Every month the BugBlog picks its Bug of the Month, the most significant bug found in the past month. Sometimes the bug will be the one which could potentially cause the most damage; sometimes it will be the bug which affects the most users. And sometimes, it will be the bug that is just the most interesting bug. This bug will be selected either from the free Bug of the Day, or from the subscription-only BugBlog Plus.

This month the Bug of the Month award goes to the U.S. Congress. While there may be ample reasons to criticize Congress, in this particular case it was for the relatively rapid change-over to new dates for Daylight Savings Time. That has meant that software manufacturers have had to hustle out fixes for software that tracks the "Spring Ahead, Fall Back" days. Some of the items in the BugBlog or BugBlog Plus this month that covered these patches include:

Apple says that most of the Daylight Savings Time rule changes for the US and Canada are already in Mac OS X 10.4.5 and later. If you have questions about earlier versions of Mac OS X, go here.

Apple says that if you are using Mac OS X 10.0.x through 10.2.8, you will need to adjust your computer's clock manually when Daylight Savings Time comes. These older versions of OS X apparently won't get a patch to adjust for the "spring ahead" dates.

If you administer an IBM WebSphere Portal Mail and World Clock server, and you aren't sure yet what you need to do for the new Daylight Savings Time switchover, see this document.

If you are running IBM Lotus Notes or Domino, you will need to make some adjustments due to the change in Daylight Savings Time implementation. Do nothing, and your appointments from March 12 through March 31 may be an hour late. See this page for links to fix information.

Daylight Saving Time starts earlier this year. Any software, such as your operating system, that automatically does the "spring ahead, fall back" may not be able to handle the change. Microsoft has a February 2007 cumulative time zone update for Microsoft Windows that will make the adjustment. Follow the link to the patch for your version of Windows.

Microsoft has a Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook that will configure Outlook for the changes in Daylight Savings Time. Read the extensive discussion of this tool, as well as some Windows Registry edits that need to be made.

If you apply the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook, it will not change any recurring calendar items in Outlook Web Access. Microsoft says that creators of those repeating items will have to manually update them.

If you maintain any Java applications that may be affected by the change in Daylight Savings Time in the US and Canada, Sun Microsystems has a paper discussing some of the ramifications. Read it here.

So for triggering these patches (and for making me revert to getting up in the morning in pitch darkness for another couple of weeks) the U.S. Congress wins their first Bug of the Month award.