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I know it’s a late warning but it’s something you should acknowledge if you haven’t yet. Regardless of your technical disposition you should know that because of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 Daylight Savings Time (DST) will be extended by approximately four weeks. It will start three weeks earlier (March 11) and end one week later (November 4).

Why is this a problem? Well much like Y2K (remember Y2K?) there will be a fundamental change in how time is handled - only this time the problem is worse. Y2K was only a problem for institutions whose program code (done to save space back when servers had the same amount of memory as your cell phone) had two placeholders for date rather than 4.

This is a bigger problem because computers are programmed to update the date/time automagically for things like DST. Furthermore 99% of applications (both web and desktop) use time from anything from timestamping to telling you when an email was delivered.

In the Microsoft world we develop applications based on the server time. So if the server time is wrong - all the time is wrong. But it makes for an easy 1-stop fix.

The moral of the story is that you as a developer, systems adminsitrator, or CEO should make sure that your company is ready for these changes.

If you are a Microsoft shop, check out the document they prepared so you can make sure you and/or your organization is ready.

Don’t worry about your personal computer, unless you shut off automatic updates (which is dumb), because a patch will be delivered to you next week.

Preparing for Daylight Saving Time changes in 2007 - Microsoft

Tags: Time Change, DST, Microsoft, Y2K

image from leo reynolds on flickr

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