Blogging has been light—in fact I'm at least a week behind in my blog
reading
between work and twins
(and even more behind in reading my non-work email), but tonight I'd be
remiss not to try and capture an exchange Jacob (age six) and I had over
ice-cream this evening...
Jacob: You dated Mom before you married her, right?
Michael: I did.
Jacob: Did you date her when you were in High School?
Michael: I went on a couple of dates with her
then. The first one was to see the Disney movie Little Mermaid.
Jacob:
Which Little Mermaid,
number one or number two?
Michael: Number one. It had just come out
and was still playing in movie theaters.
Jacob: So was Mom your girlfriend in High School then?
Michael: She was a friend who was a girl. I
had different friends who were girls but never just one "girlfriend" that I dated
all the time.
Jacob: Oh.
Michael: The summer after I finished High School—before I started college—I went to live with my friend whose family had moved
to Las Vegas and worked to earn money for
college and a
mission.
I was homesick at first and wrote lots of letters to all my
friends and families. Your Mom was one of the best letter writers and by
the end of the summer we were sending and receiving letters in the mail
practically every day. I guess you could say we dated by mail.
Jacob: Why didn't you just send emails?
Michael: Well, back then most people didn't
have email yet so we sent old fashioned letters.
Jacob: Oh. Did you even have light bulbs
then?
Michael: Um, yes, we did.
Jacob: Who invented the light bulb again? I forget.
Michael: Thomas Edison.
I briefly thought about digressing into a discussion of the
history of email
systems (and how I first sent email messages over the Internet without
being directly connected to the Internet in the late 1980s), and
about bulletin board systems and proprietary online services and
a host of related topics, but then I realized that to his generation a
world without near-universal email would sound about as strange to him
as a world without light bulbs would.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, March 06,
2007
at 22:14
168 comments
| Printer friendly version
This past weekend we sprung forward (for daylight saving time) two weeks
earlier than we normally would have. Most years it takes my body a couple of
weeks to adjust. This year I won't have a problem (because I'm so tired from
having been on call for the change) and I can thank my congressmen for that.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, specifically §110, reads:
(a) Ammendment.—Section 3(a) of the Uniform
Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S.C. 260a(a)) is ammended—
(1) by striking "first Sunday of April" and inserting "second Sunday of March"; and
(2) by striking "last Sunday of October" and inserting "first Sunday of November".
(b) Effective Date.—Subsection (a) shall take
effect 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act or March 1, 2007
whichever is later.
(c) Report to Congress.—Not later than 9 months
after the effective date stated in subsection (b), the Secretary shall report
to Congress on the impact of this section on energy consumption in the
United States.
(d) Right to Revert.—Congress retains the right
to revert the Daylight Saving Time back to the 2005 time schedules once
the Department study is complete.
This isn't
the first time DST has changed since the initial Uniform
Time Act of 1966 established DST between the last Sunday in April and
the last Sunday in October:
- 1974: During the energy crisis DST began on the first Sunday in January (!) and ended on the last Sunday in October
- 1975: During the energy crisis DST began on last Sunday in February and ended on the last Sunday in October
- 1976-1986: DST in effect between the last Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October (i.e., back to the original 1966 period)
- 1987-2006: DST in effect between the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October
- 2007: DST in effect between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November
- Beyond? Depends on Congress...
Two decades ago (in 1987) when DST last changed in the United States
computers were not nearly as pervasive and networked as they are today.
Novell Netware was only a few years old. The US DoD had standardized on
TCP/IP a mere five years earlier, and there were only an estimated 28,000
or so hosts on the entire Internet.
The world is a much more complexly internetworked place now. Congresses
(temporary?) change of the DST rules necessitated substantial updates to
many computer systems.
It took a lot of "busy work" to get ready for what some have called
Y2K7. For me
Sun
Microsystem's belated alert regarding EST & MST backwards
compatibility in Java resulted in substantial on-call pay this weekend.
(Thanks Sun!) It is at times like these that having Expect in my toolbox really comes in handy.
At many companies that use Microsoft Exchange you'll be pretty much free to miss
(or be up to an hour late) for any meeting you don't want to attend for
the next three weeks. Yet another benefit of this legislation. :-)
Oh, and there are special tax breaks for consumers available (unrelated to daylight
savings) too.
Having delved into the Congressional Record
once before, I decided to see if there
had been any congressional debate or discussion on the technology
impact of changing the DST rules.
Debate on the Energy Policy Act of 2005 came to the House
floor on April 20-21, 2005 and then again (after passage by the Senate and
a conference committee between the House and the Senate) on July 27-29.
Overall the act was quite controversial, but even
those who were almost completely opposed to it saw the daylight saving
change as a good thing (emphasis added below):
I have the greatest respect and affection for the Chairman of the Committee, the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), but I must say in all honesty that this is really a terrible energy bill.
The Chairman comes from Texas, and I'm sure that from a Lone Star State perspective, this looks like a pretty good bill. But most of our constituents don't come from oil producing states. Most of our constituents are energy consumers, and from a consumer perspective this bill is seriously deficient. In fact, I would suggest that this bill is a bit like that old Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western: "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
There is a tiny bit of good in the bill--like extending daylight saving time by a month in the Spring and a month in the Fall. Now, that was a good idea, it really was--and I'm glad that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) and I were able to get it in the bill.
But in all honesty I think I have to say that for the most part, what we have here before us today is one truly Bad and Ugly bill.
— Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), April 20, 2005, Congressional Record, H2195
Nobody voiced any opposition, questions, or concerns about changing
the start and end dates of daylight saving time. Those that even bothered
mentioning it uniformly praised the effects it would affect on reducing
energy consumption, lower crime, and reducing traffic accidents. (Always
without citing any specific studies or reports to back up those claims.)
No one apparently foresaw (not even those who think Republicans are out to
get the sick and the elderly) the warnings the FDA would issue earlier this
year:
Dear Healthcare Practitioner, Hospital Director and Safety Manager:
This is to alert you to the possibility that some medical devices (equipment), hospital networks and associated information technology systems may generate adverse events because of the upcoming change in the start and end dates for Daylight Savings Time (DST), and to suggest actions you can take to prevent such occurrences.
While we do not know which specific devices might be affected, FDA is concerned about medical devices or medical device networks that operate together or interact with other networked devices, e.g. where a synchronization of clocks may be necessary.
If a medical device or medical device network is adversely affected by the new DST date changes, a patient treatment or diagnostic result could be:
- incorrectly prescribed
- provided at the wrong time
- missed
- given more than once
- given for longer or shorter durations than intended
- incorrectly recorded
Any of these unpredictable events could harm patients and not be obvious to clinicians responsible for their care.
— FDA Preliminiary Public Health Notification
Unpredictable Events in Medical Equipment due to New Daylight Savings Time Change
March 1, 2007
Am I bitter about daylight savings? No—I lived through
the 1993 temporal chaos caused by
the government of the Brazilian state of Amazonas just fine.
I am disappointed that there doesn't appear to have
been any recognition in Congress—at least on the record—that
changing the DST rules in 2007 is a bigger deal than it was in 1987 or during
1973-74.
Let's at least hope Congress will continue to stick with the Gregorian Calendar however!
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, March 12,
2007
at 20:43
571 comments
| Printer friendly version
Placing yourself in the middle comes in handy in all sorts of situations.
The following skeleton of Tcl code is fully functional and easily extended.
I've used it in one form or another for many years now:
socket -server accept listeningPort
proc accept {client addr port} {
if {[catch {socket -async destHost destPort} server]} then {
shutdown $client
} else {
fconfigure $client -blocking 0 -buffering none -translation binary
fconfigure $server -blocking 0 -buffering none -translation binary
fileevent $client readable [list glue $client $server]
fileevent $server readable [list glue $server $client]
}
}
proc glue {src dst} {
if {[catch {puts -nonewline $dst [read $src]}] ||
[eof $src] || [eof $dst]} then {
shutdown $src $dst
}
}
proc shutdown {args} {
foreach sock $args {catch {close $sock}}
}
vwait forever
It's possible to get even more mileage out of it. With just another couple
of lines you can bridge SSL coming and/or going.
I love Tcl's event-driven I/O.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, March 12,
2007
at 23:03
802 comments
| Printer friendly version
