10 items tagged “timezones”
2023
It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated (via) Miguel Grinberg explains the deprecation of datetime.utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() in Python 3.12, since they return naive datetime objects which cause all sorts of follow-on problems.
The replacement idiom is datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) # 18th November 2023, 7:24 pm
2022
Benjamin “Zags” Zagorsky: Handling Timezones in Python. The talks from PyCon US have started appearing on YouTube. I found this one really useful for shoring up my Python timezone knowledge: It reminds that if your code calls datetime.now(), datetime.utcnow() or date.today(), you have timezone bugs—you’ve been working with ambiguous representations of instances in time that could span a 26 hour interval from UTC-12 to UTC+14. date.today() represents a 24 hour period and hence is prone to timezone surprises as well. My code has a lot of timezone bugs! # 26th May 2022, 3:40 am
2021
Temporal: getting started with JavaScript’s new date time API. Axel Rauschmayer explores the new proposed API for handling dates, times and timezones in JavaScript., which is under development by Ecma TC39 at the moment (and made available as a Polyfill which you are recommended not to run in production since the API is still being figured out). This is a notoriously difficult problem so it’s always interesting to see the latest thinking on how to best address it. # 7th July 2021, 10:29 pm
2018
Big tech warns of ’Japan’s millennium bug’ ahead of Akihito’s abdication (via) Emperor Akihito’s abdication in April 2019 triggers a new era, and the Japanese calendar counts years from the coronation of the current emperor. The era hasn’t changed since 1989 and a great deal of software is unable to handle a change. To make things more complicated... the name of the new era will be announced in late February, but it needs to be represented in unicode as a single new character... and the next version of Unicode (v12) is due out in early March. There may have to be a Unicode 12.1 released shortly afterwards that includes the new codepoint. # 28th July 2018, 2:04 pm
2017
Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, OpenStreetMap and Datasette
Given a latitude and longitude, how can we tell what time zone that point lies within? Here’s how I built a simple JSON API to answer that question, using a combination of data from OpenStreetMap, the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite and my Datasette API tool.
[... 2185 words]2008
django-timezones. Models, form fields and a template filter for dealing with timezones in Django. # 21st August 2008, 11:18 pm
What’s New in Edge Rails: Easier Timezones (via) Time zones can be a nightmare to get right—if this works well it’s going to make a lot of people’s lives a whole bunch easier. # 2nd April 2008, 3:39 pm
2007
calendar.timegm() (via) An “unrelated but handy function” that converts a time.gmtime() in to a corresponding Unix timestamp. I’ve been hand-rolling this one for years; never thought to look in calendar. # 3rd September 2007, 1:54 am
Django vs feedparser on dates. Some useful tips in the comments. I find Python’s timezone stuff endlessly frustrating: I know it can do what I want, but it always takes me a ridiculously long time to figure out the necessary incantations. # 2nd September 2007, 10:17 am
A Zoned Defense. Using JavaScript’s date.getTimezoneOffset() to detect the user’s timezone and stash it in a cookie. # 20th March 2007, 9:51 am