Philip

Thanks to our local Western Australian Government, I’ve been running around trying to figure out how to deal with the Daylight Savings issues in the last half a week. The problem isn’t that Daylight Savings are going ahead, it’s that we need to check and either patch or fix all our computers and software for unusual side effects since we’re now +9 hours GMT instead of +8 hours GMT like we usually are. This wouldn’t be a problem if we had a good say, 3 to 6 months to let software vendors test and fix everything. As of the moment, from what I’m reading a lot of time specific programs (like Outlook and Exchange) munge appointments up erratically, Windows itself seems to have issues enabling/disabling Daylight Savings (by default, I leave it off - never needed it before) and Mac OS X has had issues.

I managed to crack (I think) the Mac OS X problem by rebuilding the ICU database file and the zoneinfo files which fixed up iCal, you can get a PowerPC patch for 10.4.8 here. If things are OK and are tested properly I’ll probably upload an Intel patch and see if there’s interest for a 10.3.9 patch as well. There’s a long story about how I managed to get this working but at the moment I’m hoping the few people that know about it test it out and see if it fixes their issues. Maybe later on Apple will make an official patch to fix the problem.

I’ve given some thought to billing the local Government for my time investigating and building the patch, mostly just to make them aware that their lack of foresight has caused a lot of unnecessary problems for people (especially if you work in IT). I expect to get some grief Monday and probably for the rest of the week as we find all the issues. If you support this, just drop me a comment on this post with what you think.