Oh dear. The FoxClocks 2012e time zone database has a number of incorrect country codes, causing FoxClocks to display the wrong flag in some cases.

I’ve pushed out an update to the database, 2012e-1, which fixes this. You can manually update to the new database from the Time Zone Data tab of the Options Window, or wait for FoxClocks’ automated weekly check.

How to upset people

It turns out that this was a bug not in FoxClocks itself, but in the Java program that generates the FoxClocks database from the underlying IANA tz data. Deep in the IANA data some zones are ‘linked’ to others, for example:

Link Europe/Belgrade Europe/Ljubljana # Slovenia
Link Europe/Belgrade Europe/Podgorica # Montenegro
Link Europe/Belgrade Europe/Sarajevo # Bosnia and Herzegovina
Link Europe/Belgrade Europe/Skopje # Macedonia
Link Europe/Belgrade Europe/Zagreb # Croatia

and

Link Europe/London Europe/Jersey
Link Europe/London Europe/Guernsey
Link Europe/London Europe/Isle_of_Man

Unfortunately the Java program followed these links for the purpose of calculating country codes, rather than just for calculating daylight saving changes. And so anyone who had a Slovenian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Macedonian or Croatian clock and updated to FoxClocks 3.0.6 saw their flag change to a Serbian flag. A similar issue also affected people with Channel Island clocks – as well as those with clocks for Slovakia, Saint Barthelemy and the French part of Saint Martin in the Caribbean.

It’s understandably upsetting to see your national flag replaced with another, yet most feedback I received was polite. Not all, though, and I’m reminded of a quote by Robert J. Hanlon:

‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’.