Some of you might be familiar with the work I’ve done on the Trinetra project. Right now I’m working on porting our Symbian Series 60 application to Symbian UIQ 3, so that we can demo it on the MOTORIZR Z8. There are two major tasks involved with the port. First, we have to get our codebase ready for the application signing requirements imposed in Symbian 9.x. Second, we have to port the entire UI from Series 60 to UIQ. This post involves the first issue: signing the application.
I have been struggling for the past week just to get a signed skeleton application installed on the Z8. Every time I tried to sign and install the app, I would get a “certificate expired at the time of use” error. I kept trying to create new self-signed certificates, I requested Symbian Developer certificates, all with no luck. The time seemed to be set correctly on my desktop and the phone, so I just couldn’t figure out the problem.
You see, the key word in that last sentence is seemed. The time zone setting on the Z8 was labeled as “Eastern Standard Time”. However, it was not in fact “Eastern Standard Time”, but “Eastern Summer Time” — an Australian time zone. Here is where it gets interesting. Eastern Standard Time is UTC-0500 hours and Eastern Summer Time is UTC+1100 hours. Now let’s say that both the phone and the certificate issuer thought it was 12:00 in their respective local times. If the certificate is created and valid from 12:00 Eastern Standard, that translates to 07:00 UTC. However, if the application is sent directly to the phone, it is around 12:00 Eastern Summer, which translates to 23:00 UTC. The phone basically thinks that the certificate is being used before it has even become valid.
The thing that kept throwing me is that the Australian time zones are mistakenly labeled as Eastern Standard Time instead of Eastern Summer Time. Even more annoying is that I can’t find any way to set Eastern Standard Time. The Z8 gives you a list of cities to choose time zones for, but there are no U.S. east coast cities on that list. New York is usually the representative city for Eastern Standard, but it is absent. Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle are all there representing west coast PST, and even Chicago is there for the midwest CST, but there is no love for the East. For now I’m just pretending to be in Chicago.
I realize that this phone is targeted at non-U.S. markets, but people do travel to the east coast of the U.S. every now and then!
