Magic Time Draws Near

For those of a nerdish complexion (isn't that everybody?) the clock will tick over to 1234567890 on Valentine's Day (Sat Feb 14 10:31:30 2009 Eastern Australian time). I'm talking about the Unix time used by many computer systems including the Linux operating systems.

A short time ago it was 1234487907

From Linux Watch:

As most any user can tell you, Linux systems think of time in terms of the number of seconds, not counting leap seconds, since the beginning of the UNIX epoch: Jan. 1, 1970. For most readers, that number will reach 1,234,567,890 this Fri. the 13th. Psyche!

Apparently, the folks at Bell Labs who decided to count time this way in the first place anticipated this interesting milestone way back in the day. At least, that's the impression I got reading a Linux Magazine article about the "long-anticipated milestone" by Bell Labs vet (where Unix was created) Jon "maddog" Hall. Maddog suggests the following perl command, apparently written by Matias Palomec, for determining your precise local time (in more human-readable form) for the magic moment. Er, second:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"n";'

Here near the Sierra-side edge of the U.S. Intermountain West, it'll happen at "Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009," my system tells me. Some Australians report that it'll happen there on Valentine's Day.

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