Time passes...

I hadn't realised it had been so long since I posted, almost a month. Gosh.

I've spend quite a bit of time investigating the mess that is worldwide timezones. Particlurly to sort out some of the test failures I found when I went back to fix one of the wxWidgets bug I found furing bug day , which I blogged about earlier. There is nothing particularly blog worthy , I suppose in this except why do all the unices seem to use a nice/etc/localtime file and none of them to provide a way for application to parse it.

I'd like to parse it myself becuase wxWidgets wxDateTime class is 64 bit even on 32bit time_t platformss. Sigh. I suppose I could use zdump search trick to find all the discontiniuities but it seems a bit of hack, and difficult to extend DST rules.

Windows of course does something entirely different. In some ways better, in that you can query the API for any date in our valid range, but it uses entirely different timezone names, and it DST rules are much more simplistic.

We going to move over to using reqeust-tracker at work, unfortunately this is going to a protracted change as RT doesn't have any client or customer managment features, and we are going to want to invoice direct from the RT data. This looks like it going to become a 'project'.

Finally we've been asking by one of our customers say $COMPANYA for the sake of clairty - to set them up email for $COMPANYB which is no externally visible connection to $COMPANYA - but they all want it to appear in togother in outlook. We cant hide the fact that $COMPANYA and $COMPANYB share a mail server but lets hope no-one notices this , we haven't been asked directly about this either. But they would like top reply as from $COMPANYB 's domain to emails to $COMPANYB - outlook can't actually do this if you are using it with exchange server. Apparently by design. THere are people who sell highly priced plugins which are supposed to fix this, but I downloaded the trail edition an tested on my test system anc couldn't make it work. Which probably means more custom outlook development . My favourite.

And I'm not mentioning the fact that if you put a $COMPANYB email address in to the rules wizard, becuase it is associated with $USER it changes to referencee in the rule to $USER and then most wierldly of all goes on to match only that users primary address.