FW: Romance Time (forwarded with permission)

[Alex LIVINGSTON]

At 18:49 +0200 2000-06-29, Antoine Leca wrote:
>> > From: Tim Stratford [SMTP:TStratford at oneworldsoftware.com]
>> > Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2000 10:44 AM
>> > To:   'ado at elsie.nci.nih.gov'
>> > Subject:      One quick question please....
>> >
>> > Dear Arthur David Olson,
>> >       Today I was doing research concerning a time zone or aspect of time
>> > called Romance Time.  The research is for one of our software customers
>> > and we cannot find much pertaining to the subject at all.  Is their some
>> > information which you could supply me about the subject or some resources
>> > which I could further research?  Thank you very much for your time and
>> > cooperation.
>
>'Romance' is the name used for Europe/Paris and Europe/Madrid
>areas in the Windows time zone database.
>
>
>Hope it helps,
>
>Antoine

I'm sure someone'll tell me if this is initiating a discussion that is not
relevant to the tz mailing list, but it involves keeping track of time on
computers...

I'm not a Windows afficionado, and I doubt I'll ever be, but the
installation where I work now consists mostly of machines running one
version of Windows or another (at this stage mostly Windows NT 4).

As southeastern Australia (where I am) is starting daylight saving
considerably earlier this year than hitherto, I was concerned to know how
all our Windows boxes (especially our servers) could be made to behave
civilly in this circumstance. I asked a colleage this week about whether a
suitable patch or update from Microsoft (for NT) was possible, but he said
only service packs, which require bringing down the machine, were issued.
The only way we could see of getting around the problem was by setting the
machines' time zone to "(GMT +11:00) Magadan, Solomon Is., New Caledonia"
until the date when NT thinks daylight saving starts in our zone ("...
Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne", from memory). Your (Antoine's) mention of
"the Windows time zone database" makes me wonder whether that could be
edited instead.

I'd also be interested to know if anyone's worked out how to patch Mac OS's
Date & Time control panel (presumably its 'cty#' resource) to effect the
same adjustment.

Thanks for your attention.

--Alex

_______________
Alex LIVINGSTON
Macintosh and Lotus Notes Support / Information Technology (IT)
Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM)
UNSW SYDNEY NSW 2052 / Australia

Facsimile: +61 2 9931-9349 / Telephone: +61 2 9931-9264
Time     : UTC+11---[last Mar. Sun.---UTC+10---[last Aug. Sun.---UTC+11---

At midday today, Friday, June 30,
  time since epoch (1-1-1 at 00:00:00) is
    730300.5 days = 1999.49485616 average Gregorian years
  time until 3rd millennium, 21st century, 201st decade, 2001st year is
    184.5 days = .50514384 average Gregorian years