Daylight Savings Time Messed Up My Website

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: I try to keep on top of all the horrors which Microsoft has inflicted upon the world. During this stupid 3-week pre-Daylight Savings Time nonsense, I had discovered several sections of my website which no longer worked. This has been corrected. Those affected were anyone wishing to view stock photography. If you are still having problems, please contact me. : In the stock photography section, I set a cookie with an expiration date of 10 minutes. Over the next three weeks, anyone using Microsoft Internet Explorer (MIE) will loose 1 hour from the lifespan of all their cookies. So, a 10 minute cookie cannot be set. I have kludged a fix by setting these cookies to have a lifespan of a full day. : If you are using a non-Microsoft browser, you will not be affected. It is only Microsoft Internet Explorer which cannot do the math. If I tell MIE to expire a cookie in 10 minutes, why should it care what time it is or if it is Daylight Savings Time? Well, apparently, Microsoft cannot tell time. Yo - Bill: Here's a clue. If it's 7:38pm and I set a cookie with an expiration date of 10 minutes, then the cookie should expire at 7:48pm NOT at 6:48pm. Apparently, the programmers at Microsoft cannot deal with problems which I have learned to solve when I was 8 years old! These tough problems were right up there with spelling my own name, memorizing my phone number, and tying my shoelaces. And, I had it much tougher. There were no digital clocks in my day. I had to deal with an hour hand and a minute hand. : I digress. Microsoft has some other problems with telling time and expiring cookies. Assuming that I do set the expiration date for a cookie to be 2 hours, and it's exactly 1:00pm, when will the cookie expire? If you have a non-Microsoft web browser, the answer is 3:00pm or 15:00. If you are still unfortunate enough to be running a Microsoft operating system, your cookie may expire at 3:01pm or 3:02pm or 3:03pm - in fact, it will expire whenever it gets around to it. Apparently, Microsoft never tested the expiration of their cookies for times less than a few days. Despite the fact that a cookie expiration date has a resolution of seconds, this is just way too much work for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Who can be bothered to check the expiration date of cookies so often? Why not just check for expired cookies every few minutes, or so - whenever Bill can get around to it. : I bypass all this nonsense and do the math on the server. So, a 10 minute cookie will expire in 10 minutes: not 11 or 12 or 13 minutes. But, like I said, the only section which I didn't care so much about tight 1-second resolution was the stock photography access. Roughly 10 minutes was fine. I didn't expect that Microsoft software would be so horrible as to not being able to handle something so trivial. Rather than rewriting my scripts to do the math, I confess that I just put a big patch over it - I just changed 10 minutes to a full day. This will expire your cookies anywhere from 23 hours to 24 hours and 15 minutes - who knows, exactly? That will depend on several other factors: what time of year it is, if we are in Daylight Savings Time, which operating system you are running, and if your system has been "patched." : If you have a non-Microsoft browser on just about any other system, your 24 hour cookie will expire in 24 hours. : Every day, another 9,000 people switch from Microsoft to Apple. Now, don't you feel left out?

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