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Happy new year, and a reprise on being thankful

For the last post of 2008, I thought to reprise my post on being thankful, as I am fortunate enough to spend my holiday with my family. In that past post, Of interest: Being Thankful, I noted the Seattle P-I newspaper’s slide show on "Words of Thanks."

"What are you most thankful for? P-I photographer Meryl Schenker profiles six local residents who have different reasons for giving thanks on this holiday."

At home, we’re thankful for many things, primarily for good health, family, and our community. The philanthropist W. Clement Stone said that "If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share."

So I’ve included this link on how to help over the holidays from my previous hometown paper.  Or just pay it forward.  I’ll do my part for 2009 starting this week. 

As we noted to friends, family and associates on our Christmas card list, with the severe weather we’ve had over the last week, we’ve been a bit challenged to keep the boys from going stir crazy at home, spending our less-than-abundant free time occupying theirs.  So this year, rather than rush to send out cards, we decided to reprise our electronic Christmas card effort of a few years ago: to donate the money we would normally spend (towards postage, cards, photos and the like) to the local chapter of the United Way. 

Have a wonderful new year, and best wishes in 2009.

Tags: what I read.

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Advisory: 30GB Zune issues noted today, related to time and the leap year

MP3 players

First it was questions about whether or not we’d have to worry about the coming Leap Second, then today after our power came back on, customer questions about the Zune 30.

As we have a couple of Zune 30s in our home going strong, I was surprised to see a post on the Zune Insider blog WRT the 30 GB Zune and news of issues reported today related to leap years (which some referred to as Zune2K and Y2K9), especially with all of the efforts we have applied to dealing with time and calendar changes around the world.

The team has been working throughout the day on this issue, and Paul from the Zune Insider blog offers this update this afternoon:

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used).  The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. 

The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009.   We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on.  If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device. 

Customers can continue to stay informed via the support page on zune.net (zune.net/support).

We know this has been a big inconvenience to our customers and we are sorry for that, and want to thank them for their patience. 

From the FAQs:

Q:  What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation? 

This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q:  What’s the timeline on a fix?

The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q:  Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008? 

There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

The Zune service is unaffected — as are all Zune 80, 120 and Zune flash models — so we’ll be listening to music via our PC this evening.

Happy New Year.

Tags: Microsoft, Zune.

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Random quotes from 2008: from our resident seven year old on pop music

To start my collection of random quotes, I offer this from one seven-year-old boy at the end of the new movie Iron Man just as the closing credits rolled. It’s a testament to his proficiency on Guitar Hero and eclectic music library:

"Is that Black Sabbath?  I love Ozzy Osborne."

CJ on Guitar, 2008  CJ and his guitar, March 2003

That’s what you get when you hang around with the good folks like Kevin, Jay, Vinnie — and especially his guitar teacher and bassist extrordinaire ‘E’ — at Northwest Guitars.

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Of interest: CNET’s Dawn Kawamoto offers the top cloud news stories of 2008

I’ve been accused (rightly so, I might add) of enjoying general vanilla, Everyman news purveyors such as USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, along with Wired, BusinessWeek and Fortune.  (I also read much more, much to my wife’s chagrin as noted by the stacks of materials and periodicals around my home office and other areas, and the weight of our weekly recycling bin.)  Although I receive print versions of each, I’m reading the online versions more and more: 2008 is the year that I believe I passed the half-way point for most of my news consumed via bits and bytes rather than by bits of paper. 

I resolve in 2009 to cut at least two and migrate completely to digital.  (Note: one decision was already made for me, as PC Magazine announced the move to go all digital in 2008 and quite thoughtfully automatically converted the duration of my subscription. I wish others would offer similar opportunities to their subscribers, rather than only offering much higher priced versions than their paper doppelgangers.)

Clouds, c 2008 M3 SweattIn addition, I have a number of my web news favourites including CNET News, which offers their own coverage as well as syndicated and links to other top stories across the news web. This week, CNET offers their take on the news highlights from 2008, including these year in review stories on the cloud compiled by Dawn Kawamoto, Staff Writer at CNET News…

"Look beyond the tumultuous economic storm and you’ll see something else forming–cloud computing, a term and concept that took off in 2008.

"If you look at Google Trends, ‘cloud computing’ came out of nowhere in 2008. People were searching for it in the third quarter of 2007, but it went bonkers in 2008," said Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research.

"Indeed. Not only did the number of Google searches for the term "cloud computing" skyrocket in 2008, so did the number of related news stories."

Amazon storage ‘cloud’ service goes dark — Some Web 2.0 start-ups get cranky after Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service goes offline for a few hours. February 15, 2008

Study: Cloud to brighten future of data centers — New hosting companies that target start-ups could bring cloud computing into businesses as a data center replacement, research firm Forrester says. March 10, 2008

More on Microsoft’s database-in-the-cloud service — Microsoft’s new SQL Server Data Services, a database-in-the-cloud service coming soon, might have been the sleeper announcement of this year’s Mix conference.  March 10, 2008

Yahoo looking to unleash its cloud infrastructure — CTO Ari Balogh says that much like Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine, Yahoo could offer infrastructure services.  June 26, 2008

Can you trust your business to Google’s cloud? Cloud computing is ever more fashionable. This week’s Google Apps outage shows that online applications and services aren’t perfect, but that the concept is growing up. July 11, 2008

HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud research — New "test bed" project will give companies, as well as partnering researchers, access to top-notch hardware for exploring the future of the hot server-outsourcing technology. July 29, 2008

10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far) — It’s a countdown of crashes, a timeline of terror. See what happens when the cloud rains on the likes of Amazon, Twitter, and Apple. August 15, 2008

Oracle’s Ellison nails cloud computing — Speaking at OracleWorld, CEO Larry Ellison says that the computer industry as fad-driven as fashion and that cloud computing is simply the latest fad. September 26, 2008

Report: Ballmer hints at Windows Cloud — In a speech in London, the Microsoft chief executive reportedly talks about a coming cloud-based OS, as well as plans to allow light Office document editing over the Web. October 1, 2008

IBM puts Bluehouse tinge on cloud computing — Company will challenge Internet-centric "cloud" pioneers by promoting a mix of cloud-based and on-premises services.  October 6, 2008

Windows Azure: Blue skies ahead? Analysts praise Microsoft’s ambition with its Azure cloud-computing effort but say that getting there will take some time. October 27, 2008

Google promises reliability for Docs, Calendar — Overall, Gmail has been available 99.9 percent of the time. Now, Premier customers get a promise of that level of reliability for all of Google Apps.  October 30, 2008

Tags: articles, what I read, news, CNET, blogs, cloud.

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Your questions: do we have to worry about the coming Leap Second when it comes to Microsoft Windows and other products?

Clip art from Microsoft Office OnlineAs I Tweeted today (no, really, I can stop any time) I saw a question today on the subject of the coming leap second, as noted in the MSN posted article, 2009 to arrive not a second too soon, from Space.com’s Joe Rao:

"Wait a second.

"The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone’s control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year’s Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you’ll have an extra second to celebrate because a "Leap Second" will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.

"By international agreement, the world’s timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world’s irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009." 

So I heard last night and saw this question today…

One Leap second will be added at the end of this year.  I wonder whether it will have impact on Windows, SQL Server or other Microsoft System. It seems that our SystemTime structure will reject the 60 second, and FileTime will ignore the LeapSecond.

"KB article  Q909614: How the Windows Time service treats a leap second and Blog "Please Look before you Leap a second" seems indicate we have not need to worry about Leap Second."

Great end of the year question.

Besides counting down "3, 2, 1, 1… Happy New Year!" to ring in 2009 in a couple of days, you’ll find more documenting the impact of a leap second in Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article 909614, How the Windows Time service treats a leap second (as Michael Kaplan noted in his most excellent post). 

In short, W32Time does not account for a leap second being dependent on the NTP server. Most applications and services may be unaffected, but sysadmins and IT professionals should know that the leap second is not addressed until the next time sync following the official addition/ subtraction of the leap second.  Consumers really have nothing to worry about save questioning whether or not the time is accurate as broadcast during Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve when the crystal ball drops in Times Square.

Info on syncing clocks to absolute time, please see KB 816042, How to configure an authoritative time server in Windows Server 2003, and KB 884776, How to configure the Windows Time service against a large time offset.

General information on the Windows Time Service is also available in the team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/w32time/default.aspx.  More articles/ information in which you may be interested:

(Of interest: The concept of a leap second is actually in question, and an ITU working group is evaluating whether or not the process of adding/subtracting leap seconds should be discontinued.)

Anyone else have additional information, guidance they’d like to offer?  I’ll add to this post as it comes in.

Tags: Microsoft, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Savings Time, leap second, DST.

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