If you use XAMPP to run a local web server, you might have come across the problem whereby Apache will not start. You click the Start button in the XAMPP control panel, the green 'Running' message appears for a second or two, then disappears again, and Apache fails to start. This can be a very frustrating problem, as you get absolutely no feedback about why it won't start. I found 2 possible causes for this...

I was surprised to find that after the clocks changed on 26th October 2008, all of the dates on my billing records were showing up a day early. Invoices paid on 28th September showed as being paid on 27th. I tried it out on 3 different servers as well as my local PC. On the 3 Linux servers, it always calculated the wrong date, but on my PC (running Windows XP), it showed the correct date. The explanation was fairly simple, but I found it infuriatingly difficult to fix!