fusion

Friday the 13th Goodness, UNIX Style

A peculiar, one-in-a-lifetime occurrence in computer science is upon us: Friday, February 13th, 2009 UNIX time will reach 1,234,567,890 at exactly 18:31:30  EST. UNIX time is a measure of time that’s counted in the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1st 1970 UTC. If you want to find out the correct time for your timezone, you can use this Bash command:

date -d@1234567890

Or this handy Perl oneliner:

perl -e 'print localtime(1234554321)'

Apparently also occurring on the same day is the palindrome 1234554321.

For those that want to apply a New Year’s Eve-like countdown to the whole thing, there’s even a web site where you can watch the seconds count down.

So where will you be on this momentous occasion?