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Time zones and PHP question ...

jbickers — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:05:41 -0800

PHP gurus: please help me do something specific with the date function. So my website uses some logic to determine what time of day/day of week it is, and display content accordingly. It all hinges on this variable:

$now = date('l H:i');

Over the weekend, we moved web hosts - to a company in California, and now the dynamic content is always three hours off. I've looked up the documentation on the function, and it makes my head hurt. What do I do to that variable assignment to add three hours to the result it returns?

iPhone, Google Calendar, and travel across time zones

DandyRandy — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:48:20 -0800

What is the best practice for entering events across time zones, such as airline flights, when using Google Calendars and the iPhone? For instance, I'm in CA, my iPhone's calendar's Time Zone Support is set to OFF, and I entered the flight on my Google calendar so that both the departure time from CA and the arrival time in Minneapolis are as they would be in CA - leave at 10 AM Pacific, arrive in Minn at 5 PM Pacific (7 PM Central).

Is this the right way to do it? When I arrive in MN, will my iPhone calendar (which has adjusted its time zone either automatically or manually) show that the flight lands at 7 PM? Should I have Time Zone Support set on ON all the time?

This digital world traveler stuff is so confusing. Local time, destination time, this should be more intuitive.

Batch a list of ZIPs to time zones?

skypieces — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:54:56 -0800

Need to find time zones for an extensive list of U.S. ZIP codes I have in Excel. (Not for Spam.) If there is a reasonable answer to this, you will save me hours/days of manual work. I have a list of thousands of contacts that I am simply trying to sort by time zone so I can divide up the day's work more effectively. My contact list is in Excel and the ZIP is in its own column. I have seen websites that return time zone info from zip code like this one. But, one-at-a-timing it is a daunting prospect.

Note: I have no scripting experience. I might be willing to purchase a tool to do this, but something tells me I probably shouldn't have to, especially since I will only do this task once. And, again, I am not spamming anyone. No emailing involved.

Ideas?

Time travel with an iPhone

griffey — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:00:01 -0800

How do I deal with new iPhone calendaring weirdness? Bonus difficulty: live in one timezone, work in another. I'm having not so much fun figuring out how to deal with my Exchange calendaring issues on my new iPhone 3G. I'm syncing using an Exchange server, but here's the issue: I live in Central Time, but work in Eastern. The server is in eastern time, while my phone roams from one to the other as I go to and from work.

Here's what I've been able to see so far:

Create an event for 1pm on my iPhone while in Central time: event stays at 1pm even when I cross the timeline on the phone, but shows up for 2pm on Outlook on my computer.

Create an event for 1pm on my Outlook PC while at work in Eastern Time: syncs to my iPhone (which is ALSO IN EASTERN TIME) at 12pm (noon).

It's like my phone is permanently on Central time, and my computer is obviously on Eastern, and everything is crossing wires as they sync. The phone is currently set to automatically set time/date, but I tried setting it manually to Eastern and it didn't change anything.

I didn't have this problem with my last phone (windows mobile), so I'm sure it's the iPhone trying to fix things for me...but how the heck to I stop this behavior?

Everything else (email and contacts) are syncing beautifully. The phone, in every other respect, is marvelous and wonderful.

Creative solutions welcome!

Help me get rid of iCal timezone support!

sdis — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:06:05 -0800

iCal Filter: Getting rid of idiotic timezone support once and for all? Background: I just moved 9 timeszones (Los Angeles to Vienna), and iCal has panicked and moved all of my events from Los Angeles around to different days and generally made a mess of things. I've already made something of a schedule in Vienna, so currently I have 4-5 years of events in the Los Angeles timezone and a month or so of events in the Vienna timezone. If I need to hand-edit all of the Vienna events, that would be fine.

Idiotic Behavior: Lets talk about three sample events, representing one of many similar such events:
-Event A occured in Los Angeles on August 19th at 9am. (Stored as Los Angeles timezone)
-Event B occured in Vienna at 7:30pm on Sept 11th, but was added to the calendar after I turned timezone support off. As such, it is stored as occuring at 4:30am on Sept. 12th in the Vienna timezone. When the global timezone is set to Los Angeles, it shows up at the correct time.
-Event C occured in Vienna at 7:30pm on Sept 19th, but was added to the calendar when the global timezone was reset back to Los Angeles, so it's stored as 7:30pm in the Los Angeles timezone.

If my computer is set to the Vienna timezone and I shut off iCal timezone support, A B and C move 9 hours forward.

Events A B and C all show up at the correct time, just the way I'd like, if I change the computer's timezone to Los Angeles and then turn off timezone support in iCal. I can then change my computer's timezone back to Vienna and my calendars are fine...until I quit and reopen iCal, at which point everything has shifted forward 9 hours.

If I set iCal's timezone to Los Angeles while my computer's timezone is in Vienna, everything shows up correctly in week-view, but anything I add to the calendar is stored just like event C (in the Los Angeles timezone), and everything in group B is still stored at the wrong time, which becomes irritating when looking at events in month view.

The only option that would stay the same before and after I quit iCal (and show correct times for group A events) is to just set my timezone to Los Angeles, add my events as if they were in Los Angeles, etc. But I'd rather some way to turn OFF timezone support without all of my events moving.

Any ideas?

What time is it in Indiana?

jasondigitized — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:31:26 -0800

I would like to write a javascript function that takes the current time and adjusts it based on the timezone of any of our customers around the world. "Easy enough if I know the timezone" I thought......until I started to think about daylight savings time and all of its variations around the world. What is the best way to tackle this? Is there a handy script out there to do this, or should I be looking to call a webservice? I still don't know what time it is in Indiana.

At least I know where the big hand is...

tkolstee — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:43:10 -0800

If you live or work near a time zone line, how is life different for you and what difficulties have you run into? A more specific sub-question involving cell phones included... This started as a discussion with my boss. We were talking about cell phones picking up the local time from the network, and were wondering how this was handled near the time zone borders. Does your phone show a different local time throughout the day as you move from place to place and associate with different towers? How does that affect you when, say, your free night minutes start at 9pm?

Other than cell phones, I'm also curious about any other "special" things people have to account for when near these borders. Do you get used to keeping track of which side of the line you're on, and it becomes routine?

What time is it on an airplane?

Jeff Howard — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 18:28:48 -0800

Travelling across a time zone by air is ambiguous. It's hard to tell exactly when it happens. When travelling across time zones by air, when does the time change? Especially across multiple zones. I've noticed that I never see or hear a reference to the time while onboard. For instance, a movie might start at "fifteen minutes after takeoff," but not at 4:45pm. It seems like there are two options. One is that the airplane adopts the original timezone and carries it across timezones until touchdown. On the other hand, it also makes sense to immediately adopt the destination time zone upon takeoff, so as to be able to better calculate when the plane will land.

Both of these are consistent with the practice of flight attendants making a point of announcing the local time only upon landing. They also mean that it's possible to completely skip a timezone. So my question is, which model is correct? Can anyone point to examples of absolute versus relative references to time (other than duration) onboard an airplane?

Help with a world time clock?

elliot100 — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 09:16:55 -0800

World clocks. I am trying to put together a clock application and can't work out how to discern the actual time is in each city. The time zone part is easy, but a great many countries (most?) use seasonal time adjustments. I have an online world clock on my screen and a physical one hanging above my head. How do they work?