mills@DCN6.ARPA (06/07/86)
Folks, I know this must be Summer because our radio clocks are drowning in ionspheric ooze, which sloshes deeper as the days grow long. Yesterday our WWVB clock on popular fuzzball timeteller DCN1.ARPA picked up a hot bit which added 256 days to the day of year and turned its timecode-conversion routine into a hash function. The resulting random bits presented to timecallers broke a bunch of code scattered all over the Internet, or at least that's what I concluded once the phones stopped ringing. When I manually disabled the broken clock, our clever backup algorithm, put in last year at this time when the ions grew dim, promptly chose the WWV clock on DCN6.ARPA. But that was bust too, so the algorithm chose as the next backup the GOES clock on FORD1.ARPA and finally got it right. It turns out this sequence of events is not uncommon at this time of year; however, before you pull your clock plugs, be advised there are two more backups, the WWVB clock on UMD1.ARPA and the WWV clock on GW.UMICH.EDU. I guess you could say we have a magnificent, redundant algorithm which reliably delivers the wrong time. This latest problem should not recur, since I sloshed ample bugspray on the conversion routine to nip blatant timecode lies, but little lies (like the wrong year) are known from experience to be just as bad. Therefore, I sieze the opportunity first to apologize for all those broken message timestamps, file dates and accounting programs that bogged yesterday and then to appeal for more players of the Network Time Protocol (RFC-958) game, which may be the best polygraph. Dave -------