Spring forward … in to chaos?

March 10, 2007 by
Filed under: Uncategorized 

As everyone should know by now, (most of) Canada and the USA move to Summer Time (Daylight Saving Time) tomorrow, three weeks ahead of normal. This is causing almost as much concern as Y2K because the tech industry is equally unprepared for this change, even though Dubya pushed the legislation through almost 2 years ago – why do we leave everything to the last minute? Some people are calling this “Y2K7” … but I don’t. :)

Here’s the before & after view of DST for N.America:

  Before 2007 As of 2007
DST begins First Sunday of April Second Sunday of March (11th)
DST ends Last Sunday of October First Sunday of November (4th)

 
For everyone not living in / working with North America: lucky you! Then again, if you deal with much of Europe, you’ve had the Euro (currency) changes to contend with, so I guess it’s our turn for some chaos.

For those of us fortunate enough to use *nix-based systems, the change to DST should be almost painless. A simple test I ran on my server (see below) shows we’re good to go:

% date –date=”Mar 25 15:00:00 UTC 2006″
Sat Mar 25 10:00:00 EST 2006
% date –date=”Mar 25 15:00:00 UTC 2007″
Sun Mar 25 11:00:00 EDT 2007

For those of us unfortunate enough to have to use Windows, life is far from simple … but then we should expect that by now. Hopefully all businesses have applied (and tested!) all the patches, but home users can expect to spend Sunday morning dealing with the fallout. Even Microsoft says “If you use Windows Vista or have Automatic Updates turned on, you may not be affected by the change in daylight saving time.” (My emphasis.)

Probably the best place to start is Microsoft’s Daylight Saving Time Update Guide, which will step you through the updates you need to make … although I found it not very well designed: one page tells me to download a patch and then there’s instructions on what to do, which it clears as soon as you start the download! D’oh! (Hint: use your browser’s Back button to read what you’ve got to do then go Forward to carry on.)

Fortunately it’s simply a matter of running the TZedit.exe that you download – it modifies your timezone settings, so then all you need to do is check your clock is actually using the right TZ.

There’s a second step in that guided update but I don’t use Outlook (Outhouse, more like!) so I can’t tell you how that works.

I also don’t have any MacOS machines (yet!) so I can’t give you any pointers there, I’m afraid, but OS X is Linux-based so you should be OK.

One thing I can tell you is that the update for my Palm PDA (Tungsten E) went very smoothly – at least I think it was OK and that the complete dead-as-a-doornail crash yesterday afternoon is unrelated. :(

After all that, I’m still going to print my calendar for the next few weeks, just in case! :)

I’ve collected some DST-related bookmarks on del.icio.us – let me know (leave me a comment to this entry) if you find any other useful resources and I’ll add them.

Oh, and if you thought this was the end of it, don’t forget that Bush also messed with the date when we return to standard time – DST ends a week later than usual, but hopefully all these patches will have taken that into account already.

Plus, just in case you think we’re going to stick with these changes from now on, Congress has retained the right to resume the 2005 Daylight Saving Time schedule if a Department of Energy study shows the energy savings were not as forecast … and I don’t believe they will be, so expect to go through this again in a couple of years!

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Comments

One Comment on Spring forward … in to chaos?

  1. blog.henman.ca » PDA = Personal DEAD Assistant? on Sat, 17th Mar 2007 4:33 pm

    2. [...] I don’t remember the last time I put new software on it, other than the Daylight Saving patch from the Palm website that I installed last week. [...]

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