[LEAPSECS] 2008-12-31T23:59:60Z

[Zefram]

Sanjeev Gupta wrote:

>Any help on how to use a Linux PC driving a large monitor/LCD projector to

>show a group of school children the leap second?


Firstly, for the Linux clock to indicate the leap second at all, you
*must* be NTP-synchronised.  As long as you have a net connection, there
are plenty of public NTP servers to synch to.  Check that your clock is
actually synched.  The "rv" command in ntpq should show "leap_add_sec"
near the start of its output, indicating that it knows about the
upcoming leap.

The difficult bit is that hardly any Unix software is leap-second-aware.
Most clock programs will glitch.  I wrote one that will tick through
leaps correctly: <http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/time/purchron>.
I suggest running it with a display formula such as
'(ymdhms,local,9,3)/(ymdhms,local,3,-1)'.

purchron produces plain text output.  To display it full screen you'll
want to run it in an xterm (or similar) with a very big font.

-zefram