Daylight savings time

The rules for Daylight Savings are changing in the U.S. this year, in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October. This will make electronic clocks that had pre-programmed dates for adjusting to daylight saving time obsolete and will require updates to computer operating systems.

Without being overly dramatic, this sounds like it could require some Y2K-style remediation. Now I'm not saying anyone should rush out and buy batteries, or restock their nuclear fallout shelters. There's not likely to be any national shutdown. I'm just saying it may require a lot of extra attention to old, old systems within the next month.

The dates when Daylight Savings starts and ends haven't changed since 1966. This is before even many of the Y2K-compliant systems were created. Certainly any Y2K remediation would have been finished before this went into law. However, there may have been many systems that either didn't need to be updated for Y2K compliance, or which may have been installed since then in ignorance of this new rule.

There were some changes to DST rules in the last year or so, as regions like Indiana and Arizona now follow DST where they did not before. I don't know if this was a result of the same law. If so, then hopefully the programmers read the whole law and adapted for this at the same time.

On the other hand, preventing an exception for Indiana is more about stripping out code than modifying it. What made Y2K such a problem was all the calculations that intrinsically treated dates as numbers, making it hard to identify where the rules were broken. For instance, it's a lot easier to find and fix a program like:

if (Today >= "04/01/2007" 
    and Today <= "04/07/2007"
    and DayOfWeek(Today) == "Sunday")

...but not so easy if they wrote it like this:

if (var1 >= 61 
    and var1 <= 68 
    and var2 = 1)

All that to say, if you're behind on WindowsUpdates, this would be a great time to get caught up.

645 days

Well, it was a sad moment, but it had to happen. While I was in Des Moines for that meeting, I walked over to our office there and (with permission) shutdown Parallel to bring it home.

Picking up the server was a surreal experience. First of all, it was an all-indoor five-block walk from the conference center to our Des Moines offices. You can do that in some places in Chicago for a block or two, but I think Des Moines has a lot more passageways and hamster tubes than Chicago. I and four coworkers walked into the reception area in an office where nobody knew me by sight. Someone from that office had called ahead to let them know I was coming, but all they had was my name.

The receptionist he talked to was on break, but her substitute called her and confirmed it was OK. A third person walked me back to the server room and let me in, where I walked right up to a server, logged in, shut it down, unplugged it, and walked out the front door carrying it. If I had done all that without someone calling ahead, it really would have been a scary thing.

The final uptime was 645 days and about 9 hours running continuously without a reboot. The server is now resting comfortably at my house. I only need a few small tidbits off it before it can be repurposed or retired.

In some ways, it's sad to see old hardware that has been working well come to the end of its cycle. In this case, Parallel served two full cycles - once as someone's desktop computer, once as a webserver. Fear not, because Parallel may yet ride again! Since it's been so dependable so far, I may give it a third life as a firewall/router/web filter for Jen & Eric.