It rather redefines schadenfreude, doesn't it? The new pan-Christian party cooked up by Gordon Copeland and the fun-loving guys from Destiny has emerged not so much half-baked as a big sloppy mess of batter.
The Fundy Post is passing the popcorn, Colin Espiner had time to come up with a delightful name for the new party -- Destiny's Child -- and Scoop's Lyndon Hood reports that God is yet to decide whether he'll vote for any new party. Although frankly, I'm not sure whether any of them surpass the comedic value of Bishop Brian's press release.
Meanwhile, there are ructions within my own faith, the Cult of Macintosh.
At 2.00am on Sunday September 30, New Zealand Daylight Saving Time will begin -- a week earlier than has previously been the case. And therein lies the problem. It's looking very much like Macs won't be there.
Although a patch to take account of the new date has been filed as a feature request with Apple for at least six months, Cupertino has given no sign it recognises the deadline.
Apple could still post the MacOS X 10.4.11 update, which contains the new rules (as do the test builds of 10.5, aka Leopard), but there's no sign that will appear before Sunday week. Even if it does, that doesn't give users a lot of time to act -- and it's no use at all to the people still running 10.3.x versions.
So what happens if 2am Sunday week arrives without a patch? In most cases it will probably simply be an irritation. Rather than setting a time zone, you'll have to manually adjust the time on your computer. As a result, the computer will miscalculate current times for everywhere else in the world; email you send will misreport the time; and timestamps on files will be out by an hour even after you are able to eventually set the proper time zone. But there may be more serious impacts on the kind of non-consumer applications where Apple should be looking to emphasise its credibility.
The local developers don't have a lot of faith, judging by this excerpt from an email discussion on the matter:
I would like to think someone at Apple has decreed that 10.4.11 must ship by September 22nd at the latest, but even if that is the case, based on past experience I wouldn't be surprised if they got the deadline completely wrong because of one of the following:
* They confused it with daylight savings ending in the US on November 4th.
* They don't think we need an update until early next year as daylight savings doesn't start this time of year in the northern hemisphere, and they don't realize there is a difference between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.
* They don't think we need an update until early next year as daylight savings doesn't start this time of year in the northern hemisphere, and they think New Zealand is somewhere in Europe.
* They get the time zone difference wrong and think New Zealand is a day behind the US rather than a day ahead and don't ship it until the 24th NZ time.
I would have much preferred that they just shipped a daylight savings update a month ago. We are going to have to embrace 10.4.11 warts and all just to get an easy to install daylight savings update, I just hope it has less warts than 10.4.10 and no significant new warts.
The only solutions I've seen so far involve mucking about in the Terminal in ways I'm not sure I want to do, but if you're confident with that, you can email me and I'll hook you up with some instructions.
And, yes, Microsoft already has this one covered.
You may commence your schadenfreude now.
PS: It occurred to me in the middle of the night last night that there's a a better way of doing the weekly giveaways from Whisky Galore, the sponsor of Some Foreign Field, our Rugby World Cup blog. Instead of awarding the prize to the author of the best comment, I'm going to give it to the person who can give me the best lines for the Whisky Galore ads. I'll need no more than 12 words to run across two frames. Something about the Scots would be handy this week, for obvious reasons. Go and study the ads (on all Public Address pages, but not System) and you'll get the idea. Just post 'em in the discussion.