Saving Daylight

There are a few sites on the Internet which are just flat-out irreplaceable. Yahoo.com, microsoft.com, and internic.net are all pretty important, but none of these make the list. One site does:

ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub

Whenever any government body futzes with timezones, it gets noted, and the tzdata file on this FTP site gets updated.

I mention this because Congress had the bright idea to change when the U.S. moves into Daylight Saving Time. Since the Reagan administration, the parts of the U.S. that acknowledge this switch have been doing it on the first weekend in April and the last weekend in October. In 2007, this changed to be sometime in March and sometime in November.

Uh, OK.

If you use Windows or a Mac, you've probably already got your automatically updated timezone information by now, but you probably want to double-check that. For us UNIX folks, we'd better make sure that /etc/localtime is pointing to the right spot in /usr/share/zoneinfo, and most importantly, that that file has been updated with the right DST info:

$ zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007