Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
Caldarale, Charles R wrote: From: André Warnier [mailto:a...@ice-sa.com] Subject: Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ? Not reliably. For example, it says my desktop PC is in Pennsylvania, when it's really in Minnesota (but then I'm actually in Ontario right now :-). What you'll really get back is the registered location of the ISP or company, not necessarily that of the actual client. Well, in my case, when I am in Germany my ISP is a big nation-wide one (the one which ATT was just forbidden to marry the daughter of), but the location I provided earlier was pretty accurate (say within 10 Km or so, good enough for a MIRV ICBM anyway). (What I mean to say is that it is obviously much finer than the location of the ISP's headquarters, which in this case are 500 Km away). I guess it depends really on what the actual purpose is in this case. If it is just to make the website look more friendly, it may be good enough and avoid a lot of extra work and complications. As Konstantin points out separately, if you are going to use the local timezone for anything serious, then you could get yourself into a lot of complications. And who says the users are going to go though the trouble of selecting the right zone anyway ? and what if the user indeed spends his time traveling and making the life of the site designer difficult, like you above ? And what about users who are connecting first to their corporation's VPN from wherever they are, and of which all subsequent accesses appear to come from that corporation's firewall. Oh wait, that was an argument against using GeoIP, wasn't it ? - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 André, On 12/21/11 2:24 PM, André Warnier wrote: Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ? (Saves your conumdrum about how to display the choices) http://www.geoip.co.uk/ Looks pretty accurate for me : IP Address: 84.158.10.215 Country: Germany Country code: DE Region: 01 Longitude: 48.4667 Latitude: 8.9333 So, now I get to try to figure out how to map your lat/long into a Time Zone? Also, your preferred time zone isn't always where you actually are. - -chris Status: Clear Threat Level: 0 I have not looked further, but I would not be utterly surprised if there existed already some Java servlet filter or so to get the client's timezone automatically, and stuff it into some value which you can grab. I Googled-around a bit and didn't find much. - -chris -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7zp/gACgkQ9CaO5/Lv0PDDywCfamupPY93UwlDNkZGm5nOWqA/ aFoAoKfG+29twl6mWSW71jrrbNHHMGJm =5PcB -END PGP SIGNATURE- - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 André, On 12/22/11 3:51 PM, André Warnier wrote: As Konstantin points out separately, if you are going to use the local timezone for anything serious, then you could get yourself into a lot of complications. No, he's just saying once a timezone, always a timezone. And who says the users are going to go though the trouble of selecting the right zone anyway? Mine are. We have had complaints that all our timestamps are in New York time. Actually, the real complaint was that we were displaying timestamps without a time zone /at all/ and we had to tell them that everything was in America/New_York. Since I had to do a crapload of work just to get EST or EDT displayed after our timestamps (because we convert from java.util.Date - - xs:dateTime - on-screen format... it's a horrible mess of poorly-compatible APIs, etc.), I figured I may as well make it user-selectable. Now that it's user-selectable, we may as well allow the user to, well, select it. :) and what if the user indeed spends his time traveling and making the life of the site designer difficult, like you above ? And what about users who are connecting first to their corporation's VPN from wherever they are, and of which all subsequent accesses appear to come from that corporation's firewall. They can set their time zone to anything they want. And they can change it. Or they can leave everything set to the default (America/New_York). Oh wait, that was an argument against using GeoIP, wasn't it ? :) - -chris -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7zqXsACgkQ9CaO5/Lv0PAn7wCgn9Iug0qZbqsJUdc0UUp507xL pyIAn3s0y+KaCTE1Hlefj8ox/rvTsPWe =Ofqv -END PGP SIGNATURE- - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
[OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 All, We're getting to the point in our project where allowing users to identify their own time zone so we can display adjusted timestamps is something we can no longer do without. I'm trying to figure out how to display a list of time zones in a drop-down list for users to pick. Java's TimeZone class provides a static method, getAvailableIDs, that returns the huge list of time zones that the current JVM knows about. Then, I can use this list to fetch each TimeZone object by id and shove them into a list to display on the screen. So far, so good. To display, I have two options: use the ID which is usually of the form America/New_York or use the display name which varies wildly from zone to zone. Here's an example of a few time zones that get returned from my JVM (Oracle Java 1.6.0_26-b03 on a Debian Squeeze system): ID Display Name (English) ACTCentral Standard Time (Northern Territory) AETEastern Standard Time (New South Wales) AGTArgentine Time ARTEastern European Time ASTAlaska Standard Time Africa/Abidjan Greenwich Mean Time Africa/Accra Ghana Mean Time ... America/ChicagoCentral Standard Time ... CSTCentral Standard Time ... Already, I can see a few problems: 1. Time zones are repeated with different IDs. That might not be such a big deal, since some people might like to look for CST and others might be looking for America/Chicago. But including both requires the list to be very long. 2. If I go with display name instead of id, then I have to decide which id to use when there are many choices. For instance, Greenwich Mean Time gets used a lot, but has lots of ids. If I arbitrarily choose Africa/Abidjan as the id to use for that label, then everyone who expected GMT might suddenly find their timestamps off if the Abidjanese people decide in the future to abandon GMT. 3. You can't see it, but the ids are not localized. The display name is available for many languages directly from the JVM but not the id. That means that the nice labels like America/Chicago will always have those labels, regardless of the user's display language. Not ideal. 4. We (the US) are currently not in DST, so CST is displayed and not CDT. I checked, and it looks like there is no CDT time zone so during DST it will still say CST which probably nobody but me will notice. I feel like I've got a Catch-22, here: despite the wealth of information provided by the JVM, I think I might still have to just have a giant list of supported time zones and hand-localize them, especially if I want to have America/New York-style labels. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks, - -chris -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk7yDM8ACgkQ9CaO5/Lv0PBwdwCfbI1xwryuMOWpP+pf+CAGtmTZ vIQAn2IyFrAz17a45C9Yr0L+jTzCenn7 =I5AZ -END PGP SIGNATURE- - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
Christopher Schultz wrote: ... I feel like I've got a Catch-22, here: despite the wealth of information provided by the JVM, I think I might still have to just have a giant list of supported time zones and hand-localize them, especially if I want to have America/New York-style labels. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ? (Saves your conumdrum about how to display the choices) http://www.geoip.co.uk/ Looks pretty accurate for me : IP Address: 84.158.10.215 Country: Germany Country code: DE Region: 01 Longitude: 48.4667 Latitude: 8.9333 Status: Clear Threat Level: 0 I have not looked further, but I would not be utterly surprised if there existed already some Java servlet filter or so to get the client's timezone automatically, and stuff it into some value which you can grab. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 11:24 AM, André Warnier a...@ice-sa.com wrote: Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ? You still need to offer a manual selection option, because it's just not always accurate. Once I was investigating geo-location services while on the road to a show (my wife driving, me working using a Verizon MiFi hotspot). At one point I was identified by (I think) GeoIP as being somewhere in New Jersey, while actually in the middle of Utah on US80 -- that's 2 time zones away :-) Speaking to the original problem: I agree that for user-friendliness, you might have to bite the bullet and hand-tailor the dropdown list; however, to minimize the size *as displayed*, could you include a JavaScript routine to examine the client time and restrict the list to the subset that would match that time? There's only so many TZs where it's currently e.g. 12:17pm :-) Just a thought. -- Hassan Schroeder hassan.schroe...@gmail.com http://about.me/hassanschroeder twitter: @hassan - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
RE: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
From: André Warnier [mailto:a...@ice-sa.com] Subject: Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences Can you not use GeoIP to find out where a user is connecting from, and select his time zone automatically for him/her ? Not reliably. For example, it says my desktop PC is in Pennsylvania, when it's really in Minnesota (but then I'm actually in Ontario right now :-). What you'll really get back is the registered location of the ISP or company, not necessarily that of the actual client. - Chuck THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-mail and its attachments from all computers.
Re: [OT] Displaying Time Zones for user preferences
2011/12/21 Christopher Schultz ch...@christopherschultz.net: We're getting to the point in our project where allowing users to identify their own time zone so we can display adjusted timestamps is something we can no longer do without. I'm trying to figure out how to display a list of time zones in a drop-down list for users to pick. Java's TimeZone class provides a static method, getAvailableIDs, that returns the huge list of time zones that the current JVM knows about. Then, I can use this list to fetch each TimeZone object by id and shove them into a list to display on the screen. So far, so good. To display, I have two options: use the ID which is usually of the form America/New_York or use the display name which varies wildly from zone to zone. Here's an example of a few time zones that get returned from my JVM (Oracle Java 1.6.0_26-b03 on a Debian Squeeze system): ID Display Name (English) ACT Central Standard Time (Northern Territory) AET Eastern Standard Time (New South Wales) AGT Argentine Time ART Eastern European Time AST Alaska Standard Time Africa/Abidjan Greenwich Mean Time Africa/Accra Ghana Mean Time ... America/Chicago Central Standard Time ... CST Central Standard Time ... Already, I can see a few problems: 1. Time zones are repeated with different IDs. That might not be such a big deal, since some people might like to look for CST and others might be looking for America/Chicago. But including both requires the list to be very long. 2. If I go with display name instead of id, then I have to decide which id to use when there are many choices. For instance, Greenwich Mean Time gets used a lot, but has lots of ids. If I arbitrarily choose Africa/Abidjan as the id to use for that label, then everyone who expected GMT might suddenly find their timestamps off if the Abidjanese people decide in the future to abandon GMT. 3. You can't see it, but the ids are not localized. The display name is available for many languages directly from the JVM but not the id. That means that the nice labels like America/Chicago will always have those labels, regardless of the user's display language. Not ideal. 4. We (the US) are currently not in DST, so CST is displayed and not CDT. I checked, and it looks like there is no CDT time zone so during DST it will still say CST which probably nobody but me will notice. I feel like I've got a Catch-22, here: despite the wealth of information provided by the JVM, I think I might still have to just have a giant list of supported time zones and hand-localize them, especially if I want to have America/New York-style labels. Does anyone have any suggestions? IIRC when I installed Fedora on my VM recently it displayed a zoomable map of Earth surface, allowing me to select the town where I live (and thus the time zone). I think you cannot omit entries from the list. You can do some dynamic filtering based on country or continent (that user types in). The time zone selection is tricky because you select not only current time shift value, but all previous time shift rules for this territory. So if small city was in Area A but in year xx it was administratively moved to Area B with different time shift rules, it makes this small city a separate time zone with its own historical record. (Maybe I am wrong, but that is what I think it is). If your application is only concerned with the current time then your timezone selection might be a bit more simple than that. Best regards, Konstantin Kolinko - To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
