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The great Polish Sea -or- We forgot Poland!

[png]

Raymond Chen

October 27th, 20060 0

Open up the Date and Time control panel and go to the Time Zones tab.
Notice anything wrong with the world map? Take a close look at
northern Europe.

Depending on what version of Windows you have, you might see a body
of water where Poland should be. Windows 95 didn't have this problem,
but Windows 2000 did. And whether your copy of Windows XP has this
problem depends on precisely what version you have.

Where did the great Polish Sea come from?

This weekend marks the end of Summer Time in Europe, and the answer
has to do with time zones.

Recall that the Windows 95 control panel highlighted your current
time zone on the map. To accomplish this, each time zone was assigned
a different label in the time zone bitmap. To draw the map, the
portions of the world whose label was the same as the selected time
zone were drawn in bright green, and the parts that were different
were drawn in dark green. So far so good.

When the highlighting on the time zone map had to be disabled, all
that happened was that the "color for the selected time zone" was set
to dark green. The code still went through the motions of drawing the
time zone in a "different" color, but since the colors were the same
at the end of the day, the visual effect was that the highlighting
was removed.

To determine which parts of the world are land and which parts are
sea, the time zone map enumerated all the time zones as well as the
labels associated with each time zone. (You can see them in the
registry under "MapID".) In this way, the land masses of the world
gradually emerged from the ocean as the time zones claimed each spot
of land one by one.

The shell team did make one fatal mistake, however, obvious in
retrospect: It assumed that the world's time zones would never
change. But what happens when a country changes its time zone, as
Poland did? At the time Windows 95 was released, Poland was on its
own custom time zone, which Windows 95 called "Warsaw Standard Time/
Warsaw Daylight Time", but it didn't stay that way for long. Just
within Windows 95 and Windows 98, Poland's time zone went by the
following names:

  * Windows 95: (GMT+01:00) Warsaw
  * Windows 95: (GMT+01:00) Lisbon, Warsaw
  * Windows 98: (GMT+01:00) Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague,
    Warsaw
  * Windows 98: (GMT+01:00) Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofija, Warsaw, Zagreb

And that's not counting the changes that were made in Windows NT,
Windows 2000 or Windows XP or their service packs. It's not that
Poland's time zone actually changed that many times. Rather, the way
it was grouped with its neighbors changed. I don't know why all these
changes were made, but I suspect political issues played a major
role.

As a result of all this realignment, the "Warsaw Standard Time" time
zone disappeared, and with it, its associated land mass.
Consequently, the land corresponding to Poland remained underwater.
And for some reason, nobody brought this problem to the attention of
the shell team until a couple years ago.

In order to fix this, a new world bitmap needed to be made with new
labels (labeling the pixels corresponding to Poland as "Central
European Time") so that Poland would once again emerge from the sea.
Even though the highlighting is gone, the map code still needs to
know where every time zone is so it can raise them from the ocean
floor.

Fortunately, all this will soon fall into the mists of history,
because Windows Vista has a completely rewritten time zone control
panel, so the mistakes of the past can finally be shed. Let's hope
the people who wrote the new time zone control panel remembered
Poland.

[png]

Raymond Chen

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