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One of those magic times: On Friday the 13th! – Linux Magazine Online
Posted by Xeno on February 14, 2009
Jon maddog Hall
“At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890.
Where will you be at this momentous second?” – from Bell Labs
This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. If you want to find out what time it will be in your local time, try this Perl script courtesy of Matias Palomec:
perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890),”n”;’
Now if there was any reason to fear Friday the 13th, I think this is it. That many numbers sequentially in a row representative of time? Who knows what will stop working? Will lex(1) cease to work, will yacc(1)s
everywhere revolt? Will the rapture be upon us?
I remember asking Alan Cox about UNIX (note that I spelled UNIX in all capital letters, as it should be) time with respect to Linux in 1999. I was confident that most Linux systems would not be adversely affected by “Y2K”, but I knew about a hidden time-bomb in the year 2038, when the “UNIX epoch” comes to an end. Alan assured me that Linux was now working on 64-bit time, and its “roll-over” would happen about the time that the sun burnt out. And while this upcoming event is not a “roll-over”, nevertheless because it occurs on Friday the 13th I will be holding my breath….
I intend on being at the place where I have the best chance of surviving this potential catastrophe and where I can personally do the most good:
=>Martha’s Exchange Restaurant in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA<=
… Who will join me as we watch the time of UNIX line up? Please have a picture taken of you and your friends whereever you are at this time and email it to me at Pawprints AT linuxpromagazine DOT com
via One of those magic times: On Friday the 13th! – Linux Magazine Online.
We survived.
