DST bug
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 by Dave Winer.
After all the discussion of possible computer bugs due to the change in Daylight Savings Time, I'm pleased to report I had one. 
One of my servers didn't make the change automatically, or so it appeared. No problem, I did it manually. Then a few hours later it was back at the old time. I reset it again. Again, a few hours later it was wrong once again.
I finally had a minute to investigate, and traced it to a Frontier verb, tcp.getCurrentTime. I tried running it on the server, and it displayed the incorrect time. I then found the place where it's called and disabled it, and now the clock shouldn't be off on the server.
However, that wasn't the end of the mystery. When I run it on my desktop machine, calling the same government time server, time-b.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov, it returns the correct time!
On more investigation, it's not quite as interesting I thought it might be. Apparently the server, which is running Windows 2000, isn't getting updates from Microsoft as my Mac OS X desktop is from Apple. My Windows machine still thinks it's in Pacific Standard Time, whereas my desktop computer knows it's Daylight Savings Time. When the clock is set locally, it's automatically adjusted properly, on the server it's adjusted improperly. Disabling the code should take care of it.
