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Just sleep in: Swedish researchers find Daylight saving time, erratic sleep schedules could affect your health

Happy November.


As I tweeted this week, daylight saving time ends this weekend in much of North America.  And leave it to Dr. Nancy Snyderman to tell us that the time changes brought on by daylight saving time may not be good for your health


For devs staying up late to code, consider that you should likely sleep in if you stay up late for a night of coding.  😉


Dr. Nancy referred in her spot on the Today show to a study published on Wednesday suggests that the risk of heart attack my be linked to disturbances in sleep patterns and the time changes that come with daylight saving time.  Salynn Boyles of WebMD Health News reports in an article that daylight saving time may affect your heart, according to the research on heart attack sufferers in Sweden. 


j0438743[1] The research found that the risk of a heart attack rises in the first few days after the “Spring Forward” associated with daylight saving time, likely due to a loss of sleep.  And inversely, the risk goes down in the fall after the end of DST and people select to get an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning.


As noted in the article, co-author of the study Dr. Rickard Ljung said that the report results “suggest that even small disturbances in sleep patterns may affect the heart.”



“We know that Monday is the most dangerous day for heart attacks,” he tells WebMD. “It has been thought that this is due to the stress associated with returning to work after the weekend, but our study suggests that disturbed sleep rhythms may be involved, and that the extra hour of sleep we get in the fall [after daylight saving time ends] may be protective.”


So next spring, when you have to set your clocks forward, choose to sleep in and then delay your start on Monday as well.  As I recall from my past international travels, it takes a day for every time zone you cross for your body to adjust to the local time. 


Whatever you do, remember that “time is a precious thing. Never waste it.


I wonder if similarly, heart attack rates remain the same in the areas not affected by these DST changes, places such as Arizona and Hawaii, or Saskatchewan and parts of northern British Columbia.  Or perhaps if they’re following the gyrations of the stock market or doing business with folks in affected time zones, they have to get up an hour earlier and face the same risk.


As always, to ensure that your computers are up to date, visit http://www.microsoft.com/time for more details.


Tags: Microsoft, health, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, RSS, DST, 4,880,000 (up from 4.3M a month ago); 1,940,000 (up from 900K a year ago, down 200K since last month)


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Windows Vista, Windows 7, conferences and other things taking up my time

Generally the lack of posts in October is directly related to the (growing) amount of work on my plate at the office.  It’s been very busy, as we increase efforts in advance of PDC and WinHEC, and the efforts we have currently on track.

It was with interest that I read today in the Seattle Times an article from Times technology reporter Benjamin J. Romano, "With Windows 7, Microsoft faces a future full of challenges."  Romano writes that "when the company divulges details of Windows 7, the successor to much-maligned Vista, it will do so against a backdrop of growing competition from Apple, a battered Windows brand and the global economic crisis."

"Microsoft has made big changes in how it builds Windows since releasing Vista, in part to avoid repeating past mistakes.

"Many executives involved with Vista have moved elsewhere within Microsoft or left the company. Those in charge now include Steven Sinofsky, who earned a reputation for keeping big projects on schedule as the head of development for Microsoft Office, and Jon DeVaan, who also leads a companywide effort to improve engineering."

I’ve seen several articles on how the Windows management team has (as Romano puts it "reduced the Windows bureaucracy and given front-line developers more responsibility." 

Is that a bad thing, distributing responsibility to the people closest to the code?

Windows 7 has been pumped in the press as the "most secretive product ever."  So, is it a bad thing that Microsoft management has "kept a tight lid on details about Windows 7"?  Companies do that every day, and have a devil of a time keeping a lid on new innovation, features and offerings.  I’ve found that Microsoft provides tremendous transparency on technology and applications to our customers and partners.  If there’s one thing I learned, many developers and systems administrators don’t like surprises.  They want the ability and reliability to plan. 

Perhaps the Steve Jobs’ approach of "one more thing" works for consumers and entertainment technology, but for enterprises?  I don’t think so.  Scott Bekker of Redmond Magazine wrote back in 2002 that as Microsoft provided a a roadmap for future software and technologies for enterprises, there were "no surprises…"  and I think that’s the way many IT professionals prefer it.  At least, that’s what I’ve heard often enough.

Of course, all this predictability doesn’t mean one can’t continue to work and provide products with added value.  That’s one of the reasons I’m personally looking forward to PDC, and the disclosures we’ll see around a number of product and services that we’re all very excited about.  As Wolfgang Gruener posted last month in the article on tgdaily.com on PDC 2008, there will be "no surprises" on Windows 7, noting that "22 out of 155 sessions will directly new features in Windows 7 – which makes the software the second-most covered topic (behind cloud services with 26 sessions) during the event…"

Also of note:  hand in hand with the above article in the Times is one on how PC manufacturers (OEMs, ODMs)are rolling out machines that can boot up in no time.

"Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people access to basic functions such as e-mail and a Web browser in 30 seconds or less. Asus, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest maker of the circuit boards at the center of every PC, has begun building faster-booting software into its entire product line.

"Even Microsoft, whose Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that "a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds."

It’s always good to hear (as we saw during a recent Springboard webcast) how Vista SP1 provides many of the enhancements today that people are looking for, and how PC OEMs are getting smarter about satisfying their customers with faster boot times and reduced "application overhead."  In the webcast, Gabe Aul noted that "driver maturity helps a lot" and Ed Bott offered a specific example. Link to Springboard series with MarkAt 6:20 in the video, Ed relates an hands-on experience with one customer who purchased a notebook PC with Vista in April of 2007, and had a negative experience (with Vista RTM). Ed recalls that he contacted the customer, arranged to get the machine…

"… a year later after SP1 came out, [I] refreshed all the drivers, installed SP1 and sent it back (to the customer) who said that "I don’t even recognize this machine, the experience is so dramatically improved." 

That’s one of the main reasons we’re considering a new computer this fall for home use, to replace an aging notebook. The improved performance with Windows Vista SP1 is a real selling point, along with hardware specs that will likely be more that ready for what’s to come in terms of future applications and services.

Tags: Microsoft, performance, Windows 7, Windows Vista, PDC 2008.

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Windows 7 pre-beta bits and more for PDC 2008 attendees

Before I head off with my youngest to his guitar lessons and the skatepark, a few words on one of my favourite topics at the office: Windows 7.  Maybe I can get him an opening set gig.


You may’ve heard the hoopla that we will provide Windows 7 pre-beta bits to attendees at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October, on a snazzy new 160GB external USB hard drive.  True.  Also true: included will be all the SDKs, binaries, whitepapers and more distributed at the conference.


The PDC team also announced additional information on the PDC web site (at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/) such as…



  • a major lineup of executive keynote speakers representing most of the core Microsoft businesses.

  • more than 20 Windows 7 sessions, plus

  • distribution of the Windows 7 bits

Personally, I am looking forward to hearing Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie reprise their talk with their thoughts and goals for Microsoft’s application architecture and distributed computing (also in the cloud).  These guys are not to be missed.


Brain


I’m also on Twitter following the PDC 2008 tweets, recently tweeting on another interview with the Brain in The Jar (also at http://tinyurl.com/3uc57g). Fun stuff.


 


Tags: conferences, PDC2008, Microsoft, Windows 7.


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Another look at the year 2038 problem

I was asked last week (again) for guidance I could give (being involved in time in one way or another, in addition to my day job) on how Microsoft products may be impacted by the 2038 issue


As I noted in January, the Year 2038 problem (as defined by the Wikipedia entry)



“The year 2038 problem (also known as “Unix Millennium bug”, “Y2K38,” “Y2K+38,” or “Y2.038K” by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represent system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970.[1] This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.


Some people believed that the bulk of issues would surface on January 19, 2008, the date when new 30-year mortgages and bonds could be impacted.  In fact, much of the impact would have been seen years ago given that there are many financial instruments with a greater than 30 year life span: some mortgages and bonds extend out 40 years, and there are Japanese and English mortgages that can span close to a century.


From what I understand (thanks to the education from Geoff, Shay and several folks in DevDiv), information on how to mitigate the year 2038 bug was included in our Y2K response in the late 1990’s.  And Microsoft has provided guidance and statements on our various web sites, as impacts have generally been product specific for older products no longer in support (unless otherwise indicated in a supporting KB article).


In general…


  • currently supported core OS and mainstream support products operate as designed and with no known negative impact with regards to the 2038 unless otherwise noted.
  • SYSTEMTIME has no problems and can go until the year 30,827.
  • FILETIME, a 64-bit integer (two DWORDs representing LOW and HIGH values) since January 1, 1601 (Julian). It too can represent a 30,000 (or 60,000 unsigned) year interval.
  • Difficulties will be found were developers use C/C++ time_t, which will run out in 2038.

Programs that are compiled with VC8 or newer and do not define _USE_32BIT_TIME_T are immune to Year 2038 problems caused by time_t, assuming that they do not contain bugs themselves (casting a time_t to an int and back will truncate it). I’m told by the Developer division that…


For more references…



Hope this helps.

Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Windows, Time, 2038.


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Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki live at Mix08, with links to the video to prove it

Of interest today from MIX ’08 is this coverage in the Seattle Times of the interview with Steve Ballmer by Seattle Times technology reporter Benjamin J. Romano. The on-stage interviewer was my old friend Guy Kawasaki of Apple, Garage.com and truemors.com fame.

“Kawasaki pulled no punches during an hour of pointed questioning that hit on some of Microsoft’s and Ballmer’s most sensitive issues, but Kawasaki still managed to come across as good-natured…”

“In addition to his jabs, Kawasaki had some nice things to say.

“As a venture capitalist, he said, he’s worked with Microsoft a lot in recent years.

“It’s a different Microsoft,” he said. “There’s not the arrogance, there’s not the sort of bullying aspect. These people are really smart, they’re really hardworking. … I just want to give you a little bit of praise. The new Microsoft employee is very different. It’s really very easy to work with your company.”

You can read more in the Ballmer Q&A: Extended coverage in the Times, and see a video of Steve on stage at Mix on You Tube: Steve Ballmer screamed “Web Developer” at Mix08

Even better: the Steve Ballmer Q&A with Guy Kawasaki is available online via the following streaming media links, courtesy of the good folks at Mix on the visitmix.com blog:

Also of interest for further reading on Microsoft management: Seattle Times’ article on the post-Gates era, plus ThinkWeek and the need for more cowbell.

Tags: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Guy Kawasaki, Mix08, Microsoft.