Times they are a changin' earlier this year

WESTFALL - They don’t age in the same way, but as it is for you and me, time is probably a computer’s biggest enemy. This year, our cyber helpers are suffering a change in Daylight Saving Time’s start and end dates. Starting March 11 and ending with a longer, brighter evening for candy manufacturers on Halloween, the longer DST has prompted some Y2K-like concerns for techies and is something computer users need to be aware of at home as well. In 2005, Congress extended the period of daylight-saving time by three weeks in the spring and one week in the fall, through the end of October. The plan was to provide more daylight in the evening and cut energy use. The problem has prompted varied responses. Lawmakers in Wisconsin moved quickly to ensure that anyone imbibing on the night of the change, or rather the early morning, won’t have to go home early. Under current law, bars have to close at 2:30 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The new law will allow bars to remain open to 3:30 a.m. on the night of the time change, thus preventing the loss of 30 minutes of drinking time. A more serious problem is the extra work computer administrators have been putting in, dealing with software set to automatically advance its clock by an hour on the old date, the first Sunday in April. With its three campuses, the Delaware Valley School District has hundreds of computers to change. In addition to the learning process, the computers keep time-related records, schedules, appointment calendars, provide time stamps on campus video equipment, as well as running all the schools clocks. Director of Technology Gina Vives said Wednesday that she and her staff have been working on the time change problem for about a month, installing updates, software patches. “We tested and I’m feeling secure about things,” she said. Vives has been advising school staff to be especially cautious of personal appointment calendars. “They’re going to be buggy,” she said. While Microsoft has provided an update which will correct any new entries; older entries won’t be updated. “I’ve been telling people to print out the old calendar, and type in the correct times after the update is installed. Very few people keep track of dates that they make appointments,” said Vives. Other manufacturers are providing patches for peripheral equipment, such as fax machines and phone switches. There are potential compatibility woes for other business equipment and many other fixes that need to be applied, not just from Microsoft, but also from Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and other software suppliers. Cell phones running Microsoft software will also need attention. Many of the school staff also have similar equipment at home and Vives has sent home e-mail instruction about getting computer help from Microsoft. The only Microsoft product immune from the bug is the new Vista platform. The software giant has been very cautious in its statements about the problem. An inquiry to one of Microsoft’s press agencies, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, was directed to a specific handler, but Nick Sherrill quickly explained, “I’m not a spokesman for Microsoft about this.” A subsequent e-mail statement from Microsoft explained the problem and noted, “The 2007 change could impact software which use automated calendar or scheduling functions; use date and time stamps for hardware (employee time clocks) and software; process or manipulate dates or time.” The company has been issuing updates and patches for the problem since Feb. 13 and computers set to automatically receive updates have been downloading them ever since. Vives noted that there is also a manual answer to the problem, which simply involves turning off the automatic Daylight Savings Time update on your computer. For more information about Microsoft’s response to the time change, visit their Web site at www.microsoft.com/dst2007.