Timezone identifiers are wrong

March 11, 2007 9:28 PM

It's that time of the year again, when I whine about using "ET" instead of "EST"! (2005, 2006)
posted by intermod to Bugs at 9:28 PM (15 comments total)

For those of you too jaded to click the first link, I'm not saying to bother with the daylight calc (which is indeed the path to madness), just drop the S ...

For those of you about to snark about nitpicking, yep, you're right. I still love MeFi even with the lazy timezone IDs.

[ducks]
posted by intermod at 9:30 PM on March 11, 2007

Let me be the first this year to say: ET, phone home.
posted by wendell at 9:33 PM on March 11, 2007

Yeah, but that would require an extensive overhaul of the whole code base. Just doing a simple Find/Replace of all occurances of EST to ET would make a lot of Matt's comments read: "I AM THE COOLET!!!"
posted by Eideteker at 9:45 PM on March 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but that would require an extensive overhaul of the whole code base

Really? I have no idea how MeFi is structured, but somehow I doubt this.
posted by phaedon at 10:10 PM on March 11, 2007

Mathowie is not really a software architect. Each subsite? a copy-paste version of an existing one, with some modifications. Previewing a comment in a thread calls code that is separate and independent from the code that displays the thread normally.

Your timezone is read from a cookie (I just checked to make sure), along with most of your display preferences. PST in mine is encoded as 0%2E0, you may be able to get the "ET" you wish for.
posted by blasdelf at 10:25 PM on March 11, 2007

It's that time of the year again, when three or four people have deep, complex discussions about the designing of a robust and scalable timezone database, and go on and on about the benefits of building a cesium fountain clock astride the MeFi servers. And the rest of us go glassy eyed.

Ah, I love St. Patrick's day.
posted by Plutor at 4:45 AM on March 12, 2007

Plutor writes "It's that time of the year again, when three or four people have deep, complex discussions about the designing of a robust and scalable timezone database, and go on and on about the benefits of building a cesium fountain clock astride the MeFi servers. And the rest of us go glassy eyed."

And then people like intermod suggest "dude, just take out the letter 'S' and you're done!"
posted by Bugbread at 5:56 AM on March 12, 2007

My wife and I were discussing yesterday how at the USNO Time Service there's actually a guy with the job title "Director of Time".

His office, if there is any Narrativium-justice in the world, consists of a very small, dark closet, which contains (i) him and (ii) cat.
posted by dmd at 6:08 AM on March 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

Out of which closet, may I add, does in fact flow complete and utter control over the passage of time.

If he ever got around to wanting to exercise such power. He's too busy talking to his cat.
posted by dmd at 6:10 AM on March 12, 2007

The lazy solution would be to make the timezone string be a preference, so people could change it themselves twice a year.

Given that, I'm not sure why the time zone is shown to logged in users at all. I know my own time zone.
posted by smackfu at 6:10 AM on March 12, 2007

I AM THE COOLET!!!
posted by Kwine at 6:44 AM on March 12, 2007

ET: Ouuuuuch.
posted by kindall at 7:59 AM on March 12, 2007

Pfft, just set it all to UTC/epoch time. Let the browser sort it out. You mean you can't parse 1173718894 in your head?
posted by Skorgu at 10:02 AM on March 12, 2007

I would like time posted in a countdown clock to the end of the Mayan long count. (Conveniently scheduled for my 39th birthday.)
posted by desuetude at 2:05 PM on March 12, 2007

From Number One:

"Also, no more timezone crap, because I removed all references to custom timezone labels, and you now simply set an offset from the server time".
posted by intermod at 9:53 PM on March 18, 2007