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kicked in the butt by daylight savings time

in case you just woke up from a 20 year nap…

daylight savings time gets a huge makeover this year.

which means the u.s. & our neighbors in the great white north get the lovely task of changing the time when we change, well…the time!

obviously, the impact goes way beyond simply being late or early to church one sunday morning.

time sensitivity is something that can cause people to lose their fracking minds.

anybody remember a little bit of hysteria called y2k?

for those of you just emerging from the bunker you bought in 1998 with the proceeds from your liquidated holdings…

welcome to the apocalypse.

the thing is…

even a relatively small incorrect offset can cause weird things.

hands-up if you have ever seen login problems on systems using kerberos tickets. checking the time on the machines having difficulty should always be the first troubleshooting step. if time is off between machines by more than a couple of minutes, you’re asking for trouble.

but something like a one hour offset can play some real havoc with timestamps, which can makes transaction-based applications like databases go boom, or poof, or about 20 other nasty behaviors.

at the very least, it can cause folks to miss appointments. hands-up if you’ve ever seen an incorrect dst offset put the bang-shang-a-lang on an outlook calendar.

now, if the wrong person in your company misses an important enough appointment because the time on your systems was wrong…

you might as well start polishing that resume of yours right now.

still, all that’s child’s play compared to an application that uses hardcoded dst mechanisms for its timestamps.

you’d think by this time that all developers would be intelligent enough to have switched to utc support. yeah, you’d think. but you shouldn’t bet your career or your company’s future on that.

mothership has a document that’s being updated as fixes are released for their stuff.

looks like the crm folks are gonna be cutting it close!

you might want to pay close attention to the support details for older versions of mothership’s products. basically, if you aren’t on a hotfix support program for those applications…

you’ve got some serious work to do.

or just find yourself a pack of magic system elves to fix everything while visions of sugarplums dance in your head.

if your business uses turnkey or custom-coded apps…

best get to work checking how those handle dst. similar to y2k, you need to know where each of them gets its time & how it’s parsed.

and while you’re at it…

you might want to think about implementing a decent time sync mechanism that will keep your network accurate. your data will thank you.

of course…

you could always go medieval on dst & turn off auto-dst-update support on everything.

but that means you’d have to remember to update everything manually.

hands-up if you always remember to reset your clock.

yeah…

didn’t think so.

|| posted by chris under business, funlab, it pro || comments (2) || ||