In the United States and the United Kingdom we’ve just recently come through the transition from Daylight Saving Time (“Summer Time” to some of you) back to “standard” time. Back in the early to mid 1980s, this change usually meant that network managers (or, if the IT staff was more than one person, the lowest ranking member) would spend a Sunday going from server to server, desktop to desktop changing the computers’ clocks. This would happen once in the spring and then again in the fall. But the date could - and would - vary from year to year so it was impossible to automate the task.

About 20 years ago, the U.S. standardized on the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October as the dates to change. Soon thereafter, the Windows operating system knew to check the date and adjust the time on those occasions.

That all changes next year. Starting in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November. There will be patches for your server and desktop operating systems (and your laptops, palmtops and all the other Windows platforms) and the automated changes will continue to occur at the right time – provided you’ve patched your systems up to date by the beginning of March 2007.

But there’s a trap lurking on most of your computers which, while not quite as serious as the old Y2K bug, will still be almost as annoying to overcome. And not only is it NOT Microsoft’s fault, but you can lay the blame directly at the feet of Sun.

Sun's Java Runtime Engine (JRE) has its own built-in time calculation, just like Windows. Unfortunately, it’s embedded in the JRE. There’s no easy way to create a simple patch that can be applied to any version of the JRE – you actually have to install a totally recompiled JRE that has the updated rules embedded in it. The good news is that Sun already has available new updates of the JRE which handle the U.S. DST change for versions of the JRE going back to 1.3.x. Wait for it, though, because there’s also bad news.

Because of the way that Java apps are distributed, and because no vendor can be sure that you already have a compatible version of the JRE for their application, there are probably dozens of JREs, in different versions, scattered around your computers. That’s dozens on each of them, I might add. And every single one of them needs to be replaced. Better get started, you’ve only got four months!