Contributing Advent 21: Timezone database
Timezones have always been a pain, and Daylight Saving(s) time does not make it a lot easier. Then of course you have governments that decide to change the rules. Often that is done nicely in advance, but once in a while the rule changes are announced at the absolutely last moment, or, sometimes even after the new rules have come into effect. To track the craziness, have a look at Time Zone News, and this image to see how many different rules there are!
The changes to rules, and the changes to them are tracked by a group of volunteers that maintain the Olson TZ Database, named after the now retired David Arthur Olson. Every so often a new release is made through IANA's website. The last change happened last Tuesday, and hopefully this is the last release of this year.
The Olson TZ Database is used by a whole lot of software stacks, for example by almost every Unix system, but there are also implementations for languages. There is Yoda time for Java, and PHP's DateTime support also uses the Olson database to be able to calculate the correct local time.
Because the PHP release cycle can not keep up with the releases of the Olson database, you can update the rule set in PHP by installing newer versions of the timezonedb PECL extension, which closely follows releases of the Olson database.
As I am the maintainer of PHP's DateTime support, I am also responsible for keeping the database, and it's accompanying PECL extension up-to-date. With the latest release available through the PECL extension, websites such as http://time.is can then show you the latest, and correct, local time.
Comments
You linked "Yoda time"[sic!] to PHP's datetime URL. Did you mean http://www.joda.org/joda-time/ ...?
Indeed, I've fixed it!
Life Line
TIL that Kingfishers can hover just like hummingbird. I'll hopefully have some reasonable shots after I've gone through my nearly thousand shots today...
I hiked 9.8km in 3h40m47s
Updated a restaurant
Updated a vacant business
I walked 7.1km in 1h16m56s
I walked 3.9km in 45m56s
I walked 1.1km in 10m47s
I think this was my favourite photo of the set that I took. It's not at maximum coverage, but it does have a sun spot group (4508) just on the cusp of the terminator.
#eclipse #eclipse2026 #SolarEclipse #London #Astronomy #AstroPhotography #Photography
No totality here in London, but still had a great evening out in the local park and taking some snaps.
I did have a nice Solar Filter that I made for my lens, and had many conversations with people from different backgrounds. Kids loves to look through my filter after I was done (ran out of battery power).
More photos later...
#london #eclipse2026 #eclipse #photography
I walked 0.9km in 9m28s
I walked 1.2km in 19m05s
Merged pull request #1100
Fixed issue #2267: Application slow when debugger is not listening on…
I walked 4.7km in 48m18s
I walked 3.0km in 1h10m24s
Is there somebody who runs PHP on native windows (with Xdebug) and can run a simple script for me?
It must be in a file (`test.php`):
```
<?php
echo microtime(true), "\n";
xdebug_connect_to_client();
echo microtime(true), "\n";
```And run like:
php -dxdebug.log_level=11 -dxdebug.log=c:\temp\xdebug-i.log -dxdebug.client_host=localhost -dxdebug.client_port=9111 -dxdebug.mode=debug c:\temp\test.php
With the port 9111 not open.
Would love to see the output and log file (in a DM).
I walked 5.5km in 55m06s
@harry_wood This is this list of 100 Go-mistakes that I was talking about: https://100go.co/
Updated a crossing
I walked 2.1km in 20m08s
Enjoying my afternoon and evening out at Lords for some cricket!
I walked 3.2km in 38m54s
I walked 9.1km in 1h34m28s
Updated a gate
Updated a bakery shop
Shortlink
This article has a short URL available: https://drck.me/adv1321-afg