A Geeky Second Fast Approaches

In Unix, derivatives of which run pretty much the entire internet (and quite a few desktop systems these days), the time and date is tracked internally as the number of seconds since midnight on January 1st, 1970. In *nix circles, this moment is known as the beginning of the epoch, and about 4,717,800 seconds into the epoch, I was born.

Well tomorrow, February 13, 2009 at 18:31:30 Eastern Standard Time (23:31:30 Greenwich Mean Time) the number of seconds since the beginning of the Unix epoch will be 1234567890.

I first noticed this was approaching last October 7th (I can pinpoint it because found a chat log where I mentioned it to a co-worker). I was working for yet another company who, for reasons unknown, liked to store all dates in a database as epoch seconds rather than use the handy built-in date/time types every modern database has (which still use seconds in epoch internally of course, but have lots of handy functions for adding and subtracting units of time, converting for time zones, daylight savings time, not to mention displaying the info back in a way understandable by humans). But whatever, you’re the boss. You wanna pay me to code the conversions every time, I’ll do it.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes…

So last October I noticed the epoch seconds at the time were at 1223355600(ish) and wondered when it would be 1234567890. As a perl hacker, my curiosity was quickly settled by typing perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1234567890;' at a Linux command line. It would be on the evening of February 13th, 2009. I immediately set a Google Calendar reminder.

A quick search of ‘epoch 1234567890‘ showed me that I was not the first geek to notice this was coming. A guy named Chris Rowe has made a cool epoch countdown timer. I don’t know what he’s going to do with that domain name after tomorrow, though I suppose if he keeps it for a few years it will read 2222222222 on June 1st, 2040 at 23:57:02. There is another one here, more accurate (because it’s based on a time server instead of the viewer’s system clock) but not nearly as cool looking and with an even more soon-to-be-obsolete domain name. It also doesn’t link to xkcd, so more win for Chris.

But anyway, celebrate that second tomorrow evening in the knowlege that myself and countless other geeks will be celebrating it with you.