Deploy it as a service!

I used to make fun of people who were so in love with service-oriented architecture (SOA) that they would grandly want to deploy every general-use piece of code in the entire organization as a web service (rather than, for example, creating a Java class or something).

But I just had to create a web service to CALCULATE THE LOCAL TIME because Google Chrome -- which seems to be a pretty mature product -- has some sort of catastrophic time zone bug that somehow causes its time zone handling to get confused.

The debugger console shows the following ridiculous output (obviously today at 5:44 EDT):

> new Date()
Mon Apr 09 2012 10:44:42 GMT+0100 (Eastern Standard Time)

A quick search of the Chromium bug database reveals lots of users reporting bugs that are probably caused by this.

I seriously hope they don't introduce a bug into JavaScript mathematics and make me write the AddNumbers service from my fictional SOA-infested dystopia ...

P.S. Even as I write this, all the timestamps on the Blogger edit screen show incorrectly...

Update 2012 May 16:It's a bug in how Chrome deals with the TZ environment variable on Windows. See the Chromium issue.