ciamos

Unlike UTC that stays constant across the globe human time varies a lot. We long ago carved the globe up into 24 time zones so that - more or less - the sun will be overhead at noon in each zone.

Nothing difficult about that you might say. But then people start to get involved, and everything gets a whole lot messier. Neat straight line time-zone boundaries are shifted a bit to avoid slicing countries in half; the time itself is shifted to allow for lighter evenings in the summer (or lighter mornings in the winter if you like); regions are joined up or separated and we end up with a whole bunch of time-zones.

You really don't want to know the complications unless you have to: did you know that India is UTC+5h30 or that Arizona doesn't have Daylight Saving Time. Where I live in western France is on the standard European UTC+1 designed for countries far to our east so we get very light evenings!

You know - I guess, that Windows shows a little clock of it's own down at the bottom right corner of your screen. But, it's not obviously useful when you want to compare timezones. I prefer to use a separate clock that's capable of showing more than one time-zone - like those you sometimes see in banks and travel agents. I've tried several over the years and my current favourite is a free download from Symmetricon called SymmTime.

SymmTime lets me keep a little row of clocks tucked away in one corner of my screen (you can have any number from 1 to 30 if you like). They all tick neatly in sync and show me the time from New Zealand, across North America to London and her in France. Usually, just a glance is enough to tell me what I want to know.

Here's how SymmTime looks on my desktop - but it doesn't have to look like this, each of the article illustrations in this series on time (the square ones near the title) is from SymmTime.

UTC is what used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It stands for Universal Co-ordinated Time - yes, I know that would be UCT but the French and English speakers couldn't choose between UCT and TUC so we got UTC.

UTC is the international time standard and these days pretty much all other time is linked into UTC one way or another. Have you ever wondered how the clock in your computer keept time? Most likely it is getting time signals from the Internet. There are a whole bunch of specialised computers out there that do nothing but respond to requests for time signals. Usually Windows is set to do this for you automatically

UTC ticks over regularly and constantly, 24/7 365 days a year. It doesn't know anything about Daylight Saving, Summer Time or about time-zones. (Though actually it's the same as UK winter time.)

Question: I'm wondering,
1. What about PHPNuke? I believe it's called
2. Are there other, all in one solutions

This is a compilation of replies from the EuroCoach list in 2003 about how to get paid by clients in other countries. Mostly still valid today.

 Bob Janes, 2007