The second annual Earth Hour takes place at 8pm local time tomorrow (March 29th). The idea is that people turn, companies and cities turn off their lights for an hour to help inspire people to take action on climate change. It started in Sydney, Australia last year with something like 2.2 million people and 2100 businesses in Sydney turning off their lights for an hour on March 31st. Since then, it has become a global movement with more than a quarter of a million people and a large number of companies and cities committing to turning off their lights for an hour.

Locally, the City of Ottawa has joined the Earth Hour movement. Personally, I’m going to turn off my lights for the hour.

What are you going to do? If you’re not doing anything, why not?

Today is the Ides of March, famous largely because Julius Caesar was assassinated on this day in 44 BC by his enemies in the Pompeii Theatre, where the Roman Senate was meeting. He had been warned in early March about some danger that would befall him no later than the Ides of March by Titus Vestricius Spurinna, an Etruscan haruspex (soothsayer or astrologer). Caesar encountered Spurinna on the way to the Senate on the 15th of March and made fun of him saying “The Ides of March are come”, to which Spurinna replied “Yes, they are come, but they are not past.” Caesar should have heeded these words because later that day he was assassinated by his enemies. But he didn’t. Oh well. (At least it gave Shakespeare something to write about.)

But what are the “Ides” exactly?

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A lot of people I talked to earlier this week didn’t realize that we set the clocks forward this weekend.  We’re setting our clocks forward in March, rather than April, because Canada opted to follow the dates imposed by the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 as a matter of convenience.  The goal of the change in the US is to effect a 1% reduction in energy consumption, but everything I’ve read on the history of daylight saving time suggests there haven’t been any appreciable energy savings because of daylight saving time.  Ever.

In fact, a report by the Center for the Study of Energy Markets looked at an attempt in Australia to reduce energy consumption in other parts of their country to help offset the consumption by the Olympic Games in 2000.  Their research found that the demand for energy in Australia was not reduced by the extended daylight saving time.  It also suggests that the 1% reduction in electricity consumption the 1 month extension the US adopted will fail to be realized.

If you’re a *NIX system administrator and you haven’t patched your system to respect the new dates that came into effect last year, you might want to check out my blog entry on what you need to do to update your system.

E. Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game that basically started that gaming genre, died Tuesday morning at the age of 69. (articles in The Guardian and The Globe and Mail)

He and Dave Arneson created the game in 1974 and introduced its players to monsters that they fought by rolling various polyhedral dice using various types of characters.

Since then, the game has evolved quite a bit, but it still bears a strong resemblance to the original game.  One of the biggest changes has to be to the mechanics governing the rolls the players make.  No longer does one need an advanced degree in mathematics to determine whether one has scored a hit during a round of combat.  Monsters have come and gone over the years, but you can still come across crits that were in the very first Monster Manual.

My first exposure to D&D was probably 25 or so years ago in the form of a Basic Dungeon & Dragons set, then an Advanced D&D set and the Expert D&D rules.  The box came with a set of brownish polyhedral dice and a black crayon to colour the numbers in so they were easier to read.  I still have the dice and I think the original books are still at my parents’ place.  I still have some of the first edition books, including original copies of the Monster Manual and Fiend Folio books, in addition to a Player’s Handbook and a Dungeon Master’s Guide.  Though I didn’t play for several years, I’ve been playing with a group of friends about once a week for the last decade or so.

Though Gygax hasn’t been that involved in the game the last couple of years, he’s still considered by most to be one of the most influential people in the role-playing game world.  He even had a cameo in an episode of Futurama.

A webcomic I follow, The Order Of The Stick, has a strip dedicated to E. Gary Gygax, and I’m sure the other D&D and RPG-themed webcomics will have similar tributes to him.

Thank you, Gary.

If I were Norse, I’d blame the weather forecast on Loki because I don’t think Freyr was quite as much of a troublemaker, even though he was in charge of the weather. But, I’m not, so I won’t tempt incurring Loki’s wrath on top of this weather.

TAF CYOW 042338Z 050024 03012KT P6SM FEW040 BKN120
FM0300Z 06010G20KT 6SM -SN SCT020 OVC060 TEMPO 0305 2SM -SN
OVC020
FM0500Z 07012G22KT 11/2SM -SN VV012 TEMPO 0506 3/4SM -SN VV008
FM0600Z 07015G30KT 3/4SM -SN BLSN VV007 TEMPO 0608 1/4SM +SN BLSN VV003
FM0800Z 07015G25KT 1/4SM +SN BLSN VV002
FM1100Z 06020G30KT 11/2SM -PL BR VV010 TEMPO 1114 3/4SM -PLSN
BLSN VV007 PROB40 1114 1SM -FZRA BR
FM1400Z 06015G25KT 3/4SM -SN BLSN VV007 TEMPO 1417 1/4SM +SN BLSN VV003
FM1700Z 34015G25KT 2SM -SN OVC015 TEMPO 1719 5SM -SN PROB30 1719 1SM -FZDZ BR
FM1900Z 28010G20KT 6SM -SN OVC020
FM2200Z 27010G20KT P6SM BKN030 OVC060
RMK NXT FCST BY 03Z=

Wind. Snow. Ice pellets. Snow pellets. Freezing rain (maybe). Freezing drizzle (maybe). More snow. Lots of wind.

Basically, the next 24 hours or so are going to suck.

Like many early Internet users, I started using Netscape in the very early-1990s after it split off from NSCA Mosaic.  I have some fond memories of those early days when graphics were the exception rather than the norm, and banner ads and spam were unheard of.  So, it was with a certain element of sadness that I read about the demise of the Netscape browsers.

Effective March 1st, 2008, AOL has discontinued support for the Netscape browser.  One of the earliest graphical web browsers, Netscape appeared on the scene in 1994, evolving from NCSA Mosaic, which is the browser many consider to have led to the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Version 0.9, released in October 1994 supported all the basic HTML 2 elements and also supported some HTML 3.  Version 1.1 was released in April 1995 and added support for <table> tags along with some new Netscape-specific HTML tags.  By the summer of 1995, something like 80% of Internet users were using Netscape to surf the ‘net.

Netscape (the company) was acquired by America Online (AOL) in November 1998 and finally declared dead on July 15th, 2003 after massive layoffs at Netscape.  In the mean time, the browser spawned Mozilla in 1998 (named after the internal codename for the Netscape browser), which is known today as Firefox.

It morphed into an Internet Service provider in January 2004, though new releases of the Netscape browser continue to appear on the scene, culminating in the release of Netscape 9 in October 2007.

On December 28, 2007, AOL announced that development of the browser would cease on February 1, 2008.

All that’s left today is an Internet portal bearing the name of one of the earliest graphical web browsers in the history of the Internet.

You can find a very detailed history of the Netscape browser at http://www.holgermetzger.de/Netscape_History.html and also on SillyDog701’s website.

Today is February 29th, a day that occurs once every four years.  Many people probably simply accept this as one of those weird little curiosities in life, without really knowing why it is the 29th of February.

Julius Caesar introduced a calendar system we call the Julian calendar in 45 BC.  Before this calendar, the “year” was quite maleable, with days and even months being inserted into the calendar by priests when they wanted to keep their favourite politician in power.  Naturally, this lead to chaos, which frustrated Julius Caesar to the point where he decided to sort it out once and for all.

His solution did away with much of the chaos, but there was still a certain amount of “slippage” caused by the difference in the length of the calendar year and the tropical year, which was roughly 365.25 days long.  This “slippage” resulted in an error of 1 day every 128 years, meaning the tropical year started a day earlier every 128 years.

To compensate for this, the Romans added a “leap year” every four years to get things back in sync.  However, due to a counting error, the first few years the calendar was used, a leap year was took place every three years rather than every four.  The emperor Augustus compensated for the extra days by skipping a number of leap years.  This resulted in the 8th month of the year to be named after him.

By the mid-1500’s the difference between the calendar year and the tropical year had become about 10 days and calculating when Easter took place was quite difficult.  So,  in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decided to remove the extra days and align the vernal equinox with March 21st because that’s when it occurred during the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

Leap years under the Gregorian calendar occur every year that is evenly divisible by 4, except centuries (eg: 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900, etc) unless the century was evenly divisible by 400.

The last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday, October 4, 1582 and the first day of the Gregorian calendar was Friday, October 15, 1582.  However, the Gregorian calendar was not adopted by everyone at the same time.  For example, Spain, Portugal, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and most of Italy adopted it on Friday, October 15, 1582, but other countries waited.  Sweden transitioned to the Gregorian calendar sometime in the early 18th century.  On of the last countries to adopt it was Greece in on March 1, 1923, which followed February 15th.  China seems to have adopted in 1929, after first adopting it in 1912.  (There was a certain amount of chaos between 1912 and 1929.)

None of the national Orthodox churches, however, recognized the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced and many instead adopted a Revised Julian calendar in 1923 which saw 13 days dropped and a different leap year rule.  This will see the two calendar systems in sync until 2800, at which point it will be someone else’s problem.

Other Orthodox churches didn’t accept the Revised Julian calendar, either, so they’ll continue to celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January (until 2100).

Other orthodox churches use their own calendars to set their religious holidays.

With respect to Easter, the eastern Orthodox churches still use Julian Easter.  Except the Finnish Orthodox Church, which uses the Gregorian Easter.

So, all this is to say that it’s Friday, February 29, 2008.