Daylight Saving What?
It’s amazing how something invented so long ago can cause grief today. The United States passed a law that would change the rules that we follow for daylight savings time.
As you know, computers keep track of time and can automatically adjust their clocks for daylight savings time. There is no need to “spring forward” or “fall back” your computers’ clock.
All of these DST rules (and all time zone rules) are stored on your computer as part of your operating system. If there are any changes with these rules your computer must be patched or updated in order for it to know about them.
How CBC.ca tracks time
Time is kept in sync with all of the servers using a system called “Network Time Protocol” (NTP).
NTP allows all of the servers to sync their time from really accurate time sources like atomic clocks. This is extremely important in the TV and Radio world and equally important at CBC.ca.
The majority of CBC.ca web servers keep track of time in Eastern Time. The eastern time zone observes DST. This means that if the DST rules change, all of the servers that run CBC.ca must be updated as well.
So what’s the big deal?
Newsletters
The news digests that are sent out are done so on a schedule. This would mean that the emails would arrive an hour earlier (or later).
In fact, twice a year, we need to update this schedule manually because Saskatchewan does not observe DST. In order to keep the Saskatchewan news digest going out on a regular schedule, every spring and fall we need to adjust the schedule on our server manually.
For you techies out there, that means adjusting the cron job each time we switch from daylight savings time to standard time:
###### Sask is in pre-cambrian time. No Daylight saving time:
###### One hour behind ET from Oct until April
#00 13 * * 1-5 perl /sites/cbc.ca/bin/digestmail.pl sask-am-headlines
#00 21 * * 1-5 perl /sites/cbc.ca/bin/digestmail.pl sask-headlines
###### Two hours behind ET from April until Oct
00 14 * * 1-5 perl /sites/cbc.ca/bin/digestmail.pl sask-am-headlines
00 22 * * 1-5 perl /sites/cbc.ca/bin/digestmail.pl sask-headlines
So yes, we will need to update those comments to refelct the new DST rules.
Log Files
Every time you visit the website, certain information is recorded in a log file. We use this data to see which pages people are visiting and how popular certain sections of the site is.
The time of the visit is also recorded and needs to be accurate in order for us to produce accurate statistics.
Program Guide
Accurate time is necessary in order for the Program Guide to be useful. You wouldn’t want to miss your favorite CBC program because the Program Guide is an hour off.
If Only…
If we were using UTC time instead of eastern time for timekeeping, this would be a non issue and we wouldn’t have to patch four different types of operating systems.
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I wonder how many people have missed their favourite CBC programs because Program Guide is down…
I love that you quoted the term ‘pre-cambrian time’, which I believe came from YukonJohn in passing (and I know exactly how it came to appear in the crontab comment, Ahem).
Are you not now expecting an emotional response from your central canadian readers?
Rockstar, I put that in there just for you… as an homage to your time served here ;).
Getting any sort of reaction from the central canadian readers would be a bonus
Would it have been worth mentioning that because DT comes earlier this year, many older computers that don’t get regular OS updates may miss and need to be timeset manually?
As a central canadian reader, I am compelled to reply. Don’t take our time away. We don’t want to change.
In fact, there’s a bunch of old servers that we won’t be bothering to patch, because we’ve determined that they don’t matter and the risk is too high to patch them. Most of them are being tossed within the next 3 months anyway, so it’s not worth the effort.
# Michael Says:
Windows 95, 98, maybe even WinME can benefit from the Time Zone Editor tool that came with the Kernel Toys utilities from Microsoft. This allows you to (easily) edit the time zone and DST definitions for all the changes. Apparently still available.
–Bob.
I’ve always disliked Spring Forward and this year will be the worst ever. I say we all change to Saskatchewan time.
I wonder if the government ever considererd just doing our own thing. I’m not sure about in Canada but in the UK, BST British Summer Time (our Daylight Saving Time) was introduced as an emergency measure in World War I. I for one don’t believe that Kaizer Bill is quite the treat he used to be. Let’s just abolish the whole thing. The bonus is that Americans wound not only not understand our money or our units of measure, they wouldn’t even understand the time.
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Since when has Canada left the Americas?
The time has come to finally abolish daylight saving time. Someone once said “Daylight Saving time makes liars out of clocks and fools out of people”. I could not agree more.
Standard time rules!