Timezone Maintainer Retiring 198
linuxwrangler writes "It's used in Java. It's used in nearly every flavor of UNIX/Linux. In PostgreSQL, Oracle and other databases. Several RFCs refer to it. But where does the timezone database come from? I never gave it much thought but would have assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not. Since the inception of the database Arthur David Olson has maintained the database, coordinated the mailing list and volunteers and provided a release platform and now he is retiring. IANA is developing a transition strategy. Jon Udell has an interesting literary appreciation of the timezone database."
where are the comments? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, in the tradition of something as old school as the timezone database, why don't you RTFA?
Re: (Score:2)
, why don't you RTFA?
why? what did it say?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know. I was hoping you'd read it and tell me. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database [wikipedia.org]
Now was that so fucking hard?
Re:where are the comments? (Score:5, Funny)
We'd leave comments, but it's midnight here. Or at least, that's what my computer clock is telling me all of a sudden.
Definition of awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
But the other scary part is any random bus could have run over this guy any time in the past, and
nobody seems to have been prepared for that.
One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group. This is the second time in the last few years where I've been made aware of such a thing. When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.
The worrisome bit is that we probably don't have any good database of critical component maintainers and their backup maintainers. The guy who maintained that database probably DID get hit by a bus.
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
One wonders how many other situations like this exist, where critical system tools are basically handled by one person, or a tiny group.
When Unix was on its way to becoming a document processing system the programmer who wrote the formatter was killed in an auto accident. The team that took up the task of completing the program found his code so impenetrable that they abandoned it and started over. The original formatter was named roff, short for run off. The replacement was named nroff, new run off. IIRC this made Unix late for its premier as a document processing system. Eventually this was rewritten to be open-source, and named groff, which is still used to format man pages. Definitely deserving the title of useful software, but is there anyone out there who really understands how it works? All those traps and triggers?
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:4, Informative)
this is 100% bullshit.
osanna died of a heart attack, and it was rewritten so it would be in c
rather than pdp assembly.
http://www.netadmintools.com/html/7roff.man.html
True, GP is b*shit... (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up, since I'm losing that ability to post a better history.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=roff&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html#HISTORY [freebsd.org]
Osanna first [roff] version was written in the PDP-11 assembly language and released in 1973. Brian Kernighan joined the roff development by rewriting it in the C programming language. The C version was released in 1975.
[...]
After Osanna had died in 1977 by a heart-attack at the age of about 50, Kernighan went on with developing troff. The next milestone was to equip troff with a general interface to support more devices, the intermediate output format and the postprocessor system. This com- pleted the structure of a roff system as it is still in use today [...]
Re: (Score:2)
The original formatter was named roff, short for run off.
No, it was street slang for rough, because that's how Unix hackers like it.
Re: (Score:3)
When Reiser went to prison an entire file system essentially died on the vine (yes I still use it on some machines). So apparently it happens more often than we expect.
Perhaps that can be used as a measure of importance: Important projects can survive the death of their founder.
Re: (Score:2)
Two words: Jon Postel [wikipedia.org]
A legend who contributed more to the operational structure of the internet than probably any other person. These techno-trustees are Greats.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, there are many stories. Personally I work in astronomy. Given the budget cuts that have been coming down the line in science in the wake of the credit crisis, a lot of institutions have started focussing more on their "core business" and several problems have arisen where the maintainer of a widely used (1000+ users across the globe) package was let go at their local institute because all this work was contributing to the wider community for free, and the local institute (often just a dozen to a few doz
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, yes, yest, this is well known, and careful reading would have revealed I still use it as well.
I'm not sure the posturing is helpful here.
Make no mistake, its dying on the vine. It will not get any fixes, it does not handle some multiprocessor environments (or was it NSF, I forget the details), and it has no formal maintainers. (Opensuse project used to do this, but its largely frozen reiserfs where it is). You use it at the state it was in at the last release and it works well, but don't expect it
Re:Definition of awesome (Score:5, Funny)
You know you read too much Slashdot when you read "IANA" and your internal parser breaks because it isn't followed by a noun. =(
Re: (Score:2)
How does the fridge lamp work, really? (Score:5, Funny)
...assumed that it was under the purview of some standards body somewhere. It's not.
So it was magical server elves all along!
Re:How does the fridge lamp work, really? (Score:5, Funny)
No, this was a server wizard. I can only imagine the beard that comes along with this guy.
Kudos to the wise ones who have kept everything going.
So long... (Score:5, Funny)
....and thanks for all the zones.
Outstanding (Score:4, Insightful)
The "literary appreciation" article is really first rate.
bored legislators (Score:5, Insightful)
The database itself is updated approximately twenty times per year, depending on the year, based on information these experts provide to the maintainer.
Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Better than trying to get stuff done - ever notice that when government is busy fighting amongst themselves your life improves because they're not coming up with new ways to screw it up?
Of course, the real reason for the frequent updates is simply aggregating all the updates from the various governments. Daylight Saving Time being one of the worst since many (most?) countries don't hav
Re:bored legislators (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that complicated. They all translate into offsets in seconds. To the computer, I don't live in America/Los_Angeles on 3:47pm Thu March 3, 2011. The computer sees:
1299196020 (unix time in UTC)
- 28800 (my zone offset in seconds, using the tz database)
+ 0 (no DST in my zone right now)
= 1299167220 (local time)
So the really impressive work has just been in conceptualizing and organizing the database so that a program just needs to lookup two questions: which of the zones am I in, and what is the current offset for that zone?
Actually, It is that complicated (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not that complicated. They all translate into offsets in seconds. To the computer, I don't live in America/Los_Angeles on 3:47pm Thu March 3, 2011. The computer sees: 1299196020 (unix time in UTC) - 28800 (my zone offset in seconds, using the tz database) + 0 (no DST in my zone right now) = 1299167220 (local time) So the really impressive work has just been in conceptualizing and organizing the database so that a program just needs to lookup two questions: which of the zones am I in, and what is the current offset for that zone?
Maybe, but it quickly gets complicated when you try to take a detailed look at the past. Say you're writing a program that generates statistics for certain events (along with pretty PP slides for the boss). You want an exact look at the temporal distribution of these events. You're trolling a huge database for this information, so you have to extract and crunch the relevant records. The program you're writing has to give answers to questions like, "what conditions prevailed on November 16th, 1999, and what
Re: (Score:2)
It's why Astronomers work in Julian Day notation. (sometimes Modified Julain Day, but it's basically the same).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day [wikipedia.org]
But yeah, I used to work for an electricity company, and then things do get complicated, as you have to take into account Daylight Savings, leap seconds and what not if you're trying to predict what customers will do based on data of their past consumption.
Re:bored legislators (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments of the world have too much time on their hands if they average fiddling with local time zones 20 times per year.
You are certainly right about the most recent update, "Mercer County, North Dakota, changed from the mountain time zone to the central time zone." But the changes are not always recent changes. Recent ChangeLog from Fedora 14 Updates:
Other potential hosts/sponsors (Score:5, Informative)
I would expect US NIST Time & Frequency division [nist.gov] or US Naval Observatory Time department [navy.mil] would be more than willing and able to host the zoneinfo database. Otherwise the time-nuts [leapsecond.com] would likely step in and offer their support. A number of them being long time Unix folk, they wouldn't be total strangers to IANA or various national time authorities.
Someone who understands Primer! (Score:2)
I say find someone who completely understands Primer and put that person in charge. Clearly, such a person has already demonstrated the ability to understand absolutely anything about time changes.
Re: (Score:2)
There are no doubt a hundred capable organizations about the world who would likely be willing to host and maintain the database, but the problem is going to be politics. The NIST would likely be seen by non-Americans as a U.S. Government run operation, which they may believe would threaten their sovereignty.
And any time you deal with an international map, you deal with nasty national politics. "How dare you put Palestine in the Israel Standard Time zone!" "Taiwan must use China Standard Time!" "You can
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)...for some strange reason...has been hosting the project. (Off the top of my head, I know that NIH also developed Image and ImageJ, presumably for their own needs.)
<republican>Sounds like more government waste to me. Why is NIH in this business exactly</republican>
Because Arthur Olson worked for the National Cancer Institute of NIH when he started the project, and continues to work there, and because they were willing to provide him space on their FTP server to store the releases etc. and let him run the project and mailing list from there.
Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:5, Insightful)
No disrespect to the man and the effort that must have gone in to creating this, but from a rational perspective we shouldn't need more than one more update ever. Unfortunately as a population we seem to be far too dumb to handle the idea of moving away from something we've done for a long time to something that makes more sense.
Here's all we need for a logical, permanent time solution:
I'm sure there are a few odd cases where exceptions to these guidelines would make sense, and I'm not against it in those cases, but the way we handle time zones now is completely irrational.
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not just eliminate timezones and switch over to GMT/UTC time? Does 12:00 absolutely have to be when the sun is at it's peak?
Re: (Score:3)
This.
While we are at it, time and date will now be represented in the form YYYYMMDDHHmmss and so on. This would bring it into conformance with all other numbers we use.
Re: (Score:2)
Hell I'm all for both of these, I just figure baby steps and such. Fortunately while many don't write it that way, I haven't met a person who didn't understand YYYYMMDD HHmmss format for date/time. It's those early days in the month with Europeans using DD-MM-YYYY format that screw me up, being used to MM-DD-YYYY. I'm sure the same is true the other way around too.
Re: (Score:2)
Being a USAian, I grew up with middle-endian, but the senselessness of it and frequent encounters with little-endian end up making me confused by both. Big-endian always makes sense, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Swatch Internet Time [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least with time zones (as fucked up as the current system is), you can travel anywhere, set your clock to the local time and have a general estimation of the day. Wake up at 6-7am, eat lunch at noon, supper at 5 or 6, go to bed around 11. Makes things much easier on our dumb little brains.
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Insightful)
maybe i'm just a decadent libertine, but i generally eat when i'm hungry, and sleep when i'm tired
Re: (Score:2)
maybe i'm just a decadent libertine, but i generally eat when i'm hungry, and sleep when i'm tired
If I ever want to get to work on time I have to go to bed way before I'm tired and the cafeteria is only open from 11 to 13, which also leaves breakfast boxed in between sleep and work and dinner postponed to after work - usually long after I'm hungry. So for the most part I'd say I don't...
Re: (Score:2)
Need to fix more than just time too. As in my case remembering meetings when a foreign team said their project would be ready in week 33 and the Americans were scratching their heads trying to figure out when that was... Or calling up a foreign office on Monday to follow up on Friday's meeting and discovering that the entire country has gone on vacation for a month. No one answers the phone during Tea Time either.
Forget trying to have a uniform calendar too, 12 months based on Roman ideas is a bit provi
Re: (Score:2)
Use Julian Day for everything, then convert to whatever representation people want at the user interface end.
It's what the astronomers do.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not like you're going to be flying to another country and then living in a well-lit bubble. You'll eat lunch when your hosts offer lunch or when you get hungry; you'll go to bed when it gets dark and you get tired; you'll set your alarm to wake you up an hour or so before your first schedu
Re: (Score:2)
When you're jet-lagged, you're certainly not thinking at your best, and picking up environmental cues is likely not as easy as you make it out to be.
But what I think Pingmaster is kind of saying is that we still have a need for local conventions. Local bus schedules will be tied to the common morning and evening rush hours, which are today centered around local solar noon. And despite geeky protestations to the contrary, local solar noon is important as we are still diurnal mammals whose circadian rhythms
Re: (Score:2)
I still don't see how this is any different than, say, traveling to a Mediterranean country and discovering that everyone has dinner at 8:00 PM (current time!) and everything closes down around noon for a little bit. It's a different country, things are going to be different, you just have to deal with it. I don't think the position of the clock is as big of an issue as you're making it out to be.
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes you can. Using local time to file is dumb.
Zulu time (always) on the clock in the aircraft, and time Enroute are all that are neded to file electronically or in the air with AFSS.
Better yet (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Vernor Vinge? Is that you?
Re: (Score:2)
The astronomers use Julian Day time keeping. easy and unique time references for all of recorded history.
Re: (Score:2)
If you do a little reading up on it, that's partially already the case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#Skewing_of_zones [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why hang on to all of the old vestiges of traditional time to complicate matters? Scrap time zones. Everybody in the world is on the same clock. Decimal time. Why should we divide 356/24/60/60? Keeping the concept of day makes sense for biological reasons, as humans pretty much need to sleep once per day.
Re: (Score:2)
swatch internet time? 1000 ticks pr day, centered on CET.
Re:Stupid humans, why do we still need this crap? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I totally agree! Now that we've settled that, let's fix tension in the middle east.
Re: (Score:3)
Slinkies for everyone! Who can fight when they're playing with a Slinky?
Re: (Score:2)
Eliminate useless crap like Daylight Savings Time. Legal noon and solar noon should have the same offset every day of the year. If you believe that shifting schedules with the seasons has a useful impact, changing your alarm is just as easy as changing your clock.
Changing your own alarm might be easy enough, but changing everyone's schedule is the tough bit. The reason time shifts in daylight savings is to try to extend the evening hours of daylight, reducing energy use. If we don't change the clock and work schedules continue as per the winter, you lose that extra hour of benefit. Either change your clock, or get everyone to agree to opening and closing an hour earlier between April and October.
Note that this is only relevant for locations from around 30 degrees of
Reducing energy use in practice? (Score:2)
The reason time shifts in daylight savings is to try to extend the evening hours of daylight, reducing energy use.
What studies show that daylight saving time reduces energy use in practice?
I estimate you can get global political agreement on timezone consistency shortly after global peace imposed through evidence of porcine aviation.
In other words, "when pigs fly". In 2009, swine flu [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
What studies show that daylight saving time reduces energy use in practice?
http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html [ca.gov] links to this DOE 2008 report [PDF] [energy.gov] which suggests Daylight Savings saved the US 1.3 TWh over 4 weeks in 2007. While this only corresponds to 0.03% of the annual energy output, it's a fair chunk in absolute terms.
Of course, the energy picture is complicated by the fact that DST typically occurs in summer, when temperatures are hotter and there is greater demand for powered cooling, and the demand for that varies from year to year. There's no control environment
No DST in Arizona (Score:2)
There's no control environment to measure it against
Would Arizona vs. New Mexico count as a control environment? Indiana vs. Illinois used to until a few years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Daylight savings isn't just about saving energy. It's also about safety. Especially in places where it's dark during morning rush hour (most of northern europe), it has been demonstrated that you have a lot less accidents if you shift the times so that less people commute to work in the dark. Especially trials in Scotland during the seventies have shown this effect and are the main argument in the UK and other places, even if the savings in energy do play a role as well.
Re: (Score:3)
Look at it from another perspective - would it be easier to coordinate the changing of working and operating hours twice a year, every year, or easier to change the definition of time altogether, and force compliance from everyone?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We just need obeisance to a single world government run by you then it will all work great. We can switch Spain to the same time zone as England to follow your rules and make a few other adjustments.
But that aside, it's not as easy as you make it. For example, there are a few large metropolitan areas that would be split by a time zone if the world did it your way, at great inconvenience to many. Political boundaries shift. I believe there are still a few half-hour time zones in island nations to place t
Re: (Score:2)
No, dump the standard time. I like the daylight savings! I like the bright hours at later times.
Re: (Score:2)
Much of the time zone database involves historical rules too. And that historical knowledge gets updated over time as more is learned. Plus bugs (of course) need fixing. If the entire planet discarded DST overnight and we used UTC everywhere there would still need to be updates to the database after that point. Ie, someone may want to know what the local time was in Samoa on 12:00AM June 3rd 1944 UTC.
Of course, the vast majority of us don't have a need to know this stuff. We use the TZ info to determin
Re: (Score:2)
"Stupid humans"? I thought people like you either said "foolish mortals" or "puny humans".
Re: (Score:2)
...And your comment is really an insight to what it means to make a database. In the real world, when presented with data, one will have missing entries, retarded conventions, and other plain stupidities that must be recorded due to crazy external forces.
You say use "UTC+/-x:xx", how do you know the primary key isn't something just like that? I am sure that primary table serves as a way to get anywhere with the most efficient way a database programming individual could proceed. (actually if someone finds
Re: (Score:2)
"Names should be simple and non-political"
Ha! Hahahahahaha. Yeah. Good luck with that one.
Um, even "UTC" is political. Who came up with it? Why do you need to impose your time scheme on everyone? Sure, time ticks on, but in 60s? 100s? And what gives you the right to dictate universal time for someone on the other side of the globe?
Plus, names are always political, even when you think they aren't. The very idea that someone should adopt a name you want them to is political.
LOL. Vague alarming headline on Slashdot? Oh noes! (Score:2)
I think they have some time to deal with it. The only thing I can find that substantiates this is an old post:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.time.tz/2822 [gmane.org]
I think I can speak for all software developers in expressing a certain amount of disappointment that we were practically one guy-hit-by-a-bus away from switching everyone to UTC once and for all and we missed our chance. =)
time time time (Score:2)
...
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
- E. A. Poe
http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/The_Bells.htm [about.com]
Happy Retirement (Score:4)
Have a happy retirement "Father Time". I wish Arthur David Olson well and a good time off.
Thank you Arthur David Olson for keeping all of the timezones in the world for this many years which is thankless and somewhat of a painful job which has to navigate through all of those governments in the world.
Again thank you Arthur David Olson/
Can't he wait just a little longer to retire? (Score:2)
Jon Postel (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe something similar happened when Jon Postel signed off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel [wikipedia.org]). For a while, he *was* the IANA.
You know your technology has stopped being a frontier when pioneers like these get replaced by commitees. Globally, it's not necessarily a bad thing, just a sign of times.
Re: (Score:2)
RFC 2468: I REMEMBER IANA [faqs.org]
(not linking ietf.org, since it is so dang slow)
You know it's an old Sun workstation... (Score:5, Interesting)
under his desk, with a note taped to it that says "DO NOT TURN OFF".
That time in 1994 when some clod spilled coke on his desk almost brought it down, but TZ Guy was able to dive under his desk with his shirt off to soak up the spill before it started screwing things up...
Take a look at the source for this thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember looking at the source for this package when I was in New York City to run the marathon. It was held the morning the clocks went back to standard time, and I was wondering if my computer was up to date. I looked at the source of the timezone data package and it was filled with all sorts of gems. For instance
# From Paul Eggert (2001-03-06):
# Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin
# in his whimsical essay ``An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost
# of Light'' published in the Journal de Paris (1784-04-26).
# Not everyone is happy with the results:
The comments are very instructive and the rules are all in plain text so I could easily discern that, yes, my system was up to date so that it would switch back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. (I gave up though when I realized that I wasn't sure what my cron daemon would do!)
On Debian just do apt-get source tzdata.
Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date" and follow the "Date input formats" node.
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months,
are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make
coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had
some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to
make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden
routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done
better than handing down our present system.
Great easter eggs in Unix.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, another good place to look for the oddities that are buried in your Unix system is to go to "info date"
I remember the Solaris "truss" man page (equivalent to Linux' strace command) documenting some option, closing with:
This option is for unredeemed hackers who must see the raw bits to be happy.
He missed some (Score:2)
Like 98SE and ME
Meet the new Timelord... (Score:2)
Meet the new Timelord, same as the old Timelord?
In our new era of collaborative social networks such as wikis and issure-trackers it may seem logical to some to think that Arthur David Olson's post might be replaced by an automated process.
Rest assured, the faithful group of volunteers that have helped the good Doctor all these many years are in no danger of being replaced by daleks.
We wish you a fond farewell Mr. Olson.
(Perhaps now you'll have time now to fix the Tardis' broken "chameleon circuit"
Time Cube (Score:2)
Not quite a notable person... (Score:2)
As a follow up to Wikipedia's deletion frenzy, from TFA:
Most of this Talmudic scholarship comes from founding contributor Arthur David Olson and editor Paul Eggert, both of whose Wikipedia pages, although referenced from the Zoneinfo page, strangely do not exist.
I guess they were not notable enough....
It's a HISTORICAL record, dummies... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, or as I used to work in electricity production/sales, it was about predicting what your clients were going to do based on historical record, with the right adjustments for Daylight savings, leap seconds, leap days etc.
Related: Keyboard codes in X. (Score:2)
Try to find an active site or mailing list outside of the freedesktop wiki telling you where to submit patches for new keyboards. And all the links on the freedesktop wiki point to 404 or NXDOMAIN.
At least I didn't get a bounce when sending my patch to the ML(?). No idea where or if that reached human eyes, though.
Up to now, I took keyboard settings for granted, as well.
Re:'bout time (Score:5, Funny)
An allusion to what?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Doubly so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:fuck timezones (Score:4, Insightful)
now is the time to replace timezones with a countdown...
Yes...the Final Countdown!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:2012 (Score:2)
It's looking like a better guess than time ending in 2012.
Figure the confluence of Wikileaks/Successors, Anonymous/Successors, Facebook gets hacked/sells their entire database of real people's names and info, everyone into hypertracking, and on.
We're only at March 2011 and the Day is somewhere in December 2012... 20 months to go at this pace?
Re: (Score:2)
They're both totally invalid years!
Use: 2011-03-13. ;)