Calendars, Time & Bugs: Y2K, Y2004, Y2038, Y2106, Y4K

caveat: this web page was created before Wikipedia which I consider a better source of information than this modest effort

UTC (Universal Time Coordinated)

Before the age of internet connectivity...

• most non-military computers were set to the local time of their operators. (comment: military systems employ a scheme based upon the letters of the Roman alphabet)
• when the local time zone would change between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time, either the local computer clock was changed on the fly (on systems that allowed it), or it was changed during a reboot.

 But internet connectivity changed everything...

• Technically speaking, the internet began in 1969 with a project known as ARPANET
• So it should surprise no one that UNIX (which was started by Bell Labs in 1969) was the first OS to add timezone support to the computer system's timestamp. This feature trickled down to the underlying 'C' language
• although system clocks can be set to any timezone, they are usually set to UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
• In these systems, file time-stamps are almost always written as UTC but that is not what you might see (read on)
• Each user "may" set their own "TZ" parameter to any value which forces most time-zone aware programs to display time-stamps (and system time) in the user's desired time zone
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
• So why the wacky name? The 1960s standards committee was dominated by British and French. The Brits wanted to use the letters CUT (Common Universal Time) while the French wanted to use the letters TUC (Temps Universel Commun). UTC was the compromise.
  • comment: recall that this was a time when Britain and France had decided that it was better for both countries to cooperate. Out of this mindset came projects like Concorde (the name should be taken literally) and Chunnel. This alliance worked out well until some idiot Brits voted for BREXIT

NTP (Network Time Protocol)

NTP is an Internet service first developed in 1985 where computer systems can take on the roles of: CLIENT, SERVER or PEER
{{{ deleted a bunch of stuff }}}

Caveat: this article was created before Wikipedia (better to use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol)

Daylight Savings Time

• All my life, people have told me that DST (daylight savings time) was created to help farmers. Anyone who knows any farmers already knows that farmers ignore clocks so this has got to be a myth. In fact, the (mostly) farming province of Saskatchewan in Canada never adopted DST.
• The truth of the matter is this: DST was popularized by Germany after World War One where it was known that DST aided the German war efforts by extending the working length of the military day
  • https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/history.html
• Now here's a smart idea. The European Parliament (EU) just voted to end daylight savings time in 2021
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/world/europe/daylight-savings-time-european-union.html
  https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707179979/european-parliament-moves-toward-ending-daylight-saving-time
  The main reason given was that Europe's closest trading partners, China and Russia, do not shift their numerous number of time zones, and having Europe change its clocks twice annually was bad for business between all. But as a computer programmer and system admin, I can tell you that not having your computer systems change their internal clocks is a huge advantage.

Solaris (a flavor of Unix created by Sun Microsystems)

This company's name came from the fact that many of the principal people involved came from Stanford University (SUN)

• Solaris System Time Zone:
  • is defined for your system in file "/etc/TIMEZONE" and must be one of the zones defined in directory "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo"
  • general notes:
    • TIMEZONE can contain something like "TZ=Canada/Eastern" but "TZ=UTC" or "TZ=GMT" are better choices
    • even if TIMEZONE contained something like "TZ=Canada/Eastern" the system clock does not actually change but "time displays" with the "date" command would contain the correct EST/EDT suffix. Use the "date -u" command to see universal time
    • If you change this file then you'll need to reboot because almost everything in Unix is cached by default
    • This file is not a script
  • technical notes:
    • most hardware clock chips (BIOS) do not know about time zones. This means that most Unix systems will run a cron job at 2:01 everyday in March and October to execute the rtc command which will ensure the hardware clock contains the correct time zone interpretation. Failure to do this might cause your system clock to be out by one hour after a reboot.
    • many hardware clock chips (BIOS) are not accurate and may drift over time. But in most cases the Unix system clocks have been synchronized to an atomic clock by NTP. Most versions of NTP do not update the hardware clock so you might what to run a daily cron job which will execute the rtc command
      caveat: on Linux systems the command is: hwclock -w (newer systems support command timedatectl as an all-in-one-place dashboard)
• Solaris Process Time Zone:
  • by default, all processes see the system time zone setting unless shell variable "TZ" is defined in a common login script called "/etc/profile" or an optional user login script called ".profile"
  • either one of the scripts could set a local environmental variable called "TZ" which must be one of the time zones defined in directory "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo"

Update: 2020-04-03

• Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 which means the a lot of older platforms running SunOS and/or Solaris now needed to purchase an annual support agreement for patches that used to be provided for free.
• I just noticed that one of our Solaris boxes (Solaris-8; just a sever with no users) was not changing over to DST properly. From what I can see, they were missing the DST rules assigned by the  US Energy Policy Act of 2005 which went into effect in March of 2007. Since no one complained this was not something that needed to be fixed but I decided to do so anyway.
• First off, the size of the time zone files under "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo" is much larger than they need to be so I decided to investigate the man pages. Here you will learn that zdump is used to view the contents of the zone files and zic (zone information compile) is used to modify them
  

  #
  # 1) become root
  # 2) change default folder
  # 3) view desired timezone data
  #
  su -			
  cd /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo
  zdump -v Canada/Eastern	

• It turns out that the zone files contain DST rules going back many decades before the UNIX epoch (1970.01.01) and that OS and C/C++ libraries call these files when doing date-time calculations. If this is not a requirement for your system then it might be better to set your system clock to UTC then add this command to your system wide profile.
  

  TZ=EST5EDT,M3.2.0,M11.1.0

  
  Caveat: any user still using a definition like this "TZ=Canada/Eastern" will not see the correct time.
• The ZIC command allows you to add new rules to individual zone files. To fix my problem I added EDT for 2007-03-xx and an EST rule for 2007-11-xx but the procedure is dangerous (unless you backup your zone files first) so I am not going to document it here. Best to leave this to your local friendly uber-nerd.

VAX / VMS System Time

Caveat: this TOY stuff is only relevant to VAX. Not Alpha, Itanium or x86-64

TOY (Time-Of-Year Clock)

Info derived from P.254 of:
Version 4.4 VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures
(c) 1988 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

TOY Clock Notes:

• based upon a 32 bit unsigned register
• the least significant bit represents a resolution of 10 milliseconds
• initialized to 10000000 base 16 which represents 00:00:00.00 on January 1
• if a booting system sees an empty register, it assumes that the TOY clock has lost power and ignores it
• counts up, and only holds about 15 months of time (440 days) so requires external information from a file
• to prevent overflow
  1. the system must be either be rebooted
     or
  2. the SYS$SETIME system service must be invoked within the first 3 months of the new year from a privileged account

     e.g. the system manager needs to execute the DCL command $ SET TIME

     What does this do aside from setting the time? It writes current date information to files read by the VMS system during boot.

Table Legend:

TIMEKEEPING in VAX/VMS

Info derived from P.255-256 of:
    Version 4.4 VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures
    (c) 1988 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

When a non VAXcluster VAX/VMS system is booting, SYSINIT runs routine EXE$INIT_TODR to check the contents of the Time-Of-Year (TOY) Clock to see if it contains a value greater than hex $10000000.

• If the test failed, then SYSINIT assumes that the clock lost power (or had no battery backup) and then prompts the operator
• If the test passed, then SYSINIT runs EXE$GQ_SYSTIME and uses the value of the Time-Of-Year (TOY) Clock as an offset (in milliseconds) from a value that is stored in the system image file (SYS$SYSTEM:SYS.EXE) to determine the correct date and time. This value is converted into a 64 bit number which represents the number of 100 nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since 00:00 on November 17, 1858 (the base time for the Smithsonian Institution astronomical calendar). VMS now uses this internal 64 bit clock.

When the system is either started up or shut down, the $SETIME routine is called to make sure that both the Time-Of-Year Clock and the associated date entry in the system image file (SYS$SYSTEM:SYS.EXE) are accurate. When the value in the Time-Of-Year Clock is too large, its contents are lowered by one year while the stored value of the system image file are increased by a year.

What's up with "November 17, 1858" ?

caveat: 32-bit VAX-VMS is gone while 64-bit OpenVMS is in decline. However, the contents of the DEC teck-tip remain valid

Calendar Evolution (how the Y2K problem came to be)

Calendar Kinds: a 3,000 meter (10,000 foot) view

Lunar Calendars

Many ancient peoples, including Babylonians, Jews, Muslims, and Chinese, based their calendars upon the cycles of the moon. Some problems with lunar calendars include:

1. the true year (the length of time required for the Earth to orbit the Sun) is not a whole number of lunar months. A 12 month lunar year is too short while a 13 month is a little closer to the mark
2. the lunar orbit around the Earth is elliptical rather than circular (and the ellipse orbits slowly over the course of ~ 19 years)

By the way, the word Month comes from the word Moon (e.g. "Moonth")

Solar Calendars

Other cultures, such as the Egyptians, based their calendars on the cycles of the sun. The problem with ancient solar calendars is that the true year is not a whole number of days.

Click here to examine four popular calendars (two lunar, two solar)

Egypt ~ 4231-2773 BC

Ancient Egyptians began numbering their years when Sirius (the dog star) rose at the same place as the Sun. The Egyptian calendar was the first solar calendar and contained 365 days. These were divided into twelve 30-day months followed by five days of festival. From astronomical calculations, Sirius and the Sun coincided in 4241 BC and 2773 BC, so either of these could have served as Egyptian Year 1.

Greece ~ 440 BC

The calendar used by the ancient Greeks was based on the Moon, and is known as the Metonic calendar. This calendar was based on the observations of Meton of Athens (432 BC), who showed that 235 lunar months made up almost exactly 19 solar years. This 19-year cycle became known as the Metonic Cycle. However, given a nominal twelve-month year, and additional lunar months needed to be added to synchronize the cycle. These were added in years 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 16, and 19 of the cycle. (note: year gap sizes are: 2-3-3-2-3-3)

Greece ~ 325 BC

Callippus (330 BC) modified the calendar by noting that four 19-year Metonic cycles with 940 months were very close to 27,759 days. This is called the Callipic Cycle. Hipparchus noted that an even more accurate cycle (now called the Hipparchic Cycle) consisted of four Callipic Cycles less a day, in which ((4 x 27759)-1) days were very nearly 3760 months. However, neither system was widely used. A lunar-based calendar is still used by some religious sects to determine holidays. Easter, for instance, generally occurs on the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox.

Greece ~ 200 BC

In 1901, a planetarium-calendar device, now called the Antikythera Mechanism, was recovered from a Roman shipwreck circa 65 BC off the Greek island of Antikythera. It is believed to have been designed by either Hipparchus (190-120 BC) or Archimedes (287-212 BC). By turning a handle, three displays are put into motion.

1. Single Dial Side
   • Planetarium: Displays the position of the Sun, Moon, and five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) are displayed.
     • The Moon pointer changes speed reflecting the moon's elliptical orbit)
     • The individual planetary pointers will occasionally move backwards reflecting retrograde motion
2. Dual Dial Side
   1. Calendar:
      • Displays 235 lunar months over 19 years
      • The Callippic Dial is the left secondary upper dial, which follows a 76-year cycle, quadrupling the Metonic dial
      •  The Olympiad Dial is the right secondary upper dial for determining the dates of the Olympic games
   2. Eclipse Predictor: both lunar and solar

The Pragma of Rome

Rome - 753 BC

Ancient Rome's calendar was neither lunar or solar, it was agricultural. It consisted of ten lunar months, beginning with the spring moon in March and ending 304 days later in December (the tenth month). The period between December and March was disregarded since no agricultural activity was possible during those 60 winter days. In keeping with an ancient custom, each month was divided into three sections known as Kalends, Nones and Ides, each of different lengths. The word Kalends, meaning a "calling" or announcement of a new month, gave us the word calendar. The Nones was nine days before the Ides. Since this Romans used inclusive counting, this day was always on the 5th or 7th of the month. The start of the calendar was chosen every year so that the Ides (either the 13 or 15 day) of each month would always land on a full moon. Months in this calendar consisted of only odd numbered days (29 or 31) because superstitious Romans tended to avoid even numbers whenever possible.

Rome - 304 BC

Proposed by Numa Pompilius (reign 715-673 BC) but not published until 304 BC (this date is in dispute), the number of months was increased from ten to twelve by adding January and February. (January comes from the two faced god Janus who simultaneous looks ahead and back). The months were still lunar in character, their lengths alternating between 29 and 30 days. This gave the year 354 days but as the total was an even number and to the Romans this was unlucky, an extra 355th day was added at the end of the year. After being advised by his astronomers that the extra 355th day would not be sufficient to agree with the seasons which were important to both agriculture and military operations, Numa inserted an additional thirteenth month every two years, calling it Mercedonius (from the Latin word for wages, indicating that it meant extra remuneration). This "remunerative" month of 22 or 23 days was arbitrarily thrust into the calendar toward the end of February, after the 23rd, when the newly inserted month began. When it was finished, the remaining five or six days of February carried on. Of all the complicated man-made calendar adjustments in history, this was certainly the most fantastic.

Rome - 45 BC (the calendar moves to 365.25 days)

Proposed by Julius Caesar in 45 BC and slightly modified thereafter by Caesar Augustus (Octavian), this calendar agrees with the Egyptian solar calendar and even implements a leap year (by adding an extra day to February) every 4 years so the calendar is synchronized with the heavens (almost). The months of Quintilis (fifth) and Sextilis (sixth) were renamed to July (after Julius who was born in that month) and August (after Augustus). January was made the first month so August would become the 8th month (because Augustus' given name was Octavian). This is why "September (septem = latin prefix for 7) through to December (decem = latin prefix for 10)" appear to be misnamed.

Nicaea - 325 AD

Easter was originally linked to Passover, but in the year 325 AD, the council at Nicaea (under the Roman emperor Constantine) decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon, on or after the vernal equinox (the passing from winter into spring). In the year 325 AD, the vernal equinox was assumed to be fixed at March 21.

Rome - 523 AD (years change from AUC to AD)

At this time it was customary to count years since the founding of Rome (ab urbe condita or AUC) and "the church was using an Easter calculation algorithm which was about to come to an end". Around 523 AD, the papal chancellor, Bonifatius, asked monk Dionysius Exiguus (Denis the Little) to devise a new method to calculate Easter.  Information from many sources seem to indicate that Dionysius was aware that a 532 year variation (see note: 1) of the Metonic Cycle was conveniently restarted near the birth of Christ. Since only pagan cultures celebrated birthdays, Dionysius Exiguus was more concerned with the mathematical beauty of the Metonic-Callipic intersection rather than determining the birth-date of Jesus Christ. So his main claim to fame was to change the numbering of years from AUC to a date near the birth date of Jesus Christ (Anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord") only for the purposes of publishing a new Easter algorithm.

Notes:

1. The variation of the Metonic Cycle works like this:
   1. 19 years (the Metonic Cycle)
   2. 4 years (the Callipic Cycle helps to account for leap years)
   3. 7 days in a week (Easter must fall on a Sunday)
   4. result: 532 years = 19 x 4 x 7
2. The beginning of this cycle falls on January 754 AUC which Dionysius renamed to 1 AD
3. Most people I talk to are still surprised by this level of detail from ancient times. But since "the proof of the pudding is in the tasting" then search for the phrase "golden number" in any of the Easter algorithms listed here
   note: the calculations always begin with: "G = year / 19" and are valid back to 1 AD

Rome - 1582 AD

year	days
solar	365.2422
average calendar	365.2425

Neapolitan astronomer Aloysius Lilius noticed that the Julian calendar (which had a leap year every 4 years) was too long by almost 11 minutes per year which translated into a discrepancy of approximately 9.5 days by the year 1582. In order to make the calendar synchronize with the heavens, he suggested that centuries which are evenly divisible by 100 should not be leap years except those which are evenly divisible by 400.

Easter was originally linked to Passover, but in the year 325 AD at the council at Nicaea, it was decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon on, or after, the vernal equinox (the passing from winter into spring). In the year 325, the vernal equinox was assumed to be fixed at March 21. Due to inaccuracies in the calendar, by the 16th century the vernal equinox was occurring on March 11. This caused problems for the church in Rome because most Christians outside of Rome were using the date "March 21" to calculate the day of Easter rather than the "vernal equinox" event. (sometimes bad weather combined with a lack of local astronomers made "the calendar option" the only choice). This had the effect of pushing the day of Easter celebration closer to the summer months.

Pope Gregory XIII assigned the problem to a Jesuit astronomer named Christopher Schlussel (a.k.a. Clavius) who suggested that the Easter/equinox problem could be solved by removing 10 days from the current year (shifting the vernal equinox back to March 21) and adopting the suggestion proposed by Aloysius Lilius. The plan was approved by Pope Gregory approved the plan in 1582 and decreed that October 4 was followed by October 15. The peasants revolted thinking that their lives had been shortened by that much. The new calendar was named the Gregorian Calendar after the pope who approved the changes.

This so-called "continental calendar" wasn't adopted by England, or its colonies including America, until 1752. At that time, 11 days needed to be removed. (10 for the original correction, 1 for the century following)

Note: This is the reason why many Eastern European countries celebrate Christmas on Jan-6 even though Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity but more to do with "the Winter Solstice coupled with Paganism (bringing in evergreen trees indoors)" and/or Saturnalia (visiting the homes of friends with small gifts and sweet treats)

Facts:

1. The Earth requires 365.2425 mean solar days (averaged over 4 years) for one revolution around the sun, not 365.25 as is commonly believed
2. This difference translates into ~ 648 seconds per year which needed to be removed to correct for Easter as defined in 325 AD

Computer Calendar Bugs

Year 2000 Problem (a.k.a. the Y2K Problem)

Part 1: Short Field Storage (a.k.a. lazy programming)

True Fact: In 1989 a woman in who was born in 1884 was placed on a Kindergarten enrollment list because her 2-digit birthday (89) indicated that she was 5 years old rather than 105.

Now imagine the problems on January 1, 2000 when automated programs...

1. decide to purge seemingly stale records
2. decide to compute negative interest values
3. decide to lock-out seemingly expired credit cards?

Other Stuff (cheap vs. lazy)

Although most currently supported operating system software has been fixed, much application software, and firmware associated with old hardware, are still broken. Unsupported software (like MS-DOS) and obsolete firmware (like PC BIOS before 1995) will probably never be fixed. Furthermore, application software that makes direct BIOS calls to check the date instead of calling a similar routine in the operating system is at great risk since the application software will only fail on certain platforms.

If (for productivity reasons) your users only enter 2 digit years, programmers should translate these dates to 4 digits for storage. Failure to do this means this problem will be back in the year 2100. 

Part 2: Is 2000 AD a Leap Year? (Yes)

Y2004 Problem

Some Unix systems and some "C" programs will hit a wall on Saturday 2004-01-10. The reason for this is the fact that these 32 bit clocks record the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-01-01 (start of the Unix epoch). In some instances vendors only used 29 bits which means that we will experience (2^30 = 1,073,741,824 seconds) ~34.025 years of range before we overflow.

Y2010 Problem

It's only been 10 years since Y2K and yet, some bozo programmers didn't learn the lesson. Now we've got problems with portable devices running WindowsCE along with other stuff.

Links:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/symantec_y2k10_bug/
• http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/The-year-2010-is-causing-IT-problems-895628.html

y2k20 Problem

• y2k20 was expected to be an https crisis in 2020 (delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic to 2021) related to patching clients and servers
• since y2k20 in not really a clock or calendar problem, I moved the content here

Y2038 Problem (and Y2106 Problem)

Many Unix systems and C/C++ programs using the "time_t" or "time_b" structures will hit a wall on Monday 2038-01-18. The reason for this is the fact that these 32 bit clocks record the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-01-01 (start of the Unix epoch).

1. If the 32-bit clock location was treated as a signed integer, then there are only (2^31 = 2,147,483,648 seconds) ~68.051 years of range before we overflow. 1970 + 68 = 2038. BTW, the exact rollover date is: 3:14:08 AM (GMT) on January 19, 2038
   • caveat: some older user software depends upon the fact that negative numbers can be used to represent a limited number of dates before the Unix epoch. This stuff must be renovated ASAP
2. If the 32-bit clock location was treated as an unsigned integer, then there are only (2^32 = 4,294,967,296 seconds) ~136.103 years of range before we overflow. 1970 + 136 = 2106.

Notes:

1. I am convinced that "C" libraries and related OS calls will be modified to either 32-bit unsigned or 64-bit before 2038. According to this article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Linux already has fixed this problem which is probably one reason why Linux is found in the data centers of most banks and insurance companies.
    
2. I wonder how much embedded "C" software will still be working in bank machines, credit card readers, and PC BIOS firmware?

Y4K Problem?

It was suggested by the astronomer John Herschel (1792-1871) among others, that a better approximation to the length of the tropical year would be 365 x 969 / 4000 days = 365.24225 days. This would dictate 969 leap years every 4000 years, rather than the 970 leap years mandated by the Gregorian calendar. This could be achieved by dropping one leap year from the Gregorian calendar every 4000 years, which would make years divisible by 4000 non-leap years. This rule has, however, not been officially adopted.

Programmer's Summary:

1. Never take chances. Always call operating system routines rather than doing the date calculations yourself. The operating system software designers have consulting astronomers on staff to assist in this sort of thing. They will almost always do a better job of this stuff than the little guy.
    
2. BIOS routines are written in firmware. Operating Systems are written in software. Since the BIOS routines may be broken but the operating system may be fixed, never call the BIOS directly, Always call the operating system routines.

Advice to System Managers and System Operators:

For some reason, it is currently considered COOL to make one the following statements...

• I'm not going to upgrade to Windows 95. Windows 3.11 is good enough for our company.
  (Bill Gates isn't going to squeeze me for some feature that I don't need)
   
• I'm not going to upgrade to Windows 98. Windows 95 is good enough for our company.
  (Bill Gates isn't going to squeeze me for some feature that I don't need)
   
• I'm not going to upgrade to Windows 2000. Windows NT4 is good enough for our company.
  (Bill Gates isn't going to squeeze me for some feature that I don't need)

What many people fail to realize is that, in most cases, new software can make up for inadequate hardware. Whenever possible, 32-bit Windows will replace calls to 16-bit BIOS routines with 32-bit alternatives. The routine for your clock chip can also be replaced but only if you have installed new OS software.

Date/Time Stamps (and displays)

How many times have you seen a date of the form 5/10/97 and thought to yourself "is that May 10th or October 5th?". It seems that Americans prefer mm/dd/yy while Brits prefer dd/mm/yy and the remainder of Europe prefers yy/mm/dd. Canadians are so confused they'll use anything. Does anyone know what this 05/06/07 means?

IMHO, the whole world should start to use a variation of the metric format ISO-8601 (sometimes called Star Trek Time) which has the following rules:

1. the most significant field (year) appears first while the least significant field (day) appears last. Similar to the odometer in your car.

2. By removing any slashes, everyone will automatically know which time format is being used. The lack of slashes will also allow the string to be used in computer file names. Some computer file systems (Unix) will allow more than one period in the file name.

3. Leading zeros must always be used to pad fields (e.g. month must be 05 not just 5)

Links:

• ISO 8601 @ Wikipedia
• International standard date and time notation
• http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime (date and time formats)

13 Month Calendar?

It's too bad that many people in the Christian world remain superstitious because a 13-month calendar would be more efficient.

 7 days *  4 weeks  =  28 days per month
28 days * 13 months = 364 days per year

Since the length of a real year on planet Earth is 365.24 days, the 13th month would have 29 days except on leap year when it should have 30.

With a standard 28 days per month it would be easier for businesses and governments to do monthly economic forecasts. Since western workers usually skip between 2-4 work days near the end of December (Christmas, Boxing Day, etc.), this month would be the best candidate to extend by one or two days.

The 13 month calendar would be better for anyone paid once or twice monthly.

DST07 (Daylight Savings Time 2007)

Back in 2005, the Bush/Cheney Administration (USA) thought they could save some energy starting in 2007 by shifting the beginning of DST from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March (advanced by 3 weeks). They also decided to end DST one week later by moving DST from the last Sunday of October to the first Sunday of November (delayed by one week).

Now you would have thought that the computer industry would have learned their lessons after Y2K, but they did not. To make matters worse, rather than keep DST rules in the host OS, we now also need to patch:

• Java Libraries
• C/C++ Libraries
• Oracle Database
• Some Messaging Systems with links into PDAs like the Blackberry
• Some Application Software (containing baked-in DST code)

To add insult to injury, since those Y2K days many North American computer professionals have been let go and their jobs have been outsourced to India where people don't observe DST because they live so close to the equator. Oh well, just another mess linked to the effects of extreme capitalism.

UNIX and Linux

To the best of my knowledge, no RTC (real time clock) chips save the time zone. This means that just after a computer's local time has changed, a BIOS call must be made to save the new time to the RTC chip. Failure to do this means that a rebooted computer may come up with the wrong time. For the past 20 years most UNIX systems updated the RTC from root's crontab by calling /usr/sbin/rtc every morning in APRIL and OCTOBER.

caveat: Linux systems usually employ the command: hwclock -w

You should to stick with database support

A good way to avoid future date-time problems is to stick with products with built-in support. For example, there are "date" and "datetime" objects built into most databases. Look at these two examples from MySQL and MariaDB. The second example is a hack to magically return the data in ISO-8601 "odometer" format

MariaDB [(none)]> select now();
+---------------------+
| now()               |
+---------------------+
| 2018-10-22 14:13:23 |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> select now()+0;
+----------------+
| now()+0        |
+----------------+
| 20181022141330 |
+----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]>

Now try this experiment:

1. create an experimental database called junkdb
2. create a table in it called junk which is comprised of a column which has a type of DATE
3. Now try to create a record with the value of 2022-02-29 which will throw a warning because 2022 is not a leap year

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE `junkdb`;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE TABLE `junkdb`.`junk` (
                  `x1` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
                  `y2` DATE NOT NULL,
                  `z3` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
                  PRIMARY KEY (`x1`));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> use junkdb;
Database changed

MariaDB [junkdb]> insert into junk set y2="2022-03-01", z3="test 1";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [junkdb]> insert into junk set y2="2022-02-29", z3="test 2";
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [junkdb]> select * from junk;
+----+------------+--------+
| x1 | y2         | z3     |
+----+------------+--------+
|  1 | 2022-03-01 | test 1 |
|  2 | 0000-00-00 | test 2 |
+----+------------+--------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

MariaDB [junkdb]> 

Linux: ntpd, chronyd, timedatectl

• ntpd :: the NTP daemon is very old UNIX code so it should be no surprise that many internet-connected systems have been vandalized via UDP port 123
• chronyd :: is the Linux answer to the many of problems found in ntpd. Note that chrony still uses the NTP infrastructure including UDP port 123
• the date command is the way you manually set the date and time on all UNIX systems and early Linux systems. With the advent of systemd there is a special tool for every and this is true of setting date + time which is now done via timedatectl (check your man pages for details)

Links

Calendars

• https://www.time.gov/
• https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/popular-links/walk-through-time (A Walk Through Time - The Evolution of Time Measurement through the Ages)
• Julian calendar @ Wikipedia
• Time + Calendar @ InfoPlease includes the true meaning of "Julian Day" (nothing to do with Julius Caesar)
• Calendars at Wolfram Research
• Index @ Royal Greenwich Observatory
• Sources for Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data
• www.dateandtime.com
• Algorithms + Information
  • http://ghiorzi.org/easterda.htm - JavaScript
• Easter Algorithms
  • https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/python_programming/python_ch38.html
• Birthday Calculator - provides info about your conception etc.
  • Apparently my parents had nothing better to do on Decemeber-23 which was a Sunday
  • I was born in the Chinese "Year of the Dragon" which should impress my Sensei (Karate Instructor).
  • Oops! One of the Karate nerds just informed me I was really born in the Year of the Water Dragon.

Date + Time Formatting

• ISO 8601 @ Wikipedia (e.g. yyyymmddhhmmss )
• International standard date and time notation
• http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime (date and time formats)

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Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.