I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Between Entourage 2008 and my BlackBerry *some* of my meetings are out by an hour this week.
Already had 2 double bookings this week.
Voda says the BB8310 is already compliant with the new rules. Entourage 2008 should also be compliant.
Amazing this stuff just doesn’t work.
blog
Me too
On my Nokia E61 syncing from Outlook and Google cal
It’ll be sorted once DST ends in a couple of wks
My paperback dayplanner works just fine!
Paper diaries ftw!
We had some daylight savings issues at work this week… patches were available for windows pcs and linux servers, but for some reason only half of them got patched.
I wouldn’t have thought it would make any difference to our application, since the dates were user input, and independent of the OS time? Not true - they were dependent on the OS default timezone!
Time values are stored as an offset so they update as the OS timezone is changed. The daylight savings patches I was involved in making had to make changes to pre-existing calendar entries that fell in the new DST time period. Perhaps the incorrect entries were entered prior to the change? The Exchange patch wasn’t applied even though the OS was? Entries created on the 8310 vs Entourage could also account for the odd behaviour depending on when they were entered vs the other patches.
Our 8310s sailed through unscathed. I wish I could say the same for the 7290s that vodas still supply (so you would assume were supported)…unfortunately they make up the majority of our fleet :(
I needed to visit http://www.blackberry.com/dst2007/patches/carrier/4.1MR4/net_rim_bb_timezoneupdater.jad
on my pearl to update it, but of course it was flooded with requests so instead set my timezone to fiji, and then manually set the clock.
Vodafone could have pushed this out as a service book months ago - they certainly didn’t mind using service books to *remove* browsing capability on my phone, forcing me to use Live… not sure whats going on up there - but the BB experience gets pretty unsavioury when you can’t rely on it…
After reading a report of a DST problem, I understand that a lot of these are software faults, and not problems with the OS or the timezone settings themselves.
When dealing with multiple timezones, what will a developer do? They’ll convert it to UTC and then convert it back for display and comparison.
Everything works fine until someone shifts the time that we fall back an hour by a week. All of a sudden, all of the timestamps that were previously created for that 1 week period will be out by an hour.
If you’ve got a monthly/weekly recurring meeting it will be out by an hour into perpetuity for that 1 week every year.
Now, the real fix is to store dates/times in the originator’s timezone and then convert them on the fly. It makes sorting a pain in the ass (time is no longer a single int!), but we’ve got CPU to burn so why not?
The lesson to take away? You cannot convert a timestamp to UTC for storage if that timestamp is in the future.
Nokia have major problems with DST as well. On new S60 phones there is no way to make the phone ignore automatic DST changes.
It appears that Nokia are fixing the DST changes in some firmware releases but not all. The new N95 firmware is aware of the new NZ dates but my E65 isn’t even with the latest firmware (that was from around Dec 2007/Jan 2008).
I’ve been meaning to send an email off to Nokia complaining about this but have been busy so far this week. If you’re going to force phones to automatically correct their time then you need to give people a way to edit their timezones! It must be damn annoying for people in Australia..
Vodafone could minimise the problems as well by actually transmitting the GSM time signal, something very few networks seem to use.
Between my iphone going back an hour, and the clock on the bus the next morning also being back, I was basically convinced that daylight savings had occured!
Amazing how much trust we automatically put in technology now as a frame of reference for reality.
My Nokia N73 has the latest firmware and is out by an hour. Also some, but not all, of my Outlook 2007 appointments are out. Not sure why some are and some arent.
My Treo 700wx is also out by an hour - frustrating! Outlook 2007 also. Pain in the rear having to change all the appointments manually for a week.
My iPhone also incorrectly went back an hour :/ almost missed a meeting!
Just a note for Kieran have a look at:
http://www.microsoft.com/nz/windowsmobile/daylightsaving/default.mspx
I was looking into this a little more. The problem is even more silly than you expect. iCal says that for every a repeating calendar event, it must have a timezone description entry. That entry must specify at least one DST start/end period.
Obviously, if this meeting is stored (including the timezone), it will be incorrect if the DST information is changed after the meeting is created.
So, they got it half correct. They pass timezone information on, but neglect to consider that the definition may change.
Urgh.
Thankyou very much Simon - Frustration averted.
hi,
does anyone know of a nokia patch for updating the DST settings for a Nokia N73? or is the simple solution to just change the timezone to Tonga zone??
Tonga will do it in spring, but what timezone can you set it to for autumn?