21
Mar
2009
Time Changes, The Media and NTP
Through all walks of life people have been effected by the change of daylight savings which didn’t occur this weekend.
Traditionally Daylight Savings Time (DST) in Eastern Australia has finished on the last Saturday night (well very early Sunday morning) in March. A change to legislation has pushed this back a week to the first weekend in April in a bid to lower power consumption and thus reduce carbon emissions. The start of DST has been bought forward by three weeks also, which comes into effect later this year.
Today the media has been reporting of ‘computer bugs’ and ‘computer glitches’ which automatically in-corrected clocks. News.com called the error a software ‘cock up’. What really caused the issue to occur?? It was a combination of hard coding items like DST settings into software and not having a process for updating the software.
The real issue today, wasn’t technology it, was process. Software designers have a responsibility to ensure that their software will be usable from the factory and through life cycle. The only way to do this is to allow updating.
IT Pros also need to wear some of the blame for the issues experienced today. There were a number of computer systems, that support updating, which didn’t have updated Time Zone settings and were displaying the incorrect time.
The real test will come tomorrow as the majority of users return to work. What time will they be turning up to their appointments and meetings??