Rick's b.log - entry 2025/10/25

mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

Tea v0.26

Now, I slept badly last night and got up at half three to be at work for 5am. I'm honestly surprised that I had enough wherewithal (werewithal? like werewolf? whatever...) to manage to do this. I got myself a McDo burger after work because I pretty much planned to come home, throw my clothes in the washing machine, and when that was done go to bed. Instead I got some gothic symphonic metal playing, fired up Zap, and set about sorting out a bunch of things I wanted to do to Tea. It's 8pm as I'm writing this and, well, I'm a lot more awake than I thought I'd be by now.

Anyway, given the unique availability of tonight, I was able to test the logic around a time change. Yeah, they're stealing an hour from the evening and sticking it onto the morning. So you'll wake up and go to work in the gloom, and you'll come home in the gloom. What a massive pile of llama dung...

One of the main changes necessary was to look up the DST rule for each and every programme, in order that it be given the correct time; as opposed to basing everything on the system DST time. For most of the year that'll work, but for two weeks it won't. So times relate to the DST rules in force for the time of the programme.

This may make odd things happen, as tonight we literally skip back an hour, or forwards in the summer. I'm not going to fix the grid layout to cope with this (like to say 1am twice) as it's literally two hours in a little under nine thousand.

I have also improved the logic around UK time and local time. Related to the above, I needed to know the DST and non-DST values for the local machine. Now, there's a call (Territory_ReadCurrentTimeZone) that will tell you the current offset from GMT. It won't tell you the DST/non-DST offsets. There's a different call to enumerate the time zones.

Unfortunately, ReadCurrentTimeZone is broken. It is supposed to return three things: The current timezone name, the offset from GMT, and the timezone within the territory that is in use. I have a custom version of the UK territory that provides both the usual British (GMT, BST) times as well as European (CET, CEST) times.

When I ask for the current time zone information, it tells me CEST for the time zone name (correct), 720000 for the number of centiseconds offset from GMT (correct), and 0 as the timezone within the territory (wrong! it should be 1).

The way around this is to remember the name (CEST) and then repeatedly call Territory_ReadTimeZones with that timezone name until there's a match, at which point I can read the information that I'm looking for. If your timezone is NOT set to a recognised timezone, the call will return "Custom" and there will be no match, so it will then give up and use the current system setting.
This may well break the positions of programmes if (get ready, there are numerous clauses) your timezone is not the UK and you want programmes shown in your local time and your machine is set to winter or summer time and the programmes you're looking at are the opposite. So, again, it's related to the change to/from summer time.
As you can imagine, it's a bit of a niche problem likely to only affect people living in Europe (as I do) who want things in their local time but who don't have a machine that recognises CET/CEST but instead have just set their TimeZone to +1:0 - so if this is you and you'd like a CET/CEST aware version of the UK territory, click here (Zip, 6.01KiB).

Of course, if Territory wasn't such a pile'o'poop... but I'm not going down that rabbit hole again.

The channel icons now work. The logic for trying to work out the correct BBC/ITV/C4/C5 icons has been updated for the new channel numbers. Basically there's only one "BBC One" icon, for example, so it tries to determine if it's BBC One from the name, when it might actually say "BBC One South" (actually, for dumb reasons I think it's now "BBC One So HD").
I also tested with Scottish and Northern Irish postcodes to ensure it showed STV and UTV as expected (it's not called ITV1 there).

Three new channels currently don't have an icon. These are ITV Quiz, Hobby Maker, and BBC Red Button.

A bunch of obsolete icons have been removed: ITV Be, Freesat Info, Kiss, Kerrang!, Magic, Sport Stuff TV, Seen On TV, TVR UK, TalkTV, The Box, 4Music, and Create & Craft. I have left the ITV1 SD icon, but I'm not seeing that - has ITV gotten rid of the SD version of ITV1?

When fetching programme listings, it'll no longer say the mundane "Fetching day 1...". Instead it'll say "Fetching tomorrow..." or "Fetching next Saturday...", whatever applies.

Just to clarify, in case you're wondering, it is perfectly normal for you to ask it for (next) Tuesday and for Tea to tell you it is fetching Wednesday. My software isn't trying to rustle up a goth girl, it simply needs to fetch "day" and "day after" because we don't split at midnight, but the data does.

And barring unforeseen problems, I think that's all I wanted to do with this software right now. That sounds a lot like tempting fate, doesn't it?

Download tea_0-26.zip (451.12K)
For RISC OS machines

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺
As of February 2025, commenting is no longer available to UK residents, following the implementation of the vague and overly broad Online Safety Act. You must tick the box below to verify that you are not a UK resident, and you expressly agree if you are in fact a UK resident that you will indemnify me (Richard Murray), as well as the person maintaining my site (Rob O'Donnell), the hosting providers, and so on. It's a shitty law, complain to your MP.
It's not that I don't want to hear from my British friends, it's because your country makes stupid laws.

You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.