Why are we all here?
Do not believe anyone spreading apocalyptic news about things crashing and burning because of the leap second. Just like death from a gunshot wound is not death from lead poisoning, things crash because people do not test their systems enough, and not because we insert an extra second every few years. Having tested the leap second event ad nauseam for the past couple of months, using GPS simulators and a range of timing hardware along with pure software setups, I feel both relieved and disappointed at the same time, now that the day of he leap second has come. Weeks of preparations on hardware and software side, hard and sometimes frustrating work with vendors and coding until small hours, all conclude today, and then we will likely forget about it for another year or two, or more - that's if it doesn't get abolished later this year. Everything is ready and leap second pending warnings are flying around. Why is it all always last minute? Hard to say - but mostly because vendors don't do their job right so everything has to be verified twice by the customer. It's not even that the cake is a lie. Everything is.
So much for a rant, a now for something completely different; no. 1: the leap second.
