under the sun

A date with Date, Time, Duration and Timezones Have you ever wondered, when debugging an issue in a globally distributed environment, if the events are out of sequence? Chances are that all of us would have seen it at least once in our professional career. All applications are required to deal with Date, Time and Duration. This is a very complex area, as the rules regarding time-keeping are not widely known and this causes tricky and funny (and sometimes critical ) issues. Adding to this is the additional complexity of Time zones (TZ) and the Daylight Savings! Phew! Let’s refresh our understanding of how Time zones are arrived at. Since a day is 24 hours long, the world may be split into 15 degree wide longitudinal slices (360 degrees/24 hours). Each slice represents one hour. But, life is not so simple. The International Date line creates an additional TZ and a few TZ’s differ by 30 mins /45 mins. If Greenwich (0th meridian) has the current local time as 00...