Monday 1st September 2008

Pakistan Daylight Savings Time extended

Daylight savings time in Pakistan, which was initially planned to be in effect till the 31st of August, has been extended for another two months. This means that the clocks will now be reverted back an hour on the 1st of November instead of the 1st of September.

DST hasn't resulted in any noticeable lowering of the overall power consumption (research shows this isn't a significant benefit), but it has had a positive effect on a number of things. It left ample time for outdoor activities after office hours. The extra daylight made it easier to fit in more business meetings and attend various events.

Overall, I've loved the idea of daylight savings time and am happy that it has been extended. However, it has caused some issues with computer systems and gadgets that weren't prepared for it (thankfully, nothing as disastrous as the Y2K bug, which as we all know, wiped out most of humanity ;) ).

There is an ongoing discussion about this on the Telecom Grid Pakistan and has some good suggestions. For Microsoft systems, this link has details on how to deal with the latest change (thanks to Danish for the link).

Earlier, I blogged about updating Ubuntu Linux for DST. This time, I have done it manually by editing the same asia file before running zic. On line 1526, change the end date for Pakistan/2008 from "Sep 1" to "Nov 1" and then run zic asia. To make the change live, copy the correct zone file to /etc/localtime:

cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Karachi /etc/localtime

This update should be available soon for most distros in their respective updates, but this is a quick fix solution that you can use until that happens.

Enjoy another 2 months of extra daylight.

 

Liked this article? Make it popular:

19:15pm


(not displayed)