to until a few years ago.
Try to find an active site or mailing list outside of the freedesktop wiki telling you where to submit patches for new keyboards. And all the links on the freedesktop wiki point to 404 or NXDOMAIN.
At least I didn't get a bounce when sending my patch to the ML(?). No idea where or if that reached human eyes, though.
Up to now, I took keyboard settings for granted, as well.
I did the same thing... "I am not a... huh??"
So thats the blasted package that ubuntu server keeps telling me to update!