New Zealand/Mac OS X daylight saving conundrum: workaround

As noted by Apple Knowledge Base document #306486, in the second half of 2007, New Zealand will begin 27 weeks of Daylight Saving Time. "This means that clocks will be set forward to Daylight Saving time on Sunday 30-September-2007, instead of on the first Sunday in October as in previous years." This will cause Mac OS X systems in New Zealand to display the wrong time after September 30th.

Apple offers a manual workaround that must be performed after September 30th, as follows:

• From Date & Time in System Preferences, deselect "Set Date & Time automatically"
• Manually set the correct time.
• CClick Save.
• On 07-October-2007, reselect 'Set Date & Time automatically' or manually set the correct time again.

Meanwhile, a user has created a third-party software solution that updates /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Auckland with the current rules, re-links /usr/share/zoneinfo/NZ to that, updates /usr/share/icu/icudt32b.dat, and updates /usr/share/icu/icudt32l.dat if it exists (it doesn't exist on Mac OS X Server PPC). The author writes:

"It will only update if any of the current files have a modification date older than July 18th. This update has been tested with Mac OS X 10.4.10 on PowerPC and Intel, and Mac OS X Server PowerPC. This update also works on Mac OS X 10.4.9, but if you upgrade to 10.4.10 you will need to reapply the update. I definitely don't expect it to work on 10.4.8 or earlier. This update should be obsoleted by Mac OS X 10.4.11 when it is released."

The application is available as a 33KB download.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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