Re: Time zone/DST change question.

what timezone should be used for the southwestern Ontario Region

America/Toronto or Canada/Eastern


"Neil Rieck" <n.rieck@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:45ee2b7d$0$16407$88260bb3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:80b26$45ee2c59$cef8887a$19152@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The release notes for VMS83A_UPDATE-V0200 which include the TZ update
mention that from now on, those west of GMT will in in a positive time
differential instead of negative as in the past.

However, after intalling the kit (but not yet rebooting), I executed the
UTC$TIME_ZONE_SETUP procedure as the release notes said, but when
selecting eastern canada time zone it still told me that my time zone
(eastern canada) is -5 in winter and -4 in summer.

A very weird thing happened to me last week when I was testing some
application software on an Oracle-8 system. For reasons I won't go into
here, we are in possession of some third-party UNIX application software
with baked-in DST rules "and" there is not enough time to install an
upgrade.

So I installed the Solaris-8 patches and was then developing a procedure
so that 2:00 AM on Mar-11 we were going to manually change the timezone
from Canada/Eastern to just plain old GMT-4. (cuz we won't get the new s/w
loaded until mid-summer and I didn't want the baked-in s/w to flip over to
EDT on April-1).

Now here is the weird part, while testing the procedure on a captive
system I learned than GMT-4 actually produced GMT+4. Peering inside file
"/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/GMT-4" actually revealed "GMT+4" and checking
file "GMT+4" revealed "GMT-4". This is the only UNIX box doing this so I
just assumed that someone screwed up at Sun.

Now it's kind of weird that people have been confusing this stuff all
along. While it is true that EST (local) is the same as GMT minus 5,
program data we send to our ExpressVu satellites is always expressed in
GMT which is 5 hours ahead of EST (this is just a matter of perspective I
guess).

I guess I had better check the release notes you mentioned.

p.s. this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMT-4 assured me that I wanted
my computer's local clock set to GMT minus 4. In the mean time we're going
to begin working on a plan to set all of our computer system clocks to
GMT; we will also being storing GMT in our databases and will only
convert back to local time when expressly requested by a human.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/

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