Scripting News: DST bug

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

DST bug

After all the discussion of possible computer bugs due to the change in Daylight Savings Time, I'm pleased to report I had one.

One of my servers didn't make the change automatically, or so it appeared. No problem, I did it manually. Then a few hours later it was back at the old time. I reset it again. Again, a few hours later it was wrong once again.

I finally had a minute to investigate, and traced it to a Frontier verb, tcp.getCurrentTime. I tried running it on the server, and it displayed the incorrect time. I then found the place where it's called and disabled it, and now the clock shouldn't be off on the server.

However, that wasn't the end of the mystery. When I run it on my desktop machine, calling the same government time server, time-b.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov, it returns the correct time!

On more investigation, it's not quite as interesting I thought it might be. Apparently the server, which is running Windows 2000, isn't getting updates from Microsoft as my Mac OS X desktop is from Apple. My Windows machine still thinks it's in Pacific Standard Time, whereas my desktop computer knows it's Daylight Savings Time. When the clock is set locally, it's automatically adjusted properly, on the server it's adjusted improperly. Disabling the code should take care of it.

And I thought it was a government foul-up! ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:34 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr