World Clocks

Several people from my office have been traveling all over the place because of conferences. It is always difficult to remember what time it is in the various timezones throughout the world. My watch can tell me the time for all timezones, which is helpful when I am doing a lot of traveling. However it is a little cumbersome because it uses 3-letter airport codes to indicate the timezone. For instance, LAX represents the pacific time zone. Most Americans know that SFO (San Francisco International Airport) and LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) are in the same timezone. But what about ANC (Anchorage International Airport) and HNL (Honolulu International Airport)? And what about daylight savings time?

In reality, it doesn't matter what the exact time is when you are trying to call one of your coworkers in Japan. What really matters is if the sun is up or if it is the middle of the night. The best tool for that is a world clock which shows a map of the world with night areas colored darker than day areas (as shown in the image above).

There are a number of free world clocks that work on Windows, but I wanted one on Linux because that is my primary system at work. Doing a quick search on one of the Ham radio sites (because Ham radio guys use world clocks to determine the best frequencies to use) led me to Sunclock. It is a free program that can be found at ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/geosciences/sunclock.

The program comes as source code and so you have to compile it. There are some simple instructions that come with the download and most Linux users should be able to get it working with a minimum fuss. If you run Linux and do business all over the world, this application is indispensable.