Terry Tyson’s Blog

Back in 2005 congress approved changing the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST). That change goes into effect this year. Therefore, computers should be patched before March 11 (when the change takes place). Recently, I patched my firewall, web server, and laptop. The following is the zdump output before and after the patch.

# zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime  Sun Apr  1 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Apr  1 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0
/etc/localtime  Sun Apr  1 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Apr  1 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime  Sun Oct 28 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime  Sun Oct 28 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Oct 28 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0

patch applied

# zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 07:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 CST isdst=0
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 08:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 CDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2007 CDT isdst=1
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 CST isdst=0

For most home users, not patching their computers will not have any life shattering effects. In the corporate world, however, not patching servers can shut a business down. I have a friend who works in a datacenter. Most of their servers run Oracle databases on the Solaris operating system. They handle thousands of transactions per second and not properly patching these servers can wreak havoc.

Even on a home system it’s a good idea to patch properly. If you use a UNIX like operating system, you probably already know how to patch. If you use Windows, it’s easy enough to use Windows Update to keep your computer up to date.

My hat’s off to my 6 year old daughter who beat me in checkers last nite. Towards the end of the game, I had her out numbered. There were only three checkers left on the board; two were mine and all three were crowned. She pulled a couple of surprising moves and took both of my pieces. Congratulations to a smart little girl.

I’ve always received e-mails at work the have been nitemares to deal with. Now that I’ve taken on new responsibilities, these e-mails have increased dramatically. I finally decided there should be a name for these types of e-mails. Introduce the “e-mare,” an email that is a nitemare to deal with.

My 6 year old daughter impressed me yesterday morning by pulling her own tooth. It was the forth for her to loose. I was much older than that before I began pulling my own teeth.

I’ve started using drupal, a Content Management System (CMS), for my homepage. So far it has been alot nicer than editing html files or trying to code it in php myself. The default theme doesn’t look as good as the one currently used on this blog but it’s functional and I’ll get arround to changing it some day.