I'm sure you've all heard about the Daylight Saving Time bug, and since tomorrow's the big day, I hope you've patched your system. If you're using Windows XP and have automatic updates turned on, you don't need to do anything... Microsoft has pushed the patch out. If you're running Windows 2000 or older, you will probably need to download a manual patch, which you can download here. I have tested this manual patch on Windows 2000 Server and Windows NT and it worked as advertised. I haven't tested it on Windows 95 or 98, but am confident that it will work on those Operating Systems as well.
With this out of the way, let me give you a little more information, from the perspective of the geek in the trenches. This whole thing was brought on by some genius in Washington who claims to have done a study that showed America could save $4.4 Billion by the year 2020. I personally think his numbers are fuzzy at best, but he's pretty cock-sure of himself and virtually breaks his arm as he pats himself on the back, crowing about how awesome his idea was. In the article, Congressman Markey comments about how "Daylight Saving brings a smile to everybody's faces." What cave has this guy been living in? I don't know about you, but I absolutely DETEST setting my clocks forward, losing that hour of sleep, and spending the next week in a virtual trance as my body readjusts to its new sleep patern. I do like the extra hour of sleep in the fall, but that's technically when we go back to Standard Time, so I don't like Daylight Saving, I like Standard Time. Oh wait, this isn't a personal rant, I'm supposed to be discussing the ins and outs of this so-called bug.
I guess I really don't know what all of the fuss is about. Yeah, a lot of people are inconvenienced by this change and yes, a lot of people had to spend many hours finding and implementing a solution to a problem created by a Washington bureaucrat, but what's new? Yes, there was a "cost" associated with this fix, but it's a soft cost. Look, computer programmers and network administrators like me are generally salaried individuals. From an economic standpoint, this means that we're a fixed cost. Companies aren't really spending extra money to address this issue, it's more accurate to say that they're diverting already-existing resources to an unexpected issue. This happens all the time in business.
By the way, Microsoft has been taking a lot of flack about this and I don't understand why. Microsoft didn't create this problem, congress did. They're in the same boat as us... they were handed a problem, not of their own making, and expected to fix it. Okay, they could have started working on the solution a little earlier, but in the grand scheme of things, they've done fine. They did an adequate job of rolling out the fix, both to corporate users and to home users. I know people are bitching that Microsoft isn't supporting older Operating Systems and applications, but hey, if you're still using stuff that Microsoft is no longer supporting, it's your choice, not Microsoft's fault. That's like buying a new car with a 50,000 mile warranty and trying to hold the manufacturer responsible when something breaks at 100,000 miles. If you want the warranty, upgrade. And by the way, though Microsoft isn't "technically" supporting these older products, some of the released fixes (such as the aforementioned manual patch) work on software that's no longer supported.
And let's say the fixes don't work... what's the big deal? Okay, you show up for your meeting at the wrong time. Whoopee! Maybe you get shorted one hour of pay on the actual DST cutover day... like the company you work for won't be required to fix things. It's not like the Y2K bug (which was also a non-event). Geez, people, quit your complaining!
Dammit!! I was planning to write about the experience, and here I am writing an op ed article! Okay, down to the nuts and bolts. My co-worker and I found out about this around mid-January. Originally, he was going to work on it, but he ended up being scheduled for a week-long training class and I took over. Fortunately, he had done a lot of the research, saving me some time. My job was to finish up the research and implement the patches.
I had to patch three aspects of Microsoft... All of the Windows machines, the mail server, and the database servers. We only had one mail server and a couple of database servers, so that was all done manually. The Windows machines were also pretty easy. Microsoft gave me all of the data I need to build a utility that would push the patch out to all of the machines when a user logged on. Easy-squeezy. All I had to do was copy and paste a couple of things, some super-duper basic programming (building a batch file), and a little testing. It was several hours of work, but again, in the grand scheme of things, several hours is a drop in the bucket.
Is this DST bug inconvenient? Certainly, but in the end it's nothing compared to the Y2K bug. That one had the potential of being far more disastrous, and took far greater effort to fix. The DST issue? Bah!
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