Halcyon Update for Daylight Savings Time

Beginning in 2007, the daylight savings time (DST) dates will change for the United States and certain parts of Canada. The USA Energy Policy Act of 2005 has mandated the changes. For more information regarding the energy act and the DST changes, visit the following websites:

http://www.energy.gov/about/EPAct.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_savings

Generally, time zone rules are maintained by the operating system and applications make use of these rules to report the time. In the case of a Java application, the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has it’s own time zone rules and these rules are used instead of the operating system's. As a result, Halcyon products will also display the time reported by the Operating System or Java.

To resolve this issue users are required to take the following steps on each system where a Halcyon product has been deployed:

         1. Update the Operating System
         2. Update Java (where specific Halcyon products named below are used)

Most Halcyon products determine the current time based on the time zone rules that have been set in the operating system. As a result, you must install the updated time zone rules on each system that has a Halcyon product installed. For your convenience, links have been provided for the available patches for the various operating systems in Table 1 below. Contact your vendor for the latest information regarding DST patches.

Table 1 - Links for Operating System Patches for Daylight Savings Time

The Halcyon products in the following table use Java. Most dynamically find an installation of Java based on the expected operating environment and then use the first version found. The column “Java Search Order” in Table 2 identifies the order in which Java installations are searched for.

To avoid any DST issues with these products you must ensure that the first version of Java found is a supported versions of Java with the latest DST rules. A list of these can be found at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/.

Table 2 - Halcyon products using Java requiring Java updates.