The 2012 checklist

Here's my short checklist for 2012.

2012 will be a leap year. Check date calculation and validation routines for February/March.
Beeing a leap year, it has 366 days. If you are doing statistics or are working in Microsoft's Zune team, this might be important to remember.
The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (also known as the Mayan calendar) rolls over into a new epoch. Software that works with that (History related data sets, Museums) might have to make a few bugfixes.
This is a Leap year starting on Sunday. This only happens every 28 years.
As such, 2012 will have three occurrences of Friday the 13th, which might break one or more Acme modules.
On June 6, The second and last solar Transit of Venus of the century. The next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125. You might not want to miss this one!
In August, the Mars Science Laboratory will land on Mars. This is certainly the coolest RC car ever build, it even has a laser to vaporize things at a distance!
Update: On December 18th, Perl will have its 25th anniversary (counted from Release of 1.0 on comp.sources.misc)
Update: Solar cycle 24 is predicted to reach it's maximum. Watch out for Aurora Borealis, coming this year to a night sky near your.

Any important, funny or otherwise interesting items missing? Add a comment with your own list down below!

BREW /very/strong/coffee HTTP/1.1
Host: goodmorning.example.com

418 I'm a teapot

Comment on The 2012 checklist

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: The 2012 checklist by davido (Cardinal) on Dec 31, 2011 at 04:55 UTC
Not directly related, but your post reminds me of MJD's Universe of Discourse blog entry, Watch out for the Calendar Geeks, and an article he linked to therein, Mistakes on the Internet will not happen for another 823 years. Fortunately it seems the facts you've presented aren't in the category they're discussing (ie, not factually incorrect). When I get a moment I'll set an annual event on Feb 29th in my Blackberry and my Google calendars to see how it's handled. Dave	[reply]
Re^2: The 2012 checklist by cavac (Parson) on Dec 31, 2011 at 21:52 UTC
If you do, also try to send a meeting invitation to people on other systems. Would be interesting to see how the multiple conversions are handled. BREW /very/strong/coffee HTTP/1.1 Host: goodmorning.example.com 418 I'm a teapot	[reply]
Re: The 2012 checklist by JavaFan (Canon) on Dec 31, 2011 at 00:48 UTC
Technically not in 2012, but the most interesting calendar related thing happened today, when Samoa skipped a day, and went from Thu Dec 29, to Sat Dec 31. I'll have to check the comp.risk forum the next few weeks to see what funny effects this resulted in.	[reply]
Re: The 2012 checklist by aartist (Pilgrim) on Jan 05, 2012 at 04:13 UTC
I will start using Perl 6.	[reply]
Re: The 2012 checklist by ~~David~~ (Hermit) on Jan 04, 2012 at 20:06 UTC
Do you really need to worry about all this? The world is going to end this year anyway...	[reply]
Re^2: The 2012 checklist by cavac (Parson) on Jan 05, 2012 at 10:40 UTC
That is rather highly unlikely outside of the usual hollywood second hand storylines. "Believe me, Mike, I calculated the odds of this succeeding against the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid… and I went ahead anyway." (Crow in "MST3K The Movie")	[reply]

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