Microsoft’s DST Fix is a real problem

February 12, 2007 at 11:41 am · Filed under .NET

Dan blogged last night that MSVCRT hasn’t been fixed for the new US daylight savings time (DST) rules that go into effect next month.

Last week, Wayne Citrin posted about a problem with Microsoft’s DST patch for Windows:

There’s a very interesting problem with Microsoft’s DST patch for Windows that you should be aware of, since it can impact date conversion results when mapped date proxies are used.  The patch applies the new rules for whether date and time are daylight savings time without regard to year.  This means that if you ask .NET whether a given DateTime in the past is DST, it will apply the new rules even if the date would have been standard time under the old rules.

Wayne points out that this isn’t really a .NET problem, but an OS issue fixed in Vista.  (and not in XP and presumably Server 2003, and anything before).  

As someone who used to work with lots of timeseries data (and more importantly, conversion in and out of formats that don’t support UTC), I can tell you: properly handling DST can be really hard.  Not rocket science, but hard just the same.

And Microsoft is telling us we can’t trust the tools nor the OS to do this right. 

So you just have to do it yourself — it is easier to fix when Congress enacts some new arbitrary rule.

Tags: DST, Microsoft, UTC, Vista, XP

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Blog changes

February 12, 2007 at 9:29 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

I published a few changes to my blog template today. 

1. Upgraded to WordPress 2.1.
2. Added some plugins:
   1. Feedburner Feed Replacement
   2. Feed Locations 
   3. Sidebar Widgets
   4. Ultimate Tag Warrior Widget
3. Whole new template with dual floating sidebars (from the image on the left to the one on the right).

This post is mostly for me so I can remember when I have made a change, but comments are welcome.

Update: I can see that the sidebar padding is wrong in Firefox, but looks perfect in IE.  Why, why, why do we still have to deal with these incompatibilities?  Argh.

Tags: blog, blogging, Wordpress

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An Open Letter to Robert Scoble

February 8, 2007 at 10:57 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Robert Scoble often writes about his growing inbox.  Here is a letter to him with my 2 cents.

Dear Robert,

I would email this to you, but your distaste for your growing inbox is becoming legendary. 

That said, you always reply to my emails and are easy to reach on the phone.  So, why an open letter?  Because we are both fans of open communication.  Plus I thought calling you out would be more fun. 

So, back to your growing inbox.  I can only guess that you often find that you miss opportunities by not getting to your email.  And, good intentions aside, you don’t get back to people as quickly as you would like.

So, here is some free advice:

Get a personal assistant.

Now, I don’t mean a personal digital assistant.  Those are just toys (um, I mean important professional tools) and I’m sure you have several.  I mean an actual person who can do the following for you:

• Keep your calendar;
• schedule your speaking engagements;
• schedule the ScobleShow and your involvement with other PodTech programs;
• and, of course, read your emails, perform triage, and respond to them.

This might seem like a luxury; I know you work for a startup not for Microsoft.  But, I’ll bet people are trying to connect with you now more than ever before.

You probably don’t need a full time assistant, but could share one with the other talent / executives at PodTech.  I also hear that you can outsource this role internationally (or get a partial one).

Sure an assistant would take some getting used to.  Someone else reading your mail?  Sure, it sounds distasteful, but my bet is it would make your life easier and fast.

What do you think?

P.S. Should I have written this letter to John Furrier instead?

Public disclaimer: Robert owes me an email. 

Tags: John-Furrier, PodTech, Robert-Scoble

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ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Source Code Released

February 6, 2007 at 1:47 pm · Filed under .NET

This is certainly cool.  I’m stoked about the ASP.NET AJAX release in general, but the source code too?  Even better.

From Scott Guthrie’s blog:

The client-side ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript library (which we also call the “Microsoft AJAX Library”) is being released under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL).  This grants developers the right to freely customize/modify the library, as well as to redistribute the derivative versions of the JavaScript library for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. 

. . .

The code for the server-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 implementation was released this morning.  You can download it here.  It is being released under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). 

. . .

You can also obviously download (and modify) the source code for the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.  It is built as a collaborative CodePlex Project that both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers contribute code and work on together.

Thanks, Scott!

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