This confusion basically stems from twiki's adoption of the tz convention, which in turn comes from POSIX, which in turn is backwards from the normal. I'll add something like the following text to tz-link.htm. I don't see any simple fix to the twiki.org page, other than a footnote containing the following info (which would probably cause more confusion than it'd cure). <li>Numeric time zone abbreviations typically count hours east of UTC, e.g., <code>+0900</code> for Japan and <code>-1000</code> for Hawaii. However, the <abbr>POSIX</abbr> <code>TZ</code> environment variable uses the reverse convention. For example, one might use <code>TZ="JST-9"</code> and <code>TZ="HST10"</code> for Japan and Hawaii, respectively. One should never set <code>TZ</code> to a value like <code>"GMT+5"</code>, since this would mean local time is five hours behind UTC and the time zone is called "GMT". If the <code>tz</code> database is available, it is usually better to use settings like <code>TZ="Asia/Tokyo"</code> and <code>TZ="Pacific/Honolulu"</code> instead, as this should avoid confusion, handle old timestamps better, and insulate you better from any future changes to the rules.</li>