One sure sign that people are getting into real-world web services projects is when you start to see timezone awareness …
[Via Loosely Coupled weblog]
coordinating TimeZones are hard, then add in Daylight Saving Time, when or if it takes effect, and except to go completely insane! I’ve donate a few handfuls of hair to this.
here’s a couple of reference links :
http://www.timechange.com/dls/dls1.html
World Time Server : http://www.worldtimeserver.com/index.asp (Time Zone Database by subscription for ~ $400 year)
This site Daylight Saving Time is one of the best I’ve seen explaining the history and “Why”. Plus a chart of DST around the world with links to some explaining to the how it gets decided for each country.
After looking over this you 1) go out and get really really drunk, 2) try to talk for boss (and or the customer) out of it 3) decide that 400 dollar is not that much to pay to keep track of this all 4) go out for more drinking cause you still have to find a good way to implement this.
again from Loosely Coupled weblog:
Why is timezone awareness such a big deal? Because it only becomes a problem in a highly distributed, decentralized environment. So long as there’s a single, central point of control, then it’s easy to wriggle around timezone issues by pretending they don’t exist. You can always decide that, since the data center is in Colorado, all transactions will logged using Mountain Time. Or if the company headquarters is in New York, you can decree that everything happens according to Eastern Time.