Leap second tonight

Mon Jan 5 17:01:58 UTC 2009

Adrian Chadd wrote:
> Wow, how'd I miss that, I wonder? :)

I would recommend lodging a complaint to the relevant authorities.  That's
sure to help.

But seriously.  Leap seconds occur every couple of years, either on July
30th and Dec 31.  Sometimes both.  And sometimes every consecutive year for
a couple of years on the run.

If your code insists on exactly 60 seconds in all minutes, or 86400 seconds
in a hour, your code is wrong.  You need to take this into account, because
leap seconds are actually pretty common occurrences.

> I'm just angry at the jack moves pulled by last minute timezone changes
> back in Australia, and the massively stupid repercussions seen throughout
> chunks of IT (incl. network auditing setups I had to poke at the time.)
> 
> I'll add "handling second == 60" to the list of things I should check
> for in my code. Thanks. :)

Yeah, last minute declarations are annoying.  Like the british government's
mad-cap idea to change VAT for the first time in donkey's years from 17.5%
to 15% with 7 days warning.  Now that's screwed up.

Nick