[Developers] one-off error in freebase?

[Alec Flett]

I can explain this a little better: In the graph we can represent the 
date as 2007, 2007-10, 2007-10-03, etc..technically these dates are UTC.

Unfortunately when this gets loaded into a Javascript object in the 
browser, it gets converted to an absolute time (like Jan 1, 2007 at 
0:00UTC, etc) and when we UTC-adjust that to whatever local timezone 
you're viewing this in, it gets moved to the day before. So users "west" 
of Greenwich see times adjusted down, and users "east" see it adjusted 
up by a few hours.. or maybe it's the other way around.

This is probably a good lesson for any mashup writers - make sure your 
local date/time representation properly handles generalized dates, 
without timezone information. In the graph, all dates/times are really 
meant to be UTC ultimately, but if a time isn't specified, the behavior 
isn't well defined.

We'll have a fix for this on freebase.com for the specific problems 
mentioned below in the next few weeks.

Alec

brendan neutra wrote:
> I believe this is a known issue with our javascript datetime widget. I don't 
> think it's browser specific. I just tried changing my computers time zone to 
> "down under" and reproduced the issue you're describing in IE7. If you view 
> source you can see that the underlying datapoint for dob is "1955".  I think the 
> javascript is trying to adjust for timezone, which would be nice if the datetime 
> were describing when a conference call is starting but no so good in this case 
> (I think it finds 1955 to be ambiguous as a fully qualified point in time). 
> I'll let someone with more understanding of the issue chime in...
>
> Brendan
>
> Kirrily Robert wrote:
>   
>> On 10/2/07, Christoph Pingel <pingel at cognity.de> wrote:
>>     
>>> This is odd. On *all* my Mac browsers (Camino, Firefox, Safari) the date of
>>> birth is 1956, and the end-dates 1980 and 1983.
>>> June 30th will display as July 1st. And so on. No matter if I'm logged in or
>>> not.
>>>       
>> I'm seeing this too on Firefox on Mac.  I think it's relatively
>> recent, though; I was playing with dates on some fields a month or so
>> back and didn't notice anything, but I did notice this off-by-one
>> error yesterday or today, and just thought it was a mis-entry.
>>
>> K.
>>
>>     
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