Skip to main content

Y2K Part 2

In less than a day, the 3-week early DST change in the US will occur. Airplanes will fall from the sky, your bank account will be reduced to nothing, ATMs will run out of cash, nuclear missiles will launch and your Tivo will be hurled into a wolrd of recording the show after the one you wanted it to.

Actually, you'll probably just lose an hour of sleep tomorrow morning. Unless you have kids. Then you will lose two.

The media has really hyped this problem up, in a style reminiscient to the Y2K bug. Sure, there may be a few missed appointments on Monday, people may have some issues with Outlook (I got 6 invites from a client for the same meeting last week.) But by and large, the impact of this change will be less than that of realizing it's 8:00, not 7:00 and still light out.

Verizon Wirelss is doing all they can to get their customers ready. They sent a text message to my phone the other day, which conveniently had a link embedded in it to its DST Resource Page. What they failed to think through is that the link led to a regular-sized web page, complete with HTML that doesn't render well on the device which they sent it to. Not only did the page take forever to load, but once it did, it was impossible to navigate the Javascript-driven menus once it did. Thanks for that!

All was not lost. Just this morning, I received an e-mail informing me of the same imminent demise that the early DST change will bring. My favorite quote from that e-mail:
"The Verizon Wireless network will seamlessly support the change to DST. While most customers’ devices will experience no impact, customers with BlackBerry devices and most PDAs/smartphones running Palm OS or Windows Mobile will be required to update or patch their devices."

Really? So the so-called "Smartphones" - which are all considerably more expensive, have more features, and overall are much harder to use then their "dumber" counterparts - are not smart enough to realize the the network time has changed? Wow.

What Verizon Wireless recommends is to install the latest DST Patches from Microsoft. Sure, that makes, sense, let me pop on over and read about the potential impact of such a patch:
"All Windows Mobile powered device users affected by the time change should give extra attention to meetings and appointments scheduled between March 11 and April 1, 2007, and between October 28 and November 4, 2007. View any appointments that fall into these date ranges as suspect until you communicate with all meeting invitees to make sure that the item shows up correctly on everyone's calendar."

So not only do we have to worry about this problem this week, but once again in the fall? And the best they can do is recommend that I treat any appointment that I have in the next month as "suspect"? Should I call the authorities? Will the terrorism alert level change if I don't? Hmmm...

And my personal favorite piece of advise throws us all the way back to 1992, the last time that I bought filler paper for my Franklin Planner:
"Prior to applying the DST files, print out your weekly calendars for the affected time periods so that you can keep track of which meetings were scheduled before and after you run the tool."

Time to head out to Staples!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma...
76 comments
Read more

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After...
33 comments
Read more

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem...
5 comments
Read more