Downtime

[Tux]

Did my bleary eyes deceive me?

[Void Main]

Did my bleary eyes deceive me?

You lucky dog, you caught me with my first 10 minutes of downtime. :) Had a lightning storm blow through and knocked the power off for a second. The Void web server is a cheap piece of junk and doesn't automatically power back up for some reason. Maybe there is a BIOS setting for it somewhere now that I think about it but I'm not powering it back down to see. Obviously I don't have a UPS on the thing either which is what I really need.

[Tux]

Hmm, it's now 3:45 am my time. I am going to let my body have 2hours down time will reboot ready for work at 6am.
Damn i'm a trooper...

[Void Main]

When you posted that it was 9:45pm here (the forum is an hour off for some reason, guess it don't recognize daylight savings time or something).

[edit]
I guess you probably don't notice the time being off. I just realized that we set our time zones individually in our profiles unlike some other forums I used to go to. phpBB doesn't understand Daylight Savings Time for some reason and if any of you are in the same boat and the time is off by an hour just go into your profile and change your timezone by an hour. You'll have to change it back when we go back to standard time. For instance I'm at GMT-6 but because phpBB doesn't understand DST I have to set it to GMT-5 to be right during the summer months. Hopefully they will have it fixed in the next version of phpBB. The authors say it is not a bug, apparently they don't live in a time zone where Daylight Savings Time is used.
[/edit]

[Calum]

no, it's not a bug for the following reason.

you are still 6 hours out from GMT, but you are now only 5 hours out from UK time. this is because the UK is currently 1 hour out from GMT itself. we are currently using BST here (which is GMT+1), so if the forums changed to say you were only 5 hours out from GMT, they would be incorrect.

[Void Main]

I didn't mean to say it was a bug because it didn't change from -6 to -5. I said it's a bug because it doesn't know that -6 is a DST time zone and when in this time zone it didn't recognize that the -6 time zone had changed from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time. I say it's a bug because the operating and every other application and service understood that this happened and changed it's time appropriately at 2:00am on Sunday a few weeks back. phpBB did not change and thus displayed an incorrect local time. Why is it that phpBB can not do this but everything else can? My operating system time zone is set to "-6 CDT", when I type "date" I get this:

"Fri Apr 25 09:26:30 CDT 2003"

But when my profile was set to "-6" in phpBB it said it was only "08:26:30". If it's going to do that I might as well just set it to GMT. To correct this so it matches my clock on the wall I have to manually change my profile from "-6" to "-5" in the summer months. If this is not considered a "bug" then I would say that a severely needed "feature" is missing. :)

[Calum]

i agree with you then. i suppose they could easily put in a hack that uses tha 'date' command (or you could!), but this would assume that that command worked on every system it was possible to install phpBB on. i never checked, but i bet it can be installed on a variety of non *nix systems which wouldn't have 'date'.

i did see a discussion once on phpbb.com boards saying there were no plans to add in daylight savings support because it was a lot of hassle configuring it right for every single timezone in the world and they had better things to do et cetera. of course phpBB is GPL, so maybe if somebody were to start a project solely to give phpBB timezone support then it might catch on. i am not sure if this could be some kind of module or if it would have to go into phpBB proper, if it were a module (or whatever they call it in phpBB world) it would need to be checked and maybe rewritten for each new release of phpBB i suspect.

edit: and it's 20 to 5, and i just noticed it says i posted at 3:37, but it's not like i really mind, i can just look at the clock!

[Void Main]

edit: and it's 20 to 5, and i just noticed it says i posted at 3:37, but it's not like i really mind, i can just look at the clock! :D

See, that's a problem. As long as you know it's two hours off for you then you can figure it out. I do take note of what time a post was made. You can change your timezone setting to an incorrect one to make it match your wall clock in your profile.

I don't see what the big deal is for the time zone code. It's not like they have to do a lot of work, the code already exists in Linux, just copy/paste (well, almost that easy). You can't really do a "date" command because the issue is that everyone viewing these forums is from a different time zone and it's a per user setting. But you are on the same lines as what I was thinking. I believe they need to add another option to their time setting in the user profiles, and that is whether daylight savings is observed just like when you configure your Linux system (or Windows system). Now all data in the database would be set to GMT (or UTC or whichever is the definitive non-changing time). Then it would be translated at display time based on what is set in the users profile, just like Linux does when you have your time zone set to "-6 CDT" for instance. There would have to be some sort of function to determine what the real local time is for any particular user based on the UTC/GMT time on the data and the user Time Zone settings. Like I said this is already figured in the OS, why can't this be added to phpBB? I know, I know, just do it yourself and send the patches to phpBB right? Well, maybe I will if I feel froggy.

[Calum]

that's what open source is all about, yes?

[Void Main]

Wow, I got home a couple of hours ago from flying my planes and the dang cable connection appeared to be down. No problem, I needed to mow the yard and take care of some other things anyway. It looks like it must have been down for right at 8 hours. Sorry folks, not much I can do about and hopefully it's not the start of a trend!!

[Tux]

You bad bad man!