IT Confidential: Resolving To Resolve The Daylight-Saving Time Problem

I hate New Year's resolutions. You start out with wide-eyed optimism, then slowly evolve from misgiving to apprehension to anxiety to guilt, when you finally have to admit you can't live up to your self-imposed obligations. Kind of like marriage, but without the second income.

What I find remarkable is how depressingly unoriginal New Year's resolutions tend to be: lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, drink less, find time to relax. I wondered if a technology manager's list might look a little different, more positive, more original. But no, as far as I can tell, it's the same familiar refrains, except with a technology filter. (Stop me if you're getting tired of the list thing, but it works well online, so I'm sticking with it.)

Lose weight: What's an Intel-based server weigh these days--10, 15 pounds? Virtualization software promises to help shed some of that excess plastic, which is why a lot of technology managers are pushing it to the top of their 2007 priority lists (see "Running Start"). Virtualization may not eliminate the bulge around the midrange, but it will definitely help spruce up the bottom line (so to speak).

Stop smoking: Because smoking is what those overheated blade servers will start doing if you don't figure out a quick and dirty way to dissipate that heat.

Exercise more: As if running from a meeting on intellectual property protection to interviewing a tattooed code jockey to handling an end user's complaint about interface fields wasn't enough.

Drink less: Of the Web services Kool-Aid. Not that Soap, WSDL, and UDDI don't sound cool, but what do they matter when the online transaction server is overloaded and customers can't order the company's latest product?

More "me" time: Translation--we can wait on that Windows Vista upgrade project.

Finally, here's a real New Year's resolution you'd better put on your list, if you don't have it there already: Fix the time-stamp problem. No, not THAT time-stamp problem--the one that has to do with the change in daylight-saving time.

In 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act, which provides guidelines and incentives for energy conservation. Probably as a sop to the powerful Amish farmers lobby, the Energy Act also extends daylight-saving time by a few weeks. Instead of starting the first Sunday in April, it now starts the second Sunday in March; instead of ending the last Sunday in October, it's now over on the first Sunday in November (remember: spring ahead, fall back).

The change takes effect this year. That means many of the systems and apps that use the current daylight-saving time parameters are going to have a rude awakening--or maybe they won't, but you will. A technology exec at a large Midwestern bank told me his group has been spending a lot of time on the DST problem; the company even appointed a project manager to oversee the work. He sent me a link to IBM's Web page concerning the problem, which is worth checking out.

Sun has one for Java, and Microsoft has several pages devoted to the problem on its site. Microsoft provides patches to change the DST parameters in its operating systems, except for Windows 2000 (see "Heat's On Win2000 Holdouts").

It's not a problem of millennium proportions, but it's a New Year's resolution you need to fulfill.

Got any New Year's resolutions you'd like to share? Or industry tips? Send them to [email protected] or phone 516-562-5326.

To find out more about John Soat, please visit his page.