Facebook timezone issue

Introduction

As at version 1.3.1, Synergy and the Pre doesn't display Facebook event times right. This is, in my opinion, due to an error on both the part of Facebook, and Palm.

Mostly Facebook.

How Facebook does event times

As per http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Events.get:

Note that the start_time and end_time returned are the times which were input by the event creator, converted to UTC after assuming that they were in Pacific time (Daylight Savings or Standard, depending on the date of the event), then converted into Unix epoch time.

... Pacific time being GMT-8.

Why they assume this PST timezone, who knows... their backend seems to be smart enough to work out what timezone a typical browser session is in (I'm assuming via +/- offsets in HTTP requests), so why not use that when an event is submitted, convert down to UTC at that time, and all is well!

Instead, they do it this way, and do some crazy magic when others view the event. This is where I say Palm is partly at fault -- because they haven't put this same magic in. They shouldn't have to though.

What WebOS does

It would seem the Pre assumes that the <start_time> and <end_time> are in UTC via a Unix epoch timestamp -- very fair logic in my opinion, as this is what Facebook should be returning via its API. Instead, it seems to return local_time_of_event+8. Bizarre.

(To be continued, not finished.)