Daylight saving changes usually occur on the last Sunday of March and the last Sunday of October for the eastern states of Australia (Queensland excepted). This year is an exception.
Got an email at work yesterday asking us to reboot our Windows boxes to have this patch applied. Apparently because of the upcoming Commonwealth Games at Melbourne, daylight saving change (from DST to standard time) has been postponed from the 26 of March to 2 — and this is across the whole of Australia wherever daylight saving is implemented.
One you have the patch installed, you should be able to choose the “Commonwealth Games” variant of your existing timezone. For example:
For Mac OS X, here is a method to manually patching it by compiling your own timezone files. Not pretty and there seems to be some compatibility issues with other Apple applications. My Linux boxes are also unpatched, even though I am running the up-to-dated Gentoo. As it is using the same system as Mac OS X, I guess the same method applies.
(Note that timezone is part of glibc on Gentoo, and looks like you need at least 2.3.6 for the change, which is still keyword-masked at the moment).
And exception is always troublesome. It is more than having operating system vendors updating the zone files. You also need to have date-sensitive applications verified as well, as they might not be using the facility provided by the operating system. One application we had relies on pytz, and its latest release has DST change-over on the right date. However I can imagine that there are many that have not been updated with latest changes.
I am actually fine with having daylight saving. However if government wants to have an exception because of sporting events (maybe only Australia would do that), they need to make updates available early. Not 4 months prior to the change, but at least one or two years, so that those on slightly older version of software can still work, without being forced with a patch or upgrade.
Thank you so much for the information. I’ve installed the patch from Microsoft and it works well. It also solves a bug in the Simplified Chinese Version of Windows XP. Previously if you choose the time zone of “Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney” (with DST), “Brisbane” (without DST) will be displayed:-(
I can’t see why they didn’t just change the event times to an hour earlier.
That would have been easy
Would have save the country a fortune on time changes and software changes.
Not counting the fact that we are going to have huge problems with organisers, phones, GPS and every other bit of equipment that we own that automatically gets times changed.
Scott
what was the name of the Commonweath games before the name change?
For Gentoo it seems to be sufficient to just emerge sys-libs/timezone-data. It is currently masked (bit dumb since the change needs to be made before tomorrow night!)
so:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=’~x86′ emerge -v sys-libs/timezone-data
should fix it up for gentoo people.
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It would have been much simpler to have the various Commonwealth games activities start one hour earlier – now everyone’s confused about the time changeover. It’s not going to inconvience the athletes all that much to start earlier – many of them, I’m sure, come from time zones that do not have daylight saving and they had to adjust when they arrived in Australia. Why the rest of us have to be inconvienced like this is beyond comprehension.
I think that the Commonwealth Games was called the Empire Games before the name change.
So when does say light saving actually end for 2006?
thx
@Stephanie – it will be next Sunday, the 2nd of April.
@Brain – thanks for the tip. I was also wondering why it was still masked.
The best part about this whole mess is that it was for only one day of the Games. They’re over now! And we have to deal with a week of this crap. Not happy Jan.
I feel lucky I live in Qld, where we dont use whack DST :)
Who was responsible for this completely irrelevant change
They should be put in stocks, publicly ridiculed and have rotten vegetables thrown at them. Why isn’t that legal these days… :|