MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2006-07

Posted on 2006-07-30 19:30:06, modified on 2006-07-30 19:39:55
Tags: Broken software, Zope, Plone, Python

I don't know if it is Zopes problem, I don't know if it is Plones problem, but I do know that it was my problem. The problem description was simple: When entering events in plone, the time always jumped back about 10 or 12 hours. Editing these events made it jump back further...

The problem at the end was related to the way the functions in DateTime.py interpret the EST returned as the timezone. For example, this is the output of date(1):

[~] edwin@k7>TZ=Australia/Sydney date
Sun Jul 30 19:33:36 EST 2006
[~] edwin@k7>TZ=EST date
Sun Jul 30 04:33:30 EST 2006

So despite that the date function returns the Australian EST, the timezone EST reverts back to the US version.

And now the gory details on how to resolve this: Search for the file DateTime.py (/usr/local/www/Zope/lib/python/DateTime/DateTime.py on my machine), search for the definition of the array _zmap and in there, search of the keypair 'est':'US/Eastern'. Replace the est at the beginning to something else (I made it eest), then restart the Zope daemon et voila.

Posted on 2006-07-10 23:21:45, modified on 2006-08-08 13:07:30
Tags: Broken software

A customer called today, wondering why his Thomson Lawbook Online didn't work on his MacOS/X machine. It didn't work on Safari, nor on Mozilla and neither on Firefox.

Thomson Support didn't really show their cluefullness: Yes, it has Java installed. No, it's not a network problem. No, Internet Explorer for the Mac has been phased out years ago.

Now I do like the simplicity of Mac, but it doesn't really make debugging easier. Luckely, searching for "java preferences" showed me three applications with which I could display the JDK Consoles.

They showed this:

JTOC::init
java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "142_09"
        at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString (NumberFormatException.java:48)
        at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:477)
        at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:518)
        at JTOC.setBrowserInfo(JTOC.java:577)
        at JTOC.init(JTOC.java:224)
        at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(AppletPanel.java:354)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:552)

Note It's now halfway August, and Thomson Online hasn't come back to me with anything else "Can you please make sure he has the latest JDK installed."