Time zone changes from version 2005o1 to 2006b1: Date : Sunday March 19, 2006 File : 2006b1.txt World Time Explorer is going shareware! That is probably not good news for the current users, but recent changes have made me take this decision. There was some influence from the recent birth of my twin babies Majken (girl) and Magnus (boy) the 16.th. of december 2005. But more important for my decision was that my work CIMMYT decided that they wouldn't host WTE anymore, so I have had to buy a home for WTE in Homestead.com, which is the limit for me, I can distribute software for free when it doesn't cost me anything personally, but I can't also pay the hosting and the bandwidth. WTE will be shareware with a price of $15, and a 30-day Trial. However, it will not happen until I'm completely ready with the program, which probably means in a month or so. The biggest change and improved functionality is to implement accurate historic data since approximately 1850. The tz database claims to be accurate since 1970, and they have only appended timezones necessary to show all differences from 1970. But in all probability there are a lot of the 4814 cities that are quite accurate right back from 1850, using the coming World Time Explorer 2.0, which has not been released yet. The historic data handling works nicely, it's the shareware part that is the time-consuming part to implement at this point. For all locations, there was a time when they used solar noon to adjust clocks, so they didn't use an offset from GMT as today. For these there is calculated an average time that covers the capital of the country, but for all other cities in the country, the time will be wrong to a smaller or larger degree. I have made some development trying to give a more meaningful error message if the program aborts with a Visual Basic error (which of course really originates from the author), because recently I was informed from a software server that WTE would abort consistently in Windows 2000 with run-time error 13, I will have to investigate that. If you have any information about this, please drop me an e-mail on support@worldtimeexplorer.com. The new home page is http://www.worldtimeexplorer.com/index.html I'm planning to give away a free license of WTE if you can find any error in the data, either for current time zone information, or for historic data. This is of course to incourage users to report data errors if they find some, but also shows that I trust in my data, even the historic data. So stay tuned! TIMEZONE DATA CHANGES * The state of Indiana will begin following DST this year - or at least most parts of it. Vincennes and Petersburg will follow Evansville on GMT-6 (with DST) while most of Indianapolis will now be GMT-5 (with DST). I am considering to include small towns that are different in WTE, but have not decided to do so yet. * US is implementing different DST rules next year! An interesting topic, but it doesn't affect DST of this year. They will add 3 weeks of DST to the DST start (Second Sunday of March instead of First Sunday of April) and they will add 1 week to the DST end (First Sunday of November instead of Last Sunday of October). I think Microsoft will finally have to move the b... concerning timezones, and implement a patch for all US citizens, but that will perhaps be taken care of via WindowsUpdate.com? As usual there might be exceptions, Arizona will surely not implement DST at all, some states might decide to use the old DST rules (impractical) or abandon DST, we will see. For my "own" country Mexico I have tried to get information about this, but in the end it is Congress that will have to decide on this, and I don't think they have begun decision making yet. Mexico is the biggest country together with Canada to use US-style DST, and Canada is already far ahead in decision making so that it is clear most canadian states will follow troop with US. There is no news yet on smaller places that are following US-style DST like Bahamas, Bermuda, Greenland (Thule Pituffik air base) and Saint Pierre and Miquelon. * Australia has decided to leave on DST for another week, to allow for non-disturbance of the 2006 Commonwealth games, so all places that were supposed to leave DST on Last Sunday of March, will do this on the First Sunday of April. Everything points to that they will revert to the old rule in 2007, and leave DST on Last Sunday of March, but we will see about that. The affected cities or states in WTE are Canberra, Lord Howe Island, New South Wales, Adelaide, Tasmania and Victoria. * Three countries surprisingly entered DST last year, but they seem to refrain from continuing this year: Nicaragua, Haiti and Tunisia. Of course we will put a close watch on them to see if they decide to continue in the last minute, but I doubt it. * Concerning Uruguay I'm not sure what will happen, as they left DST a week ago, and until autumn will decide if they follow DST again. They left DST on 12.th of March 2006 at 2:00, which was a different date than the old information in WTE from November 2005 which would have it leave DST Last Sunday of March at 2:00. So Uruguay already left DST a week ago, the only change in this patch that surpassed the date it happened. I think I will be more careful when WTE goes shareware! * Cuba still hasn't made it official that they will leave their 2 years DST and go back to GMT-5, but for the moment I put them to follow the tz database, to leave DST Last Sunday of October. Old Rule (Aug-2004 to Oct-2006): GMT-4 all year round New Rule (2006) on GMT-5: starts : 1.st. of January at 0:00 ends : Last Sunday of October at 0:00 * Israel usually implements DST on different dates in our calendar each year (not considering the hebrew calendar, which I don't know). Also this year: Old Rule (2005): starts: First Friday on/after 26.th. of March at 2:00 ends: 9.th. of October 2005 at 2:00 New Rule (2006): starts: First Friday on/after 26.th. of March at 2:00 (2006-03-31) ends: 1.st. of October 2006 at 2:00 * New Brunswick starts and ends DST not on the full hour, but one minute later, just like Newfoundland, at 00:01:00. * A number of minor changes: Calcutta was renamed to Kolkata (Calcutta) following official name, Tai o Hae is the capital of Marquesas Islands, Grand Turk is the main island of Turks and Caicos Islands, but the capital is Cockburn Town, Edinburgh *is* the capital of Tristan da Cunha Island (it wasn't before in WTE). * In Montserrat, the city Plymouth was for a long time capital, until the volcanic eruptions wiped the city out. The new capital seems to be Brades, although I have not found an official page of Montserrat to confirm this. But there is (some) confirmation on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montserrat Regards, Jesper Nørgaard Welen GMT = Greenwich Mean Time DST = Daylight Saving Time WTE = World Time Explorer World Time Explorer 1.8: http://www.worldtimeexplorer.com/index.html e-mail: support@worldtimeexplorer.com TZ Database: http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub