It's been almost a year since I last posted. I'm still programming, but it's mostly visible on github, especially my trying to help with jquery/globalize by implementing nongregorian calendars.
I finally solved a bug that was, um, bugging me. In order to test my Julian Day routines, I needed to create a javascript Date at midnight UTC rather than local time. I thought I was clever when I did:
d = new Date();
d.setUTCFullYear( year );
d.setUTCMonth( month );
d.setUTCDate( date );
d.setUTCHours( 0 );
d.setUTCMinutes( 0 );
d.setUTCSeconds( 0 );And everything worked fine, until last night when I would set month=1 (February) but the month would end up as 2 (March). This had never happened before, and the code hadn't changed.
I finally realized that the date was 2016-01-28 St. Louis time at 2300, or 2016-01-29 UTC. So setting the year to a non-leap year like 2015, then setting the month to 1 with setUTCMonth() meant I was trying to set it to 2015-02-29, which Date helpfully corrected to 2015-03-01, then the date was set correctly. The only way that bug would turn up is if my code was run on the last day of the month and tested with a shorter month.
Turns out there's a much better way to set UTC time:
d = new Date( Date.UTC( year, month, date ) )And now I am wiser.
